Lea David

'Learning from history is an obvious step for post-conflict societies. Yet enforcing remembrance through a standard trope of techniques and scripted commemorations also presents its own challenges. Lea David walks us through the process of how apparent reconciliation actually might exacerbate conflict and tensions. This is a wonderful book that should be read not just by governments and scholars, but by all those who seek to remember and remedy past wrongs.' Miguel Centeno, Princeton University

'The Past Can't Heal Us presents a path-breaking analysis of the limits of the global standardisation of memorialisation. The novel comparative analysis discloses ever-expanding fissures in foundational paradigms in human rights discourse and practice, while grounding fascinating re-conceptualisations of ideology and micro-solidarity. David's provocatively critical and courageous voice permeates every illuminating chapter. A must-read for scholars, students and laypersons alike.' Carol Kidron, University of Haifa 'Human rights are often seen as a panacea capable of curbing political extremism and social inequalities.

In this wonderful and highly original book, Lea David shows convincingly that enforcing human rights policies in a world dominated by the nation-state model of social organisation is likely to produce the opposite effect: prescribed moral remembrance regularly generates more group animosity. This is an excellent, thoughtful and brave contribution that combines superb analytical skills with the comprehensive and meticulous empirical research.' Siniša Malešević , University College Dublin

To what extent were individuals willing to help others during the pandemic? This article examines pro-social attitudes among 7000 residents in England, Ireland, Germany, Serbia, and Sweden by showing a fictitious scenario of an older neighbour who needs his groceries to be picked up from a nearby supermarket. The online survey experiment follows a 3 × 2 × 2 factorial design varying the ethno-religious origin of neighbours signalled by the name (Alexander vs Mohammed), the length of their residence (<1 year, 10 years, entire life), and if groceries, or groceries and beer need to be collected. We find that those of minority origin and those who have spent less than a year in a country are disadvantaged. Overall, religiosity is associated with a lower willingness to help a neighbour.

Desire objects-that is, personal items of the missing or killed found at the sites of mass atrocities-are often understood as the last tangible link to the absent person. In this article, I try to conceptualise what is happening in this human-object relationship and how this relationship is shaped when desire objects move through different social circuits. I demonstrate how the emotional energy charge changes with the objects' transition from one circuit to another, which consequently leads to the alteration of the perceived value of the desire objects. Using the biography and the ascribed agency of desire objects, I trace how humanobject relations shape political action.

In this short piece, I trace the emergence of the ‘dealing with the past’ agenda which entered the public sphere from the 1970s, briefly describing how it has gradually disseminated worldwide. Consequently, the ‘dealing with the past’ approach, where remembering was intimately tied to a preventative vision of ‘never again!’, became deeply embedded in human rights-led memorialization processes around the world. However, though this approach gave voice to long-silenced historical injustices and mass human rights abuses from the past, the erroneous assumption that ‘proper remembrance’ can heal nations also produced numerous troubling ‘side-effects’: the application of Western(ized) medical diagnostic categories of mental illness; hierarchies of victimhood; and new social inequalities, which are briefly discussed in the second part of this article.

The article traces the emergence of the novel phenomenon known as “moral remembrance” (MR). MR refers to the standardized set of norms, promoted through the human rights infrastructures of world polity, in which societies are supposed to deal with the legacies of mass human rights abuses. This vision has adopted, over the past forty years, the three main principles of “facing the past,” “a duty to remember,” and having a “victim-centered approach.” Following the emergence of MR, I demonstrate what happens when the human rights–sponsored MR clashes with the nation-state-sponsored memorialization agenda and why decoupling from the “victim-centered approach” results, more often than not, in hierarchies of victimhood and, consequently, the production of new societal inequalities. I suggest here that the relationship between MR and the nationalist use of memorialization processes needs to be understood from the perspective of economic corruption, the politics of opportunism, and competing authorities.

