Sarajevo’s ambivalent memoryscape: Spatial stories of peace and conflict

Abstract

This article focuses on Sarajevo’s memoryscape to investigate the ambiguous nature of artefacts of commemoration. Suggesting that memorials impact the ways in which people relate to the past and future, the article suggests that they represent important platforms on which different versions of peace and social justice are implicitly narrated and discussed. Depending on the artist/designer, the location, the shape, the audience and the surrounding socio-political discourses, memorials inspire and transform stories of war and peace. The controversies around the Sarajevo roses or monuments dedicated to the international community in Sarajevo mirror controversial societal debates around the nature and politics of peace(building). Conflict and contestation can thus be read through closer investigation of the maps of meaning underpinning the commemoration of certain events. Due to their ambiguous nature, monuments can be used as a platform for the constant transformation of discourses of peace into conflict, and vice versa.

Keywords

ambivalence Bosnia-Herzegovina memory memoryscape monuments peacebuilding Sarajevo space stories

Get full access to this article

View all access options for this article.

References

Austin

(1962) How to Do Things with Words. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Bell

(2009) Sarajevska Zima: a festival amid war debris in Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina. Space and Culture 12(1): 136–142.

Belloni

(2001) Civil society and peacebuilding in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Journal of Peace Research 38: 163–180.

Bjőrkdahl

Mannergren-Selimović

(2016) A tale of three bridges: agency and agonism in peace building. Third World Quarterly 37(2): 321–335.

Boutros-Ghali

(1992) An agenda for peace. Preventive diplomacy, peacemaking and peace-keeping. Available at: http://www.unrol.org/files/A_47_277.pdf (accessed 10 June 2014).

Boyarin

(1994) Introduction. In: Boyarin

(ed.) Remapping Memory: The Politics of TimeSpace. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, pp. vii–xiv.

Budruk

White

Wodrich

. (2008) Connecting visitors to people and place: visitors’ perceptions of authenticity at Canyon de Chelly National Monument, Arizona. Journal of Heritage Tourism 3(3): 185–202.

Butler

(2006) Doing heritage differently. Memoryscape: using new technology to integrate art, landscape and oral history. Rising East Online 5. Available at: http://www.uel.ac.uk/risingeast/archive05/academic/butler.htm (accessed 9 June 2014).

Chottin

Izambert

(2010) Sans l’ombre d’une hésitation. Vacarme 4(53): 82–84. Available at: www.cairn.info/revue-vacarme-2010-4-page-82.htm (accessed 18 November 2014).

10.

Conway

(2008) Local conditions, global environment and transnational discourses in memory work: the case of Bloody Sunday (1972). Memory Studies 1(2): 187–209.

11.

Coward

(2009) Urbicide: The Politics of Urban Destruction. Abingdon: Routledge.

12.

Davis

(2002) Narrative and social movements. The power of stories. In: Davis

(ed.) Stories of Change: Narrative and Social Movements. New York: State University of New York Press, pp. 3–29.

13.

De Certeau

(1984) The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

14.

Domanska

(2006) The material presence of the past. History and Theory 45(3): 337–348.

15.

Ewick

Silbey

(1995) Subversive stories and hegemonic tales: toward a sociology of narrative. Law & Society Review 29(2): 197–226.

16.

Ewick

Silbey

(2003) Narrating social structure: stories of resistance to legal authority. American Journal of Sociology 108(6): 1328–1372.

17.

Gallagher

(1997) My neighbour, my enemy: the manipulation of ethnic identity and the origins and conduct of war in Yugoslavia. In: Turton

(ed.) War and Ethnicity: Global Connections and Local Violence. San Marino: Boydell & Brewer, pp. 47–75.

18.

Grodach

(2002) Reconstituting identity and history in post-war Mostar, Bosnia-Herzegovina. City 6(1): 61–82.

19.

Halbwachs

(1997 [1950]) La Mémoire collective. Paris: Albin Michel.

20.

Halilović

(2011) Nestaju Sarajevske ruže. In: Blog, 11 November. Available at: http://zrnomudrosti.blogspot.co.uk/2011/11/nestaju-sarajevske-ruze-imaju-li-graani.html (accessed 11 November 2013).

21.

