{"id":135494,"date":"2015-10-30T12:19:54","date_gmt":"2015-10-30T11:19:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.recom.link\/?p=135494"},"modified":"2015-10-30T12:19:54","modified_gmt":"2015-10-30T11:19:54","slug":"researching-reconciliation-between-public-narratives-and-micro-politics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.recom.link\/en\/researching-reconciliation-between-public-narratives-and-micro-politics\/","title":{"rendered":"Researching reconciliation: between public narratives and micro-politics"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Catherine Baker<\/strong><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Who needs to reconcile with each other after the Yugoslav wars, what would have to occur before reconciliation could take place, and how would anyone be able to tell if it had happened? Many researchers as well as policy-makers have tried to approach this question in post-Yugoslav societies \u2013 but often imply that meaningful reconciliation might require a more socially, politically and economically transformative process in post-Yugoslav societies than any current political structures have been committed to.<\/p>\n

\u2018Reconciliation\u2019, writes the anthropologist Marita Eastmond<\/strong><\/a>, \u2018has emerged as a master narrative of our time\u2019, supposedly a moral universal for which the inhabitants of post-conflict societies should self-evidently strive. In contemporary international politics, reconciliation is more than a theoretical concept; it is a policy objective for many agencies and NGOs, to be pursued as part of the package of initiatives that will supposedly prevent future conflicts. The relationships between organisations and everyday communities, and the various frameworks for interpreting and knowing about the past and present that one could encounter in any of these contexts, thus provide a background for much of the academic research about reconciliation in post-Yugoslav societies that has taken place since the 1990s wars.<\/p>\n

A simple understanding of reconciliation in the aftermath of ethnopolitical conflict might be to suppose that it meant reconciliation between peoples \u2013 the ethnic groups who were at war. Yet using this as the only dimension of reconciliation would read from the surface of history while missing the dynamics that made violence possible and prolonged it once it had begun. Instead, research on reconciliation may look at the institutions that shape the space in which reconciliation might take place; the collective narratives about the recent and more distant past that might themselves need to be reconciled with each other; the areas of society where it might be essential for reconciliation for start or where reconciliation might appear to be obstructed; or even the assumptions that participants and observers might make about who and what ought to be reconciled, or how important it was.<\/p>\n

Researchers interested in what reconciliation might mean or how it might be possible in practice have written about many aspects of post-conflict society, especially for Bosnia-Herzegovina. The question of refugee return, for instance, was established in the Dayton Peace Agreement as supposedly a precondition for reconciliation. After research in Sarajevo and Banja Luka, however, Anders Stefansson<\/strong> became one of several researchers to suggest<\/a> that refugee return programmes were simply \u2018treating the symptom rather than the roots\u2019 of the conflict. Local authorities \u2013 sometimes even the same individuals who had been in positions of power during the war as soldiers and paramilitaries forced residents out of their homes \u2013 could still intimidate returners by installing nationalist symbols around towns while obstructing returners\u2019 attempts to commemorate their own dead, as Hariz Halilovich<\/strong> records<\/a> in his research among Bosniaks who had been forced out of what became Republika Srpska. In such circumstances, had any \u2018reconciliation\u2019 taken place even though some of the displaced had moved back?<\/p>\n

Education is another site where, if young people could be equipped with the skills to challenge simplistic concepts of collective antagonism, powerful steps towards reconciliation could perhaps be made. Yet obstruction from the very interest groups that would be threatened by transformative education of this kind has limited the role that education can play. Azra Hromad\u017ei\u0107<\/strong>\u2019s recent book Citizens of an Empty Nation<\/em><\/a> traces efforts to reintegrate one prestigious high school, the Mostar Gymnasium, in a city that has remained a collection of monoethnic spaces marked as \u2018Bosniak\u2019 or \u2018Croat\u2019. The lack of transethnic social spaces in the rest of the city, she suggests, limited teachers\u2019 and donors\u2019 attempts to overcome the \u2018division in people\u2019s heads\u2019 [BCS: podjela u glavi<\/em>] for a new generation. In showing how international intervention might exacerbate ethnopolitical division even without meaning to, Hromad\u017ei\u0107 also joins researchers such as Stefanie Kappler<\/strong><\/a> or Alex Jeffrey<\/strong><\/a> who have studied the micropolitics of internationally-driven peacebuilding and statebuilding initiatives.<\/p>\n