While there is extensive literature on both the expansion of human rights and solidarity movements, and on micro-solidarity and violent actions, here I ask what is the relationship between human rights, micro-solidarity and social action? Based on a case study of structured, face-to-face dialogue group encounters in the Israeli/Palestinian context, I draw on Randall Collins's interaction ritual chain theory to demonstrate why emotional energy and the ritualization of historical narratives have very limited potential to translate into human rights-based moral actions. Instead, I suggest, these encounters produce micro-solidarity that ascribes additional weight to ethnic categories, serving to polarize and homogenize groups along ethnic lines.

Sociology has an important part to play in understanding human rights. In this article, I trace obstacles within sociology to theoretically conceptualize human rights as an ideology. These impediments, I suggest, demonstrate the need to recognize the blind spots within sociological research. However, instead of trying to persuade readers why human rights qualifies as an ideology, I attempt to demonstrate why it is beneficial for sociological inquiry to conceptualize human rights as an ideology. Instead of following the widely accepted practice of understanding human rights as a desirable set of values designed to promote a liberal peace, I propose conceptualizing human rights as an ideology which, through its institutionalization, produces coercive organizational and doctrine power. The question of whether its organizational and doctrine power is capable of value penetration in micro-solidarity groups opens up a new prism through which sociologists can assess the successes and failures of human rights ideology on the ground.

Face-to-face encounters are well embedded in reconciliation
processes and are meant to break down stereotypes and
misconceptions and to “re-humanize the Other”, facilitating a
transformation that would have a “healing” effect for entire
communities. Based on “face-to-face encounters” in Israel/
Palestine and in the Western Balkans (Serbia, Bosnia–Herzegovina
and Croatia), I demonstrate that what happens is quite the
opposite. Instead of blurring ethnic/religious identities, these
structured encounters ossify historical narratives that serve to
ethnically homogenise, polarise and essentialize the participants’
understanding of selfhood, stratifying them according to their
ethnic belonging. As a result, these encounters result in enforcing
ethnic identities.

Using a case from Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH), this article seeks to uncover how structural division along ethnic lines and external pressures to adopt memorialization policies relate to ontological security seeking. To provide securitization of memory, external memorialization policies, understood as the offsprings of the growing organizational power of human rights ideology, are constantly clashing with the nationalist understanding and usage of memory because, through particular pretext of victim-perpetrator-bystanders, they displace deeply contextualized historical memory from its national setting. The securitization of memory is understood here as the part of ontological security which refers to the need of a political elite governing a sovereign polity to have a secure identity by maintaining distinctiveness and through routinizing their relationships with other polities. The main claims of this paper are twofold. Firstly: external attempts to secure memory are actually designed to secure the moral boundaries of those who impose and mandate the memorialization policies, meaning the international community, and not the Bosnians. Secondly, and closely interlinked with the previous claim: the attempt to enforce one set of memories may backfire—that is, fail to secure against the repetition of violence while also cementing divisions along ethnic lines. These ethnic divisions, thus continually mobilized, may then contribute to further conflict. Those claims are illustrated with three different realms of memorialization policies securitization in the case of BiH.

This article deals with the rise of memorialization standards and policy-oriented attempts to engage transitional societies to develop and adopt specific normative forms of remembrance. The transitional justice paradigm brought a tremendous change moving the paradigm from a " duty to remember " to policy-oriented " memorialization standards " that promote Western memorial models as a template for the representation of past tragedies or mass crimes. The article argues that the human rights regime mandates normative standards that de-historicize and de-contextualize local knowledge key, which not only disables different patterns of dealing with a traumatic past but also may strengthen societal divisions on the ground.