James

(2013) Social networking Sarajevo Roses: digital representations of postconflict civil life in (the former) Yugoslavia. Journal of Communication 63: 975–992.

22.

Jansen

(2014) Can the revolt in Bosnia and Herzegovina send a message to the wider world? Available at: http://www.balkaninsight.com/en/blog/can-the-revolt-in-bosnia-and-herzegovina-send-a-message-to-the-wider-world (accessed 13 February 2014).

23.

Kappler

(2013) Representations of peace in the EU’s peacebuilding approach in Bosnia-Herzegovina. In: Aggestam

Björkdahl

(eds) Rethinking Peacebuilding: The Quest for Just Peace in the Middle East and the Western Balkans. New York: Routledge, pp. 168–182.

24.

Kappler

(2014) Local Agency and Peacebuilding: EU and International Engagement in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Cyprus and South Africa. Basingstoke: Palgrave.

25.

Kostić

(2007) Ambivalent peace: external nation-building, threatened identity and reconciliation in Bosnia-Herzegovina. PhD Thesis, Department of Peace and Conflict Research, Uppsala University, Uppsala.

26.

Latour

(2007) Reassembling the Social. New York: Oxford University Press.

27.

Leib

(2002) Separate times, shared spaces: Arthur Ashe, monument avenue and the politics of Richmond, Virginia’s symbolic landscape. Cultural Geographies 9(3): 286–312.

28.

Lovrenović

(1994) The hatred of memory: in Sarajevo, burned books and murdered pictures. The New York Times, 28 May, pp. 15–19.

29.

Massey

(2005) For Space. London: SAGE.

30.

Milton

(2011) Defacing memory: (un)tying Peru’s memory knots. Memory Studies 4(2): 190–205.

31.

Moll

(2013) Fragmented memories in a fragmented country: memory competition and political identity-building in today’s Bosnia and Herzegovina. Nationalities Papers 41(6): 910–935.

32.

Naef

(2011) Touring the Traumascape: ‘War Tours’ in Sarajevo. In: Collins

Clark

(eds) Speaking the Unspeakable Oxford: Interdisciplinary Press, pp. 237–244.

33.

Phillips

Reyes

(2011) Surveying global memoryscapes: The shifting terrain of public memory studies. In: Phillips

Reyes

(eds) Global Memoryscapes: Contesting Remembrance in a Transnational Age. Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, pp. 1–26.

34.

Scott

(1990) Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

35.

Sheftel

(2012) ‘Monument to the international community, from the grateful citizens of Sarajevo’: Dark humour as counter-memory in post-conflict Bosnia-Herzegovina. Memory Studies 5(2): 145–164.

36.

Stari Grad (2013) Aleja Ambasadora. Available at: http://www.starigrad.ba/bs2/txt_extra_wide.php?id=378 (accessed 31 October 2013).

37.

Stefansson

(2004) Refugee returns to Sarajevo and their challenge to contemporary narratives of mobility. In: Long

Oxfeld

(eds) Coming Home? Refugees, Migrants, and those Who Stayed Behind. Philadelphia, PA; Pennsylvania, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, pp. 170–186.

38.

Steinberg

(1999) The talk and back talk of collective action: a dialogic analysis of repertoires of discourse among nineteenth-century English cotton spinners. American Journal of Sociology 105(3): 736–780.

39.

Steiner Editor

Zelizer

(1995) Competing memories: reading the past against the grain: the shape of memory studies. Critical Studies in Mass Communication 12(2): 213–239.

40.

Tuan

(1974) Topophilia: A Study of Environmental Perception, Attitudes, and Values. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.

41.

Watson

Till

(2010) Ethnography and participant observation. In: DeLyser

Herbert

Aitken

. (eds) The SAGE Handbook of Qualitative Geography. London: SAGE, pp. 121–137.

42.

Young

(1992) The counter-monument: memory against Itself in Germany Today. Critical Inquiry 18(2): 267–296.

43.

Young

(1999) Memory and counter-memory: the end of the monument in Germany. Harvard Design Magazine 9: 1–10.

44.

Zupan

(2006) Facing the past and transitional justice in countries of former Yugoslavia. In: Fischer

(ed.) Peacebuilding and Civil Society in Bosnia-Herzegovina: Ten Years after Dayton. Münster: Lit Verlag, pp. 327–342.