Time and narrative: Temporality, memory, and instant history of Balkan wars

Abstract

International audienceIn this article, we explore the ways in which from the beginning to the end of twentieth century different temporalities and historicizations stemming from different narrative perspectives on the Balkan wars have constructed different commonplace, timeworn and enduring representations. In practical terms, we take issue with several patterns of narratives, such as the sensationalism of media industry, the essentialization of collective memory, the securitization of imaginary threats and the pacifist activism of normative transformations. It is our contention to argue that they historicize certain moments of rupture, which are subsequently used and misused to construct an anachronistic representation of Southeast Europe that may conceal hidden interests. Contrastingly, an alternative narrative that emphasizes a “history from below” as an apperception of the temporality of being can offer a revisionist approach that may show the futility of ahistorical accounts

Politics of mass rapes in ethnic conflict: a morphodynamics of raw madness and cooked evil

“…In fact, whichever reference to blood mentality in relation to postcommunist turbulence in Albania, or to sexual violence in former Yugoslavia, becomes fundamentally a pure rhetoric. Nevertheless, as argued elsewhere, similar interpretations contributed to construct the Balkan image of Southeastern Europe in international representations with decisive implications in the global politics of regional affairs, including the advocating of the policy of non-intervention in Bosnia and the further containment of Western Balkans [45][46][47]. As a result, the insistence on international security contributed to install a fundamental political and ethical distance between the West and the so-called Balkan wars.…”

“…Rape may be analyzed by its effects on male group dynamics, military rankings, state and ethnic formations, forms of political recruitment, family reorganization, gender relations, economic and rural/urban differentiation, and forms of political recruitment and religious purity/pollution. Conflict-related rape and gender-based 2 Structural methodology is implicit in previous works on social morphology [32,33], processes of identity construction and cultural socialization [34,35], women's agency [36], the myth of many children within the so-called Albanian patriarchal extended family [1], the religious movements during much of Southeast European history and politics [37][38][39][40][41][42][43][44], the narrative legacies and international representations of Balkan wars and their implications in regional and international politics [45][46][47], or the transformations of European identity [48].…”

Mnemonic legality: militarism, masculinity, and the elasticity of belonging

“…38 Indeed, one participant, Zackary, 39 volunteered a great deal of 33 Carter & Sealey (2007). 34 Olick & Robbins (1998 Abazi & Doja (2018). 38 See eg Lake (2010); Daley (2018).…”

The New German-speaking School of Balkankompetenzen: Knowledge production and truth claims in post-colonial post-communist context

“…Anthropologists needed different, distant, exotic others as the basis for their explanatory models, and it seemed natural that new primitive others could be found on the margins of Europe, in the Balkans where culture did not seem an obvious attribute. In particular, the discursive elaboration of prejudiced international representations and their political implications in this area, as examined elsewhere (Abazi and Doja, 2016, 2017, 2018; Doja and Abazi, 2021), reveal that the main effect of the mytho-logical construction of a geographically close but conceptually distant identification of a “non-European Europe” is to represent in contrast a higher image of “European Europe” within a civilizational hierarchy.…”