The interdisciplinary fields of Memory Studies and Transitional Justice have largely developed in parallel to one another despite both focusing on efforts of societies to confront and (re-)appropriate their past. While scholars working on memory have come mostly from historical, literary, sociological, or anthropological traditions, transitional justice has attracted primarily scholarship from political science and the law. This series bridges this divide: it promotes work that combines a deep understanding of the contexts that have allowed for injustice to occur with an analysis of how legacies of such injustice in political and historical memory influence contemporary projects of redress, acknowledgment, or new cycles of denial. The titles in the series are of interest not only to academics and students but also practitioners in the related fields.The Memory Politics and Transitional Justice series promotes critical dialogue among different theoretical and methodological approaches and among scholarship on different regions. The editors welcome submissions from a variety of disciplines -including political science, history, sociology, anthropology, and cultural studies -that confront critical questions at the intersection of memory politics and transitional justice in national, comparative, and global perspective.Memory Politics and Transitional Justice Book Series (Palgrave)

No abstract

No abstract

No abstract

No abstract

No abstract

This chapter explores the Bosnian war and the post-war political conflicts to set the scene for Bosnian victims’ struggle for redress that forms the rest of the book. It introduces three post-war phases that frame Bosnian politics and victims’ struggle. The first phase from 1995 to 1999 was defined by emergency post-war stabilization when victims started forming their associations and organizing first advocacy campaigns under the wider umbrella of ‘truth and justice’. In the second phase that lasted until approximately 2006 centralization efforts and external state-building dominated local politics. This was also a period when victims sought out international and domestic allies to press for dramatic changes in their redress. In the last phase that followed, a ‘two steps forward, three steps back’ pattern of progress could be observed, accompanied by flawed Europeanization and re-nationalization of politics. Victims’ struggle grew into polarizing movements and inter-group animosities. A key goal became the pursuit of a formal ‘status’, i.e. a legal recognition of a victim group as eligible for material and in-kind support. Just like politics, victims’ struggle started to be dominated by nationalism and hierarchies of suffering. This chapter provides a contextual understanding for the following three empirical chapters.

The Law on Missing Persons from 2004 remains the only legal provision for Bosnian war victims successfully adopted at the state level. It foresaw the creation of a new state institution for the search of the missing, a central registry of all names and a special fund for families. While only some of these promises materialized, the adoption was unprecedented. This chapter discusses the role of missing persons’ families and the process of their state recognition. It presents a case of ‘Optimal Route’ scenario when victim capital can be described as consisting of high salience, authority and resources. It argues that families of Bosnians who went missing during the war were exposed to high levels of external attention because this group included victims whose suffering came to define Bosnian post-war transitional justice: Srebrenica survivors. The Srebrenica genocide of July 1995 not only conferred superior international salience and moral authority upon families of the missing among Bosniaks but Srebrenica victim associations have enhanced their two sources of leverage by huge personal investments in their mobilization resources too. This chapter not only discusses the circumstances of the 2004 change but also the subsequent lack of access to its provisions by victims.