Ethnic Conflict and War Crimes in the Balkans: The Narratives of Denial in Post-Conflict Serbia

ISBN-13: 9781848850033 / Angielski / Twarda / 2013 / 272 str.

Jelena Obradovic

Opis

In the years following the fall of Slobodan Milosevic, Serbian social, cultural, and political responses to the wars of the 1990s have fallen under intense international scrutiny. But is this scrutiny justfied, and how can these responses be better understood? Jelena Obradovic engages with ideas about post-conflict societies, memory, cultural trauma, and national myths of victimhood and justified war to shed light upon Serbian denial and justification of war crimes - for example, Serbia's reluctant cooperation with the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY). Rather than treating denial as a failure to come to terms with the past or as resurgent nationalism, Obradovic argues that the justfications of atrocities are often the result of a societal need to understand and incorporate violent events within culturally acceptable boundaries.