Ambiguous loss and incomplete abduction narratives in Kosovo (original) (raw)
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" Forgetting Equals Killing: " Loss and Remembrance of the Missing Children in Post-War Kosovo
The Kosovo War of 1999 has had a devastating and enduring impact on individual and social lives of the civilian population. This article provides an in-depth understanding of the impact of wartime atrocities on community experiences, by examining the role of political memory construction in stimulating the production of various sites for recounting alternative memory. Based on extensive ethnographic research, I particularly focus on the collective engagement and the mechanisms of reformulation and transmission of social memory among the parents of missing children. I argue that the pain of loss gets materialized, visualized and publicly asserted through various mediums in an attempt to cope with, as well as resist, societal forgetting. In this article, I refrain from giving a totalizing interpretation of collective memory in postwar Kosovo, and argue instead that multiple and fragmented " acts of remembrance " co-exist, as moulded in collective action situated in the public domain.
Nationalities Papers, 2019
In spring 1999, amidst a wider ethnic cleansing campaign, Serb police forces abducted Ferdonije Qerkezi’s husband and four sons, who were never to be seen alive again. She subsequently transformed her private house into a memorial to the lost normalcy of her entire social world. We trace this memorialization process; her struggle for recognition; her transformation into an iconic mother of the nation and her activism, both for missing persons and against the internationally-driven Serb-Albanian normalization process in Kosovo. From a multi-disciplinary perspective, we critically reflect on the theoretical concept of “normative divergence” in intervention studies. We are guided by social anthropological (including immersive, historical-ethnographic, and semantic) analysis of the core tropes of social memory as both narratively and materially embodied by the House Museum. In systematically juxtaposing these to the normative transitional justice principles of truth, justice, non-recurr...
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Linking objects in the process of mourning for sons disappeared in war: Croatia 2001
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Localising Memory in Transitional Justice, 2022
Building upon Antze and Lambek (1966), among others, this chapter aims to discuss memory practices in relation to commemorations and memorials in the two post-conflict/post-genocide contexts in Bosnia, i.e. in the RS entity: Prijedor and Srebrenica. After reflecting on personal, methodological, and ethical aspects of the research on which the chapter is based, I discuss how the issue of the missing (presumably dead) has affected memories and identities of local communities and families in Bosnia and in the diaspora. This discussion is followed by the ethnographies of collective burials and commemorations. Unlike the Srebrenica commemoration – taking places at a single site at the Memorial Cemetery Potočari on 11 July – there are several sites of commemoration in and around Prijedor, including both local cemeteries and the former concentration camp sites.
Swisspeace, 2022
This working paper is based on a multidisciplinary research project, which explored the practices around the search for victims of enforced disappearance in Colombia and El Salvador from legal, political, and psychosocial perspectives. The paper presents the terminology relevant to understanding the "search", and introduces the case study contexts, as well as the actors involved in activities related to the search in those contexts. Grouped along the themes of the legal framework for participation in the search, mobilisation and encounters around the search, and the legalpsychosocial interplay around victimhood, the working paper, in its latter sections, summarises the main findings of this research project.
Frontiers in Political Science, 2022
In recent years, scholars have emphasized the need for a relational understanding of the impact of collective violence pointing to the myriad interconnections between individual and communal experiences and consequences. These interconnections are particularly strong in the (re)integration of formerly abducted children and youth, and their children born of war, since various social, relational and cultural processes play a key role in their wellbeing and healing. One example is the way in which trauma communication is shaped by culture and context, and intersects at the level of the individual and the collective. In this paper, we will explore how forcibly abducted mothers and fathers in post-conflict Northern Uganda perceive the trauma communication about the context in which their children born in forced captivity were conceived. Case study research was used to understand the dynamic trajectories of this trauma communication, placing parents' experiences within broader life histories, and the social and relational context. Repeated interviews were performed with six mothers and four fathers who became parents in forced captivity with the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA). Central in the participants' stories is their agency in the careful, individual choice "to be silent" or "not to be silent" toward their children, family and community members. However, these choices are shaped-and often restricted-by the relational and cultural context. A dynamic interplay of several factors, such as the age of the child, the emotional impact of disclosure, a lack of resources and support in the upbringing of children, identity and belonging, and perceived or potential future stigmatization are explored in this paper. Trauma communication can be seen as a socially negotiated choice, interacting in a complex dialectic relationship between silencing, disclosing, forgetting and remembering. As such, the study revealed important insights into post-conflict healing and reintegration in the day-today lives of formerly abducted children and youth, and their children born of war, on an individual and collective level.