War Narratives in Post-Conflict Societies

Keeping the Past Alive in the former Yugoslavia
1. Auflage 2025
ISBN: 978-1-032-28283-1
Verlag: Routledge

Buch, Englisch, 300 Seiten, Format (B × H): 156 mm x 234 mm, Gewicht: 462 g

Reihe: Contemporary Security Studies

This book studies war narratives and their role in the political arenas of post-conflict societies, with a focus on the former Yugoslavia.

How do politicians in postwar societies talk about the past war? How do they discursively represent vulnerable social groups created by the conflict? Does the nature of this representation depend on the politicians’ ideology, personal characteristics, or their record of combat service? The book answers these questions by pairing natural language processing tools and large corpora of parliamentary debates collected in three southeast European post-conflict societies (Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia, and Serbia). Using the latest advances in computer science, the book explores patterns in the war discourse of the political elites of these countries and discusses how politicians talk about war in terms of common narratives and shared frameworks. Mapping over 20 years of parliamentary debates, the book presents a new perspective on the role of the legacies of war in public space and develops theoretical arguments about reconciliation in post-conflict societies. The wars of the 1990s and the breakup of Yugoslavia have created three totally different settings for remembering the past conflicts in these countries, despite their common history. It is a story of victorious battles (Croatia), past grievances (Bosnia-Herzegovina), and denial (Serbia), showing the different flavors of past wars in various national contexts that are symptomatic of many post-conflict societies in different parts of the world.

This book will be of much interest to students of war and conflict studies, southeastern European politics, discourse analysis, and international relations.

Zielgruppe

Postgraduate, Professional, and Undergraduate Advanced

Autoren/Hrsg.

Mochtak, Michal

Fachgebiete

• Interdisziplinäres Wissenschaften Wissenschaften Interdisziplinär Friedens- und Konfliktforschung
• Sozialwissenschaften Politikwissenschaft Internationale Beziehungen Diplomatie
• Sozialwissenschaften Politikwissenschaft Politische Kultur Menschenrechte, Bürgerrechte
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Weltgeschichte & Geschichte einzelner Länder und Gebietsräume Europäische Geschichte
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Geschichtliche Themen Militärgeschichte
• Sozialwissenschaften Politikwissenschaft Militärwesen Nationale und Internationale Sicherheits- und Verteidigungspolitik
• Sozialwissenschaften Politikwissenschaft Politische Kultur Staatsbürgerkunde, Staatsbürgerschaft, Zivilgesellschaft

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Introduction  Part I: Setting the scene  1. War and history in the service of politics 2. Communication, content, and discourse of war 3. Political discourse meets natural language processing  Part II: Talking war  4. Endless war: Conflicting war legacies in Bosnia-Herzegovina 5. Glorified legacies: The myth of the Homeland War in Croatia 6. War past to be heard: Politics of denial in Serbia Part II Conclusion  Part III: Drivers of war discourse  7. Playing the war card 8. War and sentiment Part III Conclusion Conclusion

Über Autor(innen)

Michal Mochtak is an excellence fellow at Radboud University and has a PhD in political science from Masaryk University, Czech Republic. He is the author of Electoral Violence in the Western Balkans: From Voting to Fighting and Back (Routledge, 2018).