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Children born of war rape continue to be a taboo theme in many post-war societies, also in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BH). This study is based on indepth interviews with eleven adolescents born of war rape in BH. The main goal is to present how these adolescents represent themselves and their lifesituations. On the basis of the research we identify four key themes: 1) their continued sense of hostility even after the end of the war; 2) the internalized guilt; 3) the role reversal; and 4) the role of reconciling the war enemies. The analysis of life-stories shows new identifications of traumatic events and trauma. More than half of the interviewed girls suffer severe psychological and physical abuses. The research argues that there are three crucial factors influencing girls' self-perception: the role of the mothers, mothers' economic situation and general social exclusion.

In different parts of the world the 9/11 terrorist attacks have been localized and negotiated by mainstream media and in other public discourses in rather diverse ways. This article explores how young Serbian intellectuals recontextualized G.W. Bush's ‘war on terrorism’ discourse in order to legitimize, retroactively, Serbian violence against Muslims in Bosnia and Kosovo during the 1990s. We go beyond Bernstein's concept of recontextualization, defined as representation of social events, and extend it to the notion of relocation of a discourse from its original context/practice to its appropriation within another context/practice. Our analysis shows that the informants recycle and appropriate the discourse of ‘the war on terrorism’ by using an analogy. They equate the attacks on the WTC and the Pentagon with the former Yugoslav wars and they position and represent former Yugoslav Muslims as terrorists. Our informants continue to use the same principle of exclusion, celebrated by the US administration, extending the group of the ‘good’ (‘we’) to cover all ‘Western/European/Christians’, including the Serbs. The ‘evil’ (‘other’) group is represented as the ‘they’ group, encompassing all the ‘non-Western/non-European/non-Christian/Muslims’. Informants also appropriate the discourse by extending the meaning of the word ‘terrorism’ to all the violent acts carried out by Muslims regardless of the specificities of different politicalhistorical contexts.

Children born of war rapes continue to be a marginalized political, media and academic topic in Bosnian and other post-war societies. The goal of this article is to contribute to the research that deals with the life situations of children born of war rape, and to show the usefulness of an analysis of metaphors when a specific topic is emotionally difficult to talk about. The metaphor analysis of life stories of 19 adolescents — all Bosniak girls — born of war rapes in Bosnia and Herzegovina shows that metaphorical language provides abused girls with the only way to express their painful situations. The authors identify three main uses of metaphors as discursive strategies. These are the only possible articulations of their painful situations: the avoidance of the use of vocabulary from the primary domain, the repetition of the metaphor and the immediate use of the metaphor when it collapses into the primary domain. There were three major metaphorical frames that dominated the self-presentation of the girls: ‘ shooting target’, ‘cancer’ and ‘warrior’.

This article focuses on the local understandings, responses and interpretations of celebrity activist Angelina Jolie and the film she directed in 2011 about the war rapes in Bosnia and Herzegovina: In the land of Blood and Honey. We first provide a brief historical context of the production and promotion of the film. Next, we offer a theoretical approach to the phenomenon of celebrity activism. In the third part, we look at how Jolie's film has been received and interpreted in the region itself, since Jolie's stated goal was to 'raise awareness about war rapes'. On the basis of in-depth interviews with Bosnian public intellectuals, we argue that the film's story of war rapes and suffering did little to raise awareness about war rape victims generally and was interpreted primarily within two discursive frameworks: celebrity and ethnonationalistic ones that tend to reinforce the status quo in post-war Bosnia and Herzegovina and perpetuate misunderstandings about war crimes. Jolie's activism, in other words, did not contribute to the reconciliation between different ethnicities in Bosnia and Herzegovina, but has, on the contrary, further fostered polarization that continues to plague the region.