Challenges in Researching Mass Violence in the Former Yugoslavia

Session Submission Type: Panel

Brief Description

This panel aims to complicate the prevailing historical narratives of the Bosnian war and genocide that typically depict clear and dichotomous, clean-cut, and stable categorizations, such as victims and perpetrators, in-group and outgroup, soldiers and civilians, friendly neighbors, or murderous traitors, etc. Fedja Burić’s paper, “Ethnic Otherness as a Mitigating Circumstance: The Case of Dražen Erdemović in front of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) dives into the documents related to the case of Dražen Erdemović to analyze the stories he tells about himself from before, during and after the perpetration. Burić argues that Erdemović weaves a complex story that allows him to inhabit the space between three separate roles—that of a hero, a victim, and the perpetrator. In these stories, his Croat identity becomes a shield of mitigation in that he uses it to claim an escalating narrowing of his choices throughout the war. Jelena Golubović, in her paper “From Neighbors to Aggressors: Serb Women in Besieged Sarajevo” explores the social and moral decline of Serb women from the status of “neighbor” to the status of “aggressor” two local terms that mirror the moral categories of the victim-perpetrator dichotomy. Lastly, Sandra Grudić, in “Challenges Encountered in the Study of Neighborhood Violence in Bosnia and Beyond” addresses methodological issues affecting the study of neighborhood violence in Bosnia and elsewhere, including the current focus on intergroup, rather than interpersonal relations and the problematic definition of a neighbor as an operative term.

Sub Unit

• History: Since 1990

Chair

• Vladimir Petrovic, NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies (Netherlands)

Papers

• Ethnic Otherness as a Mitigating Circumstance: The Case of Dražen Erdemović in Front of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) - Fedja Buric, Bellarmine U

• Challenges Encountered in the Study of Neighborhood Violence in Bosnia and Beyond - Sandra Grudic, Harvard University - Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies

• From Neighbors to Aggressors: Serb Women in Besieged Sarajevo - Jelena Golubovic, Northeastern U

Discussant

• Vladimir Petrovic, NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies (Netherlands)