Suchergebnisse

"During two terrifying days and nights in early September 1941, the lives of nearly two thousand men, women, and children were taken savagely by their neighbors in Kulen Vakuf, a small rural community straddling today's border between northwest Bosnia and Croatia. This frenzy--in which victims were butchered with farm tools, drowned in rivers, and thrown into deep vertical caves--was the culmination of a chain of local massacres that began earlier in the summer. In Violence as a Generative Force, Max Bergholz tells the story of the sudden and perplexing descent of this once peaceful multiethnic community into extreme violence. This deeply researched microhistory provides provocative insights to questions of global significance: What causes intercommunal violence? How does such violence between neighbors affect their identities and relations? Contrary to a widely held view that sees nationalism leading to violence, Bergholz reveals how the upheavals wrought by local killing actually created dramatically new perceptions of ethnicity--of oneself, supposed "brothers," and those perceived as "others." As a consequence, the violence forged new communities, new forms and configurations of power, and new practices of nationalism"--

AbstractExplaining why restraint of violence becomes a strategy for armed groups has recently attracted the attention of researchers, especially political scientists. The emergent literature generally argues by way of macro-level statistical correlation, in which a single factor, such as the desire of armed groups to adhere to international norms about human rights or the existence of high levels of political education among fighters, is believed to explain the presence of restraint. Missing in this approach are close analyses of actual historical episodes of restraint. We thus lack comprehension of how those with ideas about restraining violence translate their thoughts into actions, especially in contexts such as civil wars. This article addresses this weakness by examining the history of a Balkan community wracked by intercommunal violence during 1941 to explain the puzzling practice of restraint in the midst of waves of retaliatory violence. Rather than identify a single factor, this micro-comparative case study reveals that a cluster of mostly endogenous factors, shaped significantly by ongoing violence, explains the successful practice of restraint. Methodologically, this article stresses the need for researchers of restraint to employ microhistorical and comparative methods. They hold the greatest potential to illuminate what remains insufficiently explained in the extant political science literature: the contingent local processes whereby a desire for restraint or escalation of violence—the existence of which may be conditioned by longer-term historical developments—becomes a reality in certain moments.

In myriad forms, violence remains a crucial and, arguably, an increasingly dominant form of political practice by a host of actors in the contemporary world. It is thus not surprising that during the past two decades research on various aspects of violence has increased significantly. Historians have long been the central chroniclers of the violent past, but others, especially social scientists, have recently moved into the spotlight with a host of compelling analyses about the origins, dynamics, and effects of violence, including those of riots, pogroms, civil war, and genocide, among others. Today, the story of violent human behavior is one that many scholars seek to tell and explain, and in a host of different ways — from research methodology and scale, to narrative style. Yet regardless of who seeks to tell histories of violence, the question of what drives people to inflict immense pain and large-scale death on others continues to remain a perplexing question in today's world, and thus is one that remains in urgent need of attention from researchers.

Newly available documentation from the State Archive of Bosnia-Herzegovina indicates that the majority of sites where Muslim civilians were killed during the Second World War remained unmarked as late as the mid-1980s. The existing scholarship, most of which argues that Yugoslavia's communist regime sought to "de-ethnicize" the remembrance of all of the interethnic violence of the war, has failed to notice and explain this apparent bias against Muslim civilian war victims. This article seeks to answer the question of why so many sites in Bosnia-Herzegovina where Muslim civilians were killed remained unmarked after the war. It does so through the reconstruction and analysis of the wartime and postwar history of Kulen Vakuf, a small town located in northwestern Bosnia. The analysis of the dynamics of mass killing in the region reveals that the communist-led Partisan movement absorbed large numbers of Serbian insurgents who had murdered Muslims earlier in the war. The transformation of the perpetrators of the massacres into Partisans created a postwar context in which the authorities, to avoid implicating insurgents-turned-Partisans as war criminals, and the Muslim survivors, out of fear of retribution and a desire to move on, agreed to stay silent about the killings. The end result was the absence of monuments for the victims.