Forgetting and remembering are two of the main concerns of being-in-the-world. At least this is what Milan Kundera states in his novel “The Book of Laughter and Forgetting“. In the same way, writer Primo Levi in ​​the existential-phenomenological expression of Auschwitz tells us that ‘memory is a marvelous but fallacious instrument‘, and this is as a result of the non-singularity […]

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 […]

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 […]