Just as norm-complying states adapt their practices to expected behaviors, post-