Overview

The 1992–95 war in Bosnia-Herzegovina following the dissolution of socialist Yugoslavia became notorious for “ethnic cleansing” and mass rapes targeting the Bosniac (Bosnian Muslim) population. Postwar social and political processes have continued to be dominated by competing nationalisms representing Bosniacs, Serbs, and Croats, as well as those supporting a multiethnic Bosnian state, in which narratives of victimhood take centre stage, often in gendered form. Elissa Helms shows that in the aftermath of the war, initiatives by and for Bosnian women perpetuated and complicated dominant images of women as victims and peacemakers in a conflict and political system led by men. In a sober corrective to such accounts, she offers a critical look at the politics of women’s activism and gendered nationalism in a postwar and postsocialist society. Drawing on ethnographic research spanning fifteen years, Innocence and Victimhood demonstrates how women’s activists and NGOs responded to, challenged, and often reinforced essentialist images in affirmative ways, utilising the moral purity associated with the position of victimhood to bolster social claims, shape political visions, pursue foreign funding, and wage campaigns for postwar justice. Deeply sensitive to the suffering at the heart of Bosnian women’s (and men’s) wartime experiences, this book also reveals the limitations to strategies that emphasise innocence and victimhood.

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9780299295547

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Reviews

This is a brave and important book of significance both for our understanding of postwar Bosnia-Herzegovina and for what it says about the unintended consequences of initiatives aimed at improving the lot of women and society as a whole in a post-conflict environment. --Wendy Bracewell, University College London

Nuanced, comprehensive, analytical, theoretical, challenging, and carefully constructed--this book takes on nationalism, feminism, gender, ethnicity, and faith as the author addresses the history of the recent Bosnia-Herzegovina war and its varied impacts on a range of social actors. -- Patrice LeClerc, H-Nationalism

Author Information

Elissa Helms is associate professor of gender studies at Central European University in Hungary. She is a coeditor, with Xavier Bougarel and Ger Duijzings, of The New Bosnian Mosaic: Identities, Memories and Moral Claims in a Post-War Society.

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