The politics of memorialization and commemoration in Kosovo have been shaped by the war of 1998-1999, which has organized them around the idea of the heroic as the most sublime truth. The sublime truth is also the only truth of the Kosovo war. The heroic has served as the organizing principle of all other forms of narrating, public discourses, political […]

“A service for peace”, NATO soldiers remember the 1999 humanitarian intervention in Kosovo. Little of what in 1999 was part of NATO’s decisions, orders and air operations over the former Yugoslavia has stopped in time to become part of the military museums of the countries whose forces were part of the intervention. What was once shown in video conferences or […]

The research unveiled several recurring patterns pertaining to the commemorative activities related to the 2001 conflict in Macedonia. The dominant patterns included the commemorations of the state security forces, the commemorations of the insurgents, the anniversaries of the OFA, and the commemorations of civil victims in the state. In this text, I will focus on the second one, providing its […]

The 2001 armed conflict in the Republic of Macedonia – Republic of North Macedonia as of 2019 – between the state security forces and the ethnic Albanian insurgents brought the state to the verge of a full-fledged civil war and it is nowadays viewed as the last violent escalation pertaining to the Yugoslav Wars of the 1990s. The seven months […]

Every year on March 24, on the anniversary of NATO bombing, both officials and the media in Kosovo remember the contribution of the military Alliance in “stopping the genocide and contributing to regional peace and security”.While the NATO in Kosovo has become the longest peacekeeping mission in its history, the ‘threads of memory’ between both Serbian and Albanian communities are […]

Jo Berry daughter of a British politician who was killed in the 1984 IRA attack

The young people of the post-war generation in the Drenica region

Nexhmije Selca closes her eyes wistfully and tries to find the words to say that most of the history of opera and ballet in Kosovo is just a sound. The first three decades of the entire repertoire of the Kosovar opera and ballet troupe have been burnt, and Selca, one of the first three ballerinas in Kosovo, says that all […]

Sound researchers and composers say that for the process of memorialization, sounds can serve as allies for the societies whose past has been distorted or denied. For the people and places whose past has often been denied, sounds are considered a rich resource for documentation and remembrance. The concept of sound as a means of documenting the dealing with the […]

Music, emotions, and joy in Kosovo’s wartime The concepts of war and joy may seem almost incompatible. On one hand, there are moments of violence, displacement, and trauma, while on the other, there exist joy and positive emotions. However, an individual’s experiences during wartime can be multifaceted, and not every emotion felt during war needs to be negative. In recent […]