Bosnia and Herzegovina (BH) is one of the rare countries that has no common state-wide set of public holidays and memorial days. Instead, the division into two federal units and the dominance of three ethnically defined political elites have created a complex setting of spatially and socially separate memoryscapes. Each of the ethno-national elites uses hegemonic power within their reach to organise (mostly) ethnically exclusive commemorations and narrate their version of history, especially the 1992-95 war. However, in the last five years a range of civil-society organisations and informal groups have started openly confronting dominant memorymaking by organising alternative commemorative events. In the context when elite-driven memory-making has been reproducing mutually conflicting interpretations of the last war which are used as arguments in the on-going political battles, these alternative memorials are aiming at conflict transformation. Following the analytical framework of “memory activism” (Gutman 2017), the paper demonstrates how these commemorative events are created in the spirit of trans-ethnic solidarity, advocating for acknowledgement of the victims forgotten in a particular memoryscape and challenging dominant conceptions of victims and perpetrators.
B.03 Paper at an international scientific conference
COBISS.SI-ID: 42495533Seminar discussed diferent aspects of memory laws as part of the state-sanctioned politics of memory, which selects and shapes admissable interpretations of past events (and determines inadmissable ones), thus promoting specific views of history in the form of both legal acts and their implementation in the courtroom. Attendants came from Poland, Serbia, Sweeden, the Netherlands and Austria.
B.01 Organiser of a scientific meeting
Guest in the TV programme Odmevi (TV SLO, chennel 1). Commenting ICTY first-instance verdict to Rratko Mladić, general of the Army of Republika Srpska, its reception in the countries of former Yugoslavia, and general impact of the court on the process of dealing with the past.
F.30 Professional assessment of the situation
COBISS.SI-ID: 42728237Online publication is a project of the Imre Kertesz College at the Friedrich Schiller University Jena, Germany.
C.06 Editorial board membership
Trening for 24 school teachers and professors of history from countries of former Yugoslavia was organised as part of the project Balkan Kaleidoscope (EU programme Europe for Citizens - Strand 1: European Remembrance). Dr. Mihajlović Trbovc was invited as an expert to hold a training on the topic of teaching Yugoslav dissolution and wars, and critical reading of the history textbooks.
F.18 Transfer of new know-how to direct users (seminars, fora, conferences)