In this article I approach memory construction as one of the crucial categories through which human rights values are invoked to impose moral responsibilities for past atrocities. In the conflict and post-conflict settings, however, memory construction is quite often used to define and reinforce ethnic boundaries. Analysing putative Holocaust-genocide nexuses in different conflict (Israel and Palestine) and post-conflict (Serbia, Croatia, and Bosnia-Herzegovina) settings, I argue that it is precisely the transition from a supposed ‘duty to remember’ to an internationally supported policy-oriented and mandatory ‘proper way of remembrance’ that brings justice for some victims but renders many other victim groups invisible. I suggest that the attempts to enforce memorialisation policies set a stage for competition not only over nominal recognition of past atrocities, but also over who gets to be ‘memorialized’ as the ultimate victim. Thus, rather than strengthening human rights values in conflict and post-conflict societies, an internationally supported ‘proper way of remembrance’ often results in strengthening further divisions and ethnic nationalism.

Just as norm-complying states adapt their practices to expected behaviors, post-conflict states are forced to adapt their practices and rhetoric to better resist pressures to comply
with particular norms. Building on this insight, this paper analyzes three mechanisms through
which the ruling elite in present day Serbia strategically constructed commemorative arenas for the purpose of dealing with the opposing demands and norms made both on the international as well as the national level: 1) decontextualization of memory contents, 2) creation of social narratives of suffering and 3) promotion of the Holocaust memory as a screen memory. These are strategies of silencing which prevent public debate, representation, negotiation and are intended to reduce the tension between the contradicting demands at the international and the domestic levels. I suggest that the gap between the local and global forces and the changing role
of the state, makes it possible for memory content to become a currency, a means of achieving certain real or symbolic benefits.

This article draws on Lev Grinberg’s notion of political space,
understood as symbolic spheres in which political actors represent and further their interests, identities and agendas. The political space notion is designed to analyze and criticize political power and its dynamics in cases such as the Serbian one, where governments do not rely on heavy handed control of civil society. I suggest here that following the wars of the 1990s, the democratic governments in Serbia have excluded the war veteran population from the political space of representation, since gaining control over this population was perceived as a crucial step in the attempt to silence any public reckoning of the nation’s criminal past. Through the case study of a decade-long “Per Diem Affair”, designated to alienate the war veteran population, I show how the mechanism of fragmentation has served the ruling elite to close the political space for open debate regarding the role of Serbia in the wars of the 1990s, first and utmost, in order to maintain control over the narrative of the recent wars. This, I suggest, comes as a result of the alteration in the role of the state: from being the direct source of power to becoming a mediator between the opposing local and international demands for particular national images and identities.

This article addresses the protracted process that took place following the wars of the 1990s through which the war veteran populations in Serbia were fragmented, alienated and marginalised. The main assumption in this paper is that gaining control over the veteran populations was a crucial step in silencing any public reckoning with the nation’s criminal past. Drawing on the case study of the top-down reframing of the war veterans’ memories, I show that the most effective strategy was found to be first to fragment the veteran population and then to encourage them to de-contextualise and reframe their memories replacing concrete historical suffering with abstract remembrance. This resulted in the reinstitution of Serbia’s former national narrative of Serbian victimisation. It is suggested that the Serbian case of collective memory reconstruction after the wars of the 1990s is a prime example of how post-conflict states may mediate their contested past in order to bridge the gap between domestic demands and those of the international community.

In this article I present a decade-long affair over the erection of the Monument in Belgrade to those killed in the wars of the 1990s where the official Serbian policy was to manage its contested past through cover ups and cultural reframing rather than public acknowledgement. I demonstrate here that, though the open competitions to erect a monument dedicated to the fallen1 of the wars of the 1990s were an opportunity to negotiate different mnemonic agendas, the ruling political elite, as the dominant actor, promoted Serbian victimhood as it meant to bridge gaps in the opposing domestic and international demands. I suggest here that the mnemonic battle in present-day Serbia proves to be an exemplary case of how a post-conflict nation state mediates its contested past when caught in the gap between the domestic demands and those of international relations.