The project of post-war criminal justice, meanwhile, was also at its inception supposed to create pathways for reconciliation by putting individual people on trial, bringing truth into the light through objective documentary and forensic evidence, and showing that responsibility for atrocities was an individual, not a collective, matter. Two decades later, however, the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) emerges from research as anything but a mechanism for reconciliation. Jelena Suboti\u0107<\/strong> argues<\/a> that post-Yugoslav states instead used their participation in \u2018transitional justice\u2019 projects strategically, \u2018hijacking\u2019 the higher role the tribunal might have played; Janine Natalya Clark<\/strong>, after fieldwork in several areas of Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo, concluded<\/a> the ICTY had had no positive impact on reconciliation \u2018on the ground\u2019 and that criminal justice was not even an appropriate mechanism through which to expect reconciliation to occur. Disillusion with the ICTY\u2019s professed aims was echoed by (as Refik Hod\u017ei\u0107<\/strong> found<\/a>) survivor\u2013witnesses, disappointed at how the tribunal had treated their evidence, and (as Johanna Mannergren Selimovi\u0107 <\/strong>found<\/a>) participants in its \u2018outreach\u2019 conferences, unconvinced that they should show forgiveness or \u2018move on\u2019. War crimes trials in \u2018domestic\u2019 courts, meanwhile, have received a number of specialist studies but have not fully been drawn together in a large-scale transnational comparison.<\/p>\n

Could other forms of testimony, outside a judicial process centred on punishment, be more effective in challenging ideas about collective victimhood and guilt? The civil society associations that came together to form RECOM believed so, as did the feminist activists who held Women\u2019s Courts; researchers have written about these still-in-process initiatives (with more continuing to be published all the time) and sometimes also participated in their events. Oral history projects such as Croatian Memories<\/a> or Oral History Kosovo<\/a> represented another kind of alternative space where people could speak of their experiences in terms that mainstream post-Yugoslav media rarely accommodated.<\/p>\n

Whose stories were most likely to be heard, however, and by whom? One dimension of a critical approach to reconciliation has been to consider, as Jelena Obradovi\u0107-Wochnik<\/strong> has<\/a> when studying the problem of \u2018denial\u2019 in Serbia, the inequalities of access to the public sphere and the active silencing<\/em> of certain kinds of speech about the past. Another has been to recognise that, in Stef Jansen<\/strong>\u2019s words<\/a>, everyone who might be involved in reconciliation is \u2018multiply positioned\u2019: scope for mutual listening and recognition across the \u2018division in people\u2019s heads\u2019 often appeared when they were able to see themselves in comparable, relatable positions on opposite sides, such as the fathers and young men [BCS: frajeri<\/em>] that Jansen met<\/a> or the women who participated in Women\u2019s Courts.<\/p>\n

And what, moreover, would reconciliation even involve? Elissa Helms<\/strong>\u2019s study of women\u2019s reconciliation initiatives in Bosnia, for instance, distinguished<\/a> \u2018thin reconciliation\u2019 \u2013 day-to-day trust \u2013 and \u2018thick reconciliation\u2019 \u2013 a kind of empathetic dialogue that was more difficult to achieve and which survivors did not even necessarily desire. Perhaps reconciliation was not even an end in its own right. The question Jansen posed in one article title<\/a> \u2013 \u2018If reconciliation is the answer, are we asking the right questions?\u2019 \u2013 guided the overview of how researchers have interpreted peacebuilding and transitional justice that I sought to provide in later chapters of my own introductory text on the Yugoslav wars<\/a>. Jansen urged researchers to ask \u2018whose reconciliation is being desired [\u2026] by whom, for whom, and for what\u2019 and suggested that the concept risked diverting attention from more radical ways of conceiving of justice and political participation. If it is at the micropolitical, intersubjective level where a transformative \u2018reconciliation\u2019 would have to take place, it is perhaps no coincidence that anthropologists have led the way in urging researchers to think critically about how it might occur.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Author is PhD, Lecturer in 20th Century History at the University of Hull and the author of the book \u2018The Yugoslav Wars of the 1990s\u2019, Palgrave Macmillan, 2015<\/em><\/p>\n

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