Extending reparative planning for wartime sexual violence survivors: The role of land ownership in memorialization

Abstract

Reparative planning scholarship emphasizes participatory integration as a key process for addressing state-sanctioned violence. In the case of post-war Bosnia, survivors of wartime sexual violence struggle to voice their reparative demands to planning institutions rebuilding spaces. Through comparative ethnographic analysis and participatory action research in Višegrad, I examine how property control over spaces with histories of violence enables key mechanisms to navigate planning commissions, such as providing the legal standing that transforms survivor claims into institutional access, local ownership of physical transformation processes, and organizational narrative authority. These findings call for extending reparative planning scholarship to center property control in contexts of institutional denial and memorialization.