The basic argument outlined in this article is that the Serbian political elite has managed Serbia’s contested past through covering and cultural reframing rather than public acknowledgement. I show here that in the creation of a current Serbian calendar, as a state-sponsored practice, there is an extensive usage of impression management techniques which enabled a different reading of the calendar at both the domestic and international levels. It is further claimed that the calendar serves multiple functions and meanings: on the one hand, it tends to present Serbia as a democratic and progressive state, but on the other hand, it legitimizes a wide range of emotions at the local level. In other words, the new Serbian calendar is made both to meet European expectations and further Serbian interests to join the European Union, but also to allow wider audiences in Serbia to express feelings of animosity, injustice, and frustration as a means of settling historical accounts.

I argue in this article that holocaust memory discourse in Serbia is currently being promoted by the state as part of its efforts to conceal any political space where an encounter between the state and the civil society may be able to occur and redirect public debate regarding the wars of the 1990s. Thus, instead of dealing with their roles and responsibilities, Serbian governments are engaged in reframing and obscuring the contested elements of their national past. In Serbia holocaust memory is brought up to the fore as a platform for articulating national interests and thus is activated as a screen-memory. I will show here how holocaust discourse has served the domestic political elite in the course of the last decade so that Serbian victims continue to be equated with Holocaust victims and the righteous nature of the wars of the 1990s is established. Furthermore, I will show that holocaust memory discourse is instrumentalized to better Serbia’ s image on the international stage.

P rošlost nas ne može izliječiti", naslov je, a ujedno i glavna teza, novo-objavljene (2020.) knjige Lee David, docentice na odsjeku za sociologiju University Collegea u Dublinu. Riječ je o knjizi koja-kako ukazuje i njen podnaslov-ukazuje na opasnosti povezane s normiranjem sjećanja u ime ljudskih prava. Već je iz toga jasno da je riječ o inovativnom pristupu, kojim se autorica suprotstavlja glavnim postulatima politike povijesti u suvremenom liberalno-demokratskom okviru. Glavna je teza sljedeća: osvrtanje na prošlost (tzv. "suočavanje s prošlo-šću") postalo je dio nove ideologije, a svaka ideologija konstruira lažne slike stvarnosti, reducirajući brojne kompleksne situacije na "crno-bijele", npr. na "nas žrtve i njih počinitelje". I ova "ideologija ljudskih prava" služi prikrivanju stvarnosti, a koristi se u borbi za moć. Koristi je suvremeni Zapad kako bi svoj narativ predstavio univerzalnim i nametnuo ga drugima. Autorica ne negira da su ljudska prava, suočavanje s prošlošću, dužnost prisjećanja i pravda za žr-tve potencijalno korisni instrumenti stvaranja nekog novog, mirnijeg i boljeg svijeta. Ali, na terenu, u primjeni tih politika, događa se selektivnost koja po-tom rezultira potpuno suprotnim efektima od navodno željenih. Pretpostavka da je "ispravno sjećanje" jedan od "ključnih koraka u utvrđivanju moralne odgovornosti za ranije počinjene zločine i, posljedično, za uvođenje vrijedno-sti ljudskih prava u sukobe i postkonfliktne situacije" jest "u najmanju ruku neefikasna a u najgorem slučaju i kontraproduktivna" (str. 2). Upravo suprot-no od očekivanog, "moralno sjećanje" može osnažiti etnički nacionalizam, a time i poslužiti kao instrument pokretanja novog sukoba u budućnosti.

One of the core assumptions underpinning the EU’s operations is that the implementation of the human rights principles is crucial for democratization processes and for coming to terms with the past, in particular in post-conflict settings. However, despite these efforts, nationalism, which opposes the uniform standardization of global rights, still remains the most potent ideology across the globe, in particular in conflict and post-conflict settings. In this lecture I will analyze the uses of the genocide discourses in Serbia, Croatian and Bosnia-Herzegovina to provide a critical perspective on the impact that the human rights regime has on nationalist ideologies. I will question the usefulness of the human rights agenda which is based on the assumption that the standardization of memory, i.e. a proper way of remembrance, is effective in promoting universalist human rights values in conflict and post-conflict settings. In so doing, it will address the fundamental questions asking kind of national memories are being enforced via human rights infrastructures among post-conflict states and how are those memories re-figuring and transforming the potency of nationalism.

