War

Post-war compensation and its impact on gender and citizenship

Oliwia Berdak
War veterans

The weakness of all three states in the face of global economic competition has increasingly put pressure even on the revered model of citizen-soldier. In times of indebtedness and austerity, there is a greater competition for state resources and contestations of the current schemes of redistribution. The pressure to contribute economically is very much present, and the perfect citizen is no longer the soldier-citizen but the working and consuming citizen. The implications of this statement go much beyond the former Yugoslavia. In the age of corporate soldiers and wars fought by drones, there is a risk that states stop caring about the quality of their ‘stock’, adding yet another reason to shed state responsibility for their populations.

This is an extended summary of a longer paper that was originally published in the CITSEE Working Papers Series and is available for download here.

Updated on: 9 September 2013

You're in the Army, Now...

Oliwia Berdak
Partisan heroes

For a long time, military conscription was how an exclusively male citizen’s duty was expressed, both in Yugoslavia and its successor states. This duty became extremely complicated in the 1990s in the context of the changing state borders, and thus the changing legal claims to men's bodies residing within them. Conflicting narratives about the war — sometimes portrayed as an external aggression, sometimes as a legitimate defence, and sometimes as a civil war — further complicated this matter.

2011 was the year when the last of the former Yugoslav states, Serbia, abolished military conscription.

Updated on: 29 October 2012

Srebrenica’s citizens: home and abroad

Lara J. Nettelfield
Sarah Wagner
Digging new graves in Srebrenica

We often think of citizenship in terms of passports and polling stations, but the rights and responsibilities inherent in belonging to a nation-state often take on more mundane, at times unexpected, forms. This is especially true in post-conflict nations, where citizens shoulder much of the burden of rebuilding society in the context of their everyday lives. The aftermath of the Srebrenica genocide provides a compelling example of this work. Citizens, both at home and abroad, have struggled to reconstitute their families, homes, and communities.

We often think of citizenship in terms of passports and polling stations, but the rights and responsibilities inherent in belonging to a nation-state often take on more mundane, at times unexpected, forms. This is especially true in post-conflict nations, where citizens shoulder much of the burden of rebuilding society in the context of their everyday lives.

Updated on: 25 July 2011

Reporting the war, an interview with Allan Little

A different vision in 1984 by Jarrett Blaustein

So, what was interesting to me as a journalist was the conflict between prevailing narratives: the narrative of ‘all sides are equally guilty’, which believes that these people have been living like this in the Balkans for centuries, versus what I believed was the case, which was that this is a battle between two different kinds of political aspirations, one which is similar to our own in Western Europe, and the other one, which is much darker in the European tradition.

Twenty years after the Yugoslav war, Allan Little talks about the challenges of reporting the conflict, and the duties of the war correspondent.

Interview conducted by Jo Shaw and Igor Štiks

Updated on: 27 June 2011

Defining the nation: constructing citizenship in the new Croatia

Viktor Koska
Old Zagreb

The Croatian citizenship legislation reveals the ongoing process of Croatian invention of, in the words of Rogers Brubaker, ‘the tradition of nationhood’ which is based on the idea that the Croatian state is a product of the “centennial” aspirations of the ethnic Croat community to have its own national state.

This is an extended summary of a longer paper that was originally published in the CITSEE Working Paper Series and is available for download here.

Updated on: 29 March 2011
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