Local Commemorations, False Heroes, and Hijacked Memories: Post-Genocide and Ethnic Cleansing Politics of Memory in Bosnia-Herzegovina’s Republika Srpska (RS)

The politics of memory is also the politics of forgetting – especially when it comes to perpetrators of violence, such as those who committed genocide and other crimes against humanity in Bosnia-Herzegovina in the 1990s. This study considers how history, mythology, and collective memories have been used by institutions and politicians, particularly in the Serb-dominated Bosnian entity Republika Srpska (RS), to construct narratives that discursively erase the Bosniak (Muslim) population and deny the country’s multi-ethnic and multi-religious history. This research contrasts these narratives ‘from above’ with narratives ‘from below’ performed by ordinary people, focusing on how memories of the recent past are constructed, contested, appropriated, and performed in post-war Bosnia-Herzegovina. Employing a combination of historical methods and ethnography to understand the competing narratives’ poetics, the research offers a new interpretation of the competing memories of post-conflict communities in Bosnia-Herzegovina, where large-scale atrocities in the country took place. This study argues that the concept of hijacked memories and survivors’ performative enactments of alternative memories in local commemorative spaces provide a powerful counter-narrative to the official memory imposed by RS institutions.