Heterogeneous data collection in the marine environment has led to large gaps in our knowledge of marine species distributions. To fill these gaps, models calibrated on existing data may be used to predict species distributions in unsampled areas, given that available data are sufficiently representative. Our objective was to evaluate the feasibility of mapping cetacean densities across the entire Mediterranean Sea using models calibrated on available survey data and various environmental covariates. We aggregated 302,481 km of line transect survey effort conducted in the Mediterranean Sea within the past 20 years by many organisations. Survey coverage was highly heterogeneous geographically and seasonally: large data gaps were present in the eastern and southern Mediterranean and in non-summer months. We mapped the extent of interpolation versus extrapolation and the proportion of data nearby in environmental space when models calibrated on existing survey data were used for predic...

Područje kulture i politika sjećanja razvilo se u jedno od najprominentnijih polja istraživa-nja društvenih i humanističkih znanosti kao i djelovanja organizacija civilnog društva. Ipak, gotovo da ne postoje sociološka istraživanja koja bi proučavala u kojoj mjeri memorijali-zacijske politike i projekti zapravo promiču ljudska prava. Knjiga The Past Can&amp;#39;t Heal Us: The Dangers of Mandating Memory in the Name of Human Rights Lee David, sociologinje sa Sveučilišta u Dublinu, važno je osvježenje. Iako je netom objavljena (srpanj 2020.), za osvrte ne treba čekati prijevod jer je riječ o itekako značajnoj knjizi za kontekst zemalja koje su prošle ratove u procesu raspada Jugo-slavije, pa tako i za Hrvatsku. Glavna teza, koju David iznosi u uvodu, hrabro se suprotstavlja uvriježenim mišljenjima-memorijalizacija u ime ljudskih prava, jednom kada biva im-plementirana u kontekstu država-nacija, ne vodi jačanju ljudskih prava. Dapače, suprotno očekivanjima, jača etničke podjele i animozitet te stvara nove nejednakosti. Prvi korak kojeg David poduzima u na-stojanju da objasni stvarni učinak politika sjećanja iz perspektive ljudskih prava jest definiranje ljudskih prava kao ideologije, o čemu piše u poglavlju &amp;quot;Human Rights As an Ideology? Obstacles and Benefits&amp;quot; (drugom poglavlju od njih sedam, uključujući uvodno). Autorica potanko i na više mjesta objašnjava kako nipošto ne odbacuje ljudska prava kao ideal, već da je, pored normativne vrijednosti u političkoj i društvenoj sferi, u znanstvenom smislu vrijedno i korisno operacionalizirati ljudska prava kao ideologiju. David ističe da, iako je promoviranje ljudskih prava plemenita nakana koja nije sporna, sociologe i druge znanstvenike nerijetko ograničava u njihovom nastojanju da društvenu stvarnost &amp;quot;promatra-ju onakvom kakva ona jest umjesto kakvom bi htjeli da bude&amp;quot; (str. 30). Ljudska prava zato treba promatrati kao ideologiju, ali ne kao &amp;quot;lažnu svijest&amp;quot;, već kao konceptualni okvir pomoću kojeg možemo operacionalizirati funkcioniranje i uspješnost ljudskih prava. Temeljem dopunjene definicije ideologije An-drewa Haywooda, David ističe da su ljudska prava ideologija zbog toga što 1) opisuju sliku postojećeg društvenog svijeta i moralne granice koje sadrži, 2) promiču sliku poželjne budućnosti te 3) objašnjavaju kako bi trebala izgledati poželjna politička promjena i kako ju postići. Model ljudskih prava kao ideo-logije koja funkcionira kroz sebi svojstvenu kumulativnu organizacijsku i doktrinarnu moć može nam reći proizvode li memorijalizacijske prakse koje su naslonjene na ljudska prava solidarnosti na mikrorazini, s kapacitetom da mobiliziraju njene konzumente na akcije bazirane na ljudskopravaškom idealu. Globalni fenomen memorijalizacije u ime ljudskih prava, kojeg David zove &amp;quot;moralno sjećanje&amp;quot; (moral rememberance), i njegov ra-zvitak tema je trećeg poglavlja &amp;quot;What Is Moral Remembrance?&amp;quot;. Moralno sjećanje odnosi se na standardizirane načine memorijalizacije, promovirane kroz infrastrukturu globalnih po-litika ljudskih prava, prema kojima se očekuje da se društva bave nasljeđem masovnih krše-nja ljudskih prava. Moralno sjećanje nastalo je na pretpostavci da će memorijalizacije i ko

