‘It Burns My Conscience’: Post-War Meaning Making Among Serbian Citizens

• In Event: Peace, War, and Social Conflict Panel Session: After War

Abstract

In post-war Serbia, the government has advanced a narrow, nationalistic narrative of the 1990s Yugoslav wars, denying its responsibility for genocide and other atrocities. Many scholars have documented the linkages between denialistic collective memory and contemporary violence, including in Serbia related to the Yugoslav wars. However, while political elites and activists have been studied in this area, an important and often overlooked aspect of this nexus is the role of ordinary citizens. How do ordinary Serbians understand, articulate, and negotiate legacies of the violent past in their daily interactions? This paper draws on interview and focus group data to analyze the nature of Serbian individuals’ interactions with collective memory about the 1990s Yugoslav wars (for example, through individual conversations, media consumption, or involvement in commemorative activities), and the narratives Serbs construct about the wartime events. Using a theoretical framework drawing on cultural trauma and the cultural trauma of perpetrators, this paper provides an up-to-date account of post-war memory politics in Serbia today, tracing the increased tendencies for Serbian citizens to accept responsibility for Serb-committed crimes and positing explanations for patterns based on gender, age/cohort, and wartime experiences. Using qualitative methods to connect individual accounts with societal-level processes, this paper sheds new light on the micro-macro link in collective memory and cultural trauma. This approach builds on a recent turn towards the local and the everyday within critical peace studies and memory studies, which refocuses attention towards the agency and significance of sub-state actors in processes of peacebuilding, nation-building, and memory contestations. This paper thus extends the literature on collective memory construction after mass violence, particularly at the micro-interactional level and among “ordinary,” non-activist citizens.

Author

• Nikoleta Sremac, University of Minnesota-Twin Cities