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 […]

Reflexion faite (‘reflecting on the past’) is an easy discursive formula for a rather complex problem. But all this reduced presentation at first glance, hides the solution of this conceptual knot. Reflecting on the past opens the door to the two central concepts of this cycle of articles: memory and history. We will not read these concepts in their vernacular […]

Is language a thread that binds people or a stumbling stone? When it comes to the role of language, this is a dilemma faced by the post-conflict Bosnian society. Language is frequently a contentious matter, subject to court proceedings and reason for citizens’ protests. The fact that SNSD members voted against the conclusion of SDP on the introduction of constitutional […]

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 […]

It has been thirty years since the closing of the Heliodrom detention camp in Mostar, and I – which is seldomly the case – simply don’t know what to coherently, let alone optimistically, write on the occasion of this anniversary, which in a better world would represent the starting point of a new life and the overcoming of trauma. A […]

For the past two years and two months activists have been fighting to name a street in Banja Luka, a town known as the “city of women,” after an exceptional woman – Vahida Maglajlić. This fight has lasted longer than the wartime journey of this partisan, adorned with the Order of the People’s Hero of Yugoslavia. And it seems it […]

It has now been thirty years since February 5th was marked on Sarajevo’s memory map simply and undeniably as – Markale. Situated in the city center, the green market got its name from the nearby marketplace built during the Austro-Hungarian period (Markt halle). On February 5, 1994, it became the site of an unprecedented massacre. That day 68 residents of […]

“All this happening after the war is what is the hardest thing for me. Why do we, ordinary people who are not in politics, hate each other (Not everyone!) so much? Why are they not being convinced that we should hate those who made us hate each other, to kill each other? (…) They [the politicians] agreed well on how […]

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