Individual countries have developed very different strategies in responding to COVID-19, which can shape how citizens view the pandemic. How do different national traditions and past levels of trust in experts shape those national reactions? A new project funded by the Health Research Board will examine the perceptions of the pandemic in five European countries (Ireland, Sweden, Serbia, Germany and England), and look at how pre-existing levels of trust in the Government and in experts together with different national traditions are shaping the varieties of reactions to the pandemic. Reactions to the pandemic can vary between countries, and this may be tied to different national traditions, past experiences and how people view and trust experts. A survey experiment within this project will help us to investigate cross-national variation in pro-social attitudes towards different groups during the pandemic. We build on theories of empathy, in-group favoritism, assimilation and discrimi...

David develops a model that explains under what circumstances memory content may be exchanged for different goods and benefits in international relations, effectively functioning as a currency. The chapter applies this model to the ways in which Serbia and Croatia have used Holocaust memory as a political currency in their dealings with agencies promoting memorialization standards: the European Union, the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, and the United Nations. David shows that Holocaust-centered memorialization for international consumption co-exists with, and covers up, nationalist memorialization for domestic audiences designed to give national elites additional legitimacy and seen as a form of resistance against outside pressure. Such instrumental uses of Holocaust memory, David argues, diminish its meaning-making aspect.

The article traces the emergence of the novel phenomenon known as “moral remembrance” (MR). MR refers to the standardized set of norms, promoted through the human rights infrastructures of world polity, in which societies are supposed to deal with the legacies of mass human rights abuses. This vision has adopted, over the past forty years, the three main principles of “facing the past,” “a duty to remember,” and having a “victim-centered approach.” Following the emergence of MR, I demonstrate what happens when the human rights–sponsored MR clashes with the nation-state-sponsored memorialization agenda and why decoupling from the “victim-centered approach” results, more often than not, in hierarchies of victimhood and, consequently, the production of new societal inequalities. I suggest here that the relationship between MR and the nationalist use of memorialization processes needs to be understood from the perspective of economic corruption, the politics of opportunism, and competin...

While there is extensive literature on both the expansion of human rights and solidarity movements, and on micro-solidarity and violent actions, here I ask what is the relationship between human rights, micro-solidarity and social action? Based on a case study of structured, face-to-face dialogue group encounters in the Israeli/Palestinian context, I draw on Randall Collins’s interaction ritual chain theory to demonstrate why emotional energy and the ritualization of historical narratives have very limited potential to translate into human rights-based moral actions. Instead, I suggest, these encounters produce micro-solidarity that ascribes additional weight to ethnic categories, serving to polarize and homogenize groups along ethnic lines.

Sociology has an important part to play in understanding human rights. In this article, I trace obstacles within sociology to theoretically conceptualize human rights as an ideology. These impediments, I suggest, demonstrate the need to recognize the blind spots within sociological research. However, instead of trying to persuade readers why human rights qualifies as an ideology, I attempt to demonstrate why it is beneficial for sociological inquiry to conceptualize human rights as an ideology. Instead of following the widely accepted practice of understanding human rights as a desirable set of values designed to promote a liberal peace, I propose conceptualizing human rights as an ideology which, through its institutionalization, produces coercive organizational and doctrine power. The question of whether its organizational and doctrine power is capable of value penetration in micro-solidarity groups opens up a new prism through which sociologists can assess the successes and failu...

