Based on the analysis of narrative-biographic interviews, this paper explores the ways in which second-generation youth of Bosnian descent in Switzerland explore, relate to, and engage with the past of their origin country and with the conflict-induced history of their parents’ migration. It examines how the legacies of the homeland conflict exert an impact on the lives of succeeding generations in the diaspora and how young people deal with and transform those legacies in the contexts of their current lives and prospects.

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This article explores how diaspora youth is impacted by and deals with the legacies of the violent conflict in their parents' homeland of Bosnia. Based on the analysis of narrative-biographic interviews with second-generation Bosnians in Switzerland and ethnographic observations in diaspora spaces, this paper highlights the repercussions that Yugoslav disintegration wars and, particularly, the war in Bosnia (1992Bosnia ( -1995 have for young people who were raised in Switzerland. First, it demonstrates that instead of a coherent picture about the past, young people receive fragments and pieces of personal memories and experiences that their families went through. Second, the history of conflict has repercussions for the ways young people establish and articulate their sense of attachment and belonging to the homeland of their parents. Third, while second-generation Bosnians rarely reproduce the conflict dynamic themselves, they move in spaces in which the legacies of conflict continue to be an important discursive and structural force.