Suchergebnisse

There is no greater honor for an author than to respond to such generous and thoughtful engagement with one's work such as the two commentaries by Mila Dragojević and Tamara Trošt. These commentaries are that much more appreciated as both Dragojević and Trošt have contributed tremendous scholarship on memory politics and historical narratives in the Western Balkans and in many ways Yellow Star, Red Star builds on their own work.

While archival research most often does not include direct interaction with living subjects, ethical issues surrounding this method are no less acute. These issues are even more profound in studies of violence, where the likely questions are often about life, death, murder, culpability, responsibility, punishment, or remorse. Identifying answers to such questions is a process rife with ethical minefields, including possibility of unfair affiliation of individuals with violent groups, or tendentious interpretation of past documents, or even avoidance of specific archival material if it causes direct and irreversible reputational harm. While other disciplines have begun a more thorough evaluation of the ethics of archival research, political science has so far remained largely silent on this issue. To bring these conversations to political science, I discuss three main ethical challenges in conducting archival research on political violence: the role of researcher in interpretation; harms and benefits to subjects of research; and the politics of archives and politicization of research. I illustrate the arguments with my own archival research on Holocaust remembrance in post-communist Europe. I discuss archives – public and private – as sites of my own research and present ethical challenges I encountered while working with these archival materials. I then provide a possible path toward more ethical archival research on political violence and link this path to the ongoing discussion about data and research transparency in qualitative work.

This article revisits the history of Yugoslavia to trace the unique ways in which the national airline Yugoslav Airlines (JAT) served as a powerful tool of Yugoslav, and then post-Yugoslav, Serbian state identity construction from 1975 to 2013, when JAT ceased to exist. I analyze the complete archives of the JAT Review to trace the stunning reconstruction of Yugoslav state identity over time: from the height of the Yugoslav "brand" in the 1970s as the country served a pivotal role in the Non-Aligned Movement, to the slow decline in pan-Yugoslav identity and the rise of sub-Yugoslav nationalisms throughout the 1980s, to the final dissolution of the country and collapse of Yugoslav identity in the 1990s. Building on insights from the nation-branding literature, I conduct a textual and visual analysis of articles, photographs, and ads that appeared on the pages of the JAT Review. The analysis points to the complex and often contradictory ways in which Yugoslavia constructed its multiple identities to project power and status in the international sphere, while simultaneously maintaining citizen loyalty at home.

This article analyzes the contested remembrance of the assassination of Habsburg Archduke Franz Ferdinand by Serbian radical Gavrilo Princip in 1914 in Sarajevo. I place the politics of the assassination centennial commemoration in the context of Serbian and Bosnian contemporary anxieties about their respective ontological insecurities. In Serbia, these anxieties centre on Serbia's fear of losing its international reputation as a state that was seen as historically generous and self‐sacrificing and a victim of historical injustice at the hands of great powers. In Bosnia, anxieties revolve around its persistently unresolved international status, failure to create any cohesive post‐war Bosnian identity, and deep internal ethnic divisions. The article explores ways in which the memory of the 1914 assassination is utilized for contemporary memory‐building purposes in both Serbia and Bosnia, as part of a larger narrative of state‐building, in which both states see themselves as "indispensable nations" that cracked open the historical arc of the twentieth century. The article demonstrates the profound anxiety historical commemorations provoke in internationally insecure states and illustrates ways in which states can respond.

What is the contribution of Eastern European scholarship to the study of human rights and transitional justice? This essay takes stock of the most significant empirical and theoretical contributions of the study of Eastern Europe, specifically the study of the difficult case of the former Yugoslavia, to the scholarship on transitional justice. I identify three main challenges the scholarship on the former Yugoslavia has presented to the larger field of transitional justice: the political challenge of multiple overlapping transitions, the inability of international institutions to effect domestic social change, and the dangers of politicization of past violence remembrance.