ABSTRACT Face-to-face encounters are well embedded in reconciliation processes and are meant to break down stereotypes and misconceptions and to “re-humanize the Other”, facilitating a transformation that would have a “healing” effect for entire communities. Based on “face-to-face encounters” in Israel/Palestine and in the Western Balkans (Serbia, Bosnia–Herzegovina and Croatia), I demonstrate that what happens is quite the opposite. Instead of blurring ethnic/religious identities, these structured encounters ossify historical narratives that serve to ethnically homogenise, polarise and essentialize the participants’ understanding of selfhood, stratifying them according to their ethnic belonging. As a result, these encounters result in enforcing ethnic identities.

Using a case from Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH), this article seeks to uncover how structural division along ethnic lines and external pressures to adopt memorialization policies relate to ontological security seeking. To provide securitization of memory, external memorialization policies, understood as the offsprings of the growing organizational power of human rights ideology, are constantly clashing with the nationalist understanding and usage of memory because, through particular pretext of victim-perpetrator-bystanders, they displace deeply contextualized historical memory from its national setting. The securitization of memory is understood here as the part of ontological security which refers to the need of a political elite governing a sovereign polity to have a secure identity by maintaining distinctiveness and through routinizing their relationships with other polities. The main claims of this paper are twofold. Firstly: external attempts to secure memory are actually designed to secure the moral boundaries of those who impose and mandate the memorialization policies, meaning the international community, and not the Bosnians. Secondly, and closely interlinked with the previous claim: the attempt to enforce one set of memories may backfire—that is, fail to secure against the repetition of violence while also cementing divisions along ethnic lines. These ethnic divisions, thus continually mobilized, may then contribute to further conflict. Those claims are illustrated with three different realms of memorialization policies securitization in the case of BiH.

This article addresses the protracted process that took place following the wars of the 1990s through which the war veteran populations in Serbia were fragmented, alienated and marginalised. The main assumption in this paper is that gaining control over the veteran populations was a crucial step in silencing any public reckoning with the nation&#39;s criminal past. Drawing on the case study of the top-down reframing of the war veterans&#39; memories, I show that the most effective strategy was found to be first to fragment the veteran population and then to encourage them to de-contextualise and reframe their memories replacing concrete historical suffering with abstract remembrance. This resulted in the reinstitution of Serbia&#39;s former national narrative of Serbian victimisation. It is suggested that the Serbian case of collective memory reconstruction after the wars of the 1990s is a prime example of how post-conflict states may mediate their contested past in order to bridge the gap between domestic demands and those of the international community.

This article deals with the rise of memorialization standards and policy-oriented attempts to engage transitional societies to develop and adopt specific normative forms of remembrance. The transitional justice paradigm brought a tremendous change moving the paradigm from a &quot;duty to remember&quot; to policy-oriented &quot;memorialization standards&quot; that promote Western memorial models as a template for the representation of past tragedies or mass crimes. The article argues that the human rights regime mandates normative standards that de-historicize and de-contextualize local knowledge key, which not only disables different patterns of dealing with a traumatic past but also may strengthen societal divisions on the ground.

Abstract In this article I approach memory construction as one of the crucial categories through which human rights values are invoked to impose moral responsibilities for past atrocities. In the conflict and post-conflict settings, however, memory construction is quite often used to define and reinforce ethnic boundaries. Analysing putative Holocaust-genocide nexuses in different conflict (Israel and Palestine) and post-conflict (Serbia, Croatia, and Bosnia-Herzegovina) settings, I argue that it is precisely the transition from a supposed ‘duty to remember’ to an internationally supported policy-oriented and mandatory ‘proper way of remembrance’ that brings justice for some victims but renders many other victim groups invisible. I suggest that the attempts to enforce memorialisation policies set a stage for competition not only over nominal recognition of past atrocities, but also over who gets to be ‘memorialized’ as the ultimate victim. Thus, rather than strengthening human rights values in conflict and post-conflict societies, an internationally supported ‘proper way of remembrance’ often results in strengthening further divisions and ethnic nationalism.

The basic argument outlined in this article is that the Serbian political elite has managed Serbia’s contested past through covering and cultural reframing rather than public acknowledgement. I show here that in the creation of a current Serbian calendar, as a state-sponsored practice, there is an extensive usage of impression management techniques which enabled a different reading of the calendar at both the domestic and international levels. It is further claimed that the calendar serves multiple functions and meanings: on the one hand, it tends to present Serbia as a democratic and progressive state, but on the other hand, it legitimizes a wide range of emotions at the local level. In other words, the new Serbian calendar is made both to meet European expectations and further Serbian interests to join the European Union, but also to allow wider audiences in Serbia to express feelings of animosity, injustice, and frustration as a means of settling historical accounts.

In this article I present a decade-long affair over the erection of the Monument in Belgrade to those killed in the wars of the 1990s where the official Serbian policy was to manage its contested past through cover ups and cultural reframing rather than public acknowledgement. I demonstrate here that, though the open competitions to erect a monument dedicated to the fallen of the wars of the 1990s were an opportunity to negotiate different mnemonic agendas, the ruling political elite, as the dominant actor, promoted Serbian victimhood as it meant to bridge gaps in the opposing domestic and international demands. I suggest here that the mnemonic battle in present-day Serbia proves to be an exemplary case of how a post-conflict nation state mediates its contested past when caught in the gap between the domestic demands and those of international relations.

Just as norm-complying states adapt their practices to expected behaviors, post-conflict states are forced to adapt their practices and rhetoric to better resist pressures to comply with particular norms. Building on this insight, this paper analyzes three mechanisms through which the ruling elite in present day Serbia strategically constructed commemorative arenas for the purpose of dealing with the opposing demands and norms made both on the international as well as the national level: 1) de-contextualization of memory contents, 2) creation of social narratives of suffering and 3) promotion of the Holocaust memory as a screen memory. These are strategies of silencing which prevent public debate, representation, negotiation and are intended to reduce the tension between the contradicting demands at the international and the domestic levels. I suggest that the gap between the local and global forces and the changing role of the state, makes it possible for memory content to become a...

This article draws on Lev Grinberg’s notion of political space, understood as symbolic spheres in which political actors represent and further their interests, identities and agendas. The political space notion is designed to analyze and criticize political power and its dynamics in cases such as the Serbian one, where governments do not rely on heavyhanded control of civil society. I suggest here that following the wars of the 1990s, the democratic governments in Serbia have excluded the war veteran population from the political space of representation, since gaining control over this population was perceived as a crucial step in the attempt to silence any public reckoning of the nation’s criminal past. Through the case study of a decade-long “Per Diem Affair”, designated to alienate the war veteran population, I show how the mechanism of fragmentation has served the ruling elite to close the political space for open debate regarding the role of Serbia in the wars of the 1990s, fir...

This article draws on Lev Grinberg’s notion of political space, understood as symbolic spheres in which political actors represent and further their interests, identities and agendas. The political space notion is designed to analyze and criticize political power and its dynamics in cases such as the Serbian one, where governments do not rely on heavy handed control of civil society. I suggest here that following the wars of the 1990s, the democratic governments in Serbia have excluded the war veteran population from the political space of representation, since gaining control over this population was perceived as a crucial step in the attempt to silence any public reckoning of the nation’s criminal past. Through the case study of a decade-long “Per Diem Affair”, designated to alienate the war veteran population, I show how the mechanism of fragmentation has served the ruling elite to close the political space for open debate regarding the role of Serbia in the wars of the 1990s, first and utmost, in order to maintain control over the narrative of the recent wars. This, I suggest, comes as a result of the alteration in the role of the state: from being the direct source of power to becoming a mediator between the opposing local and international demands for particular national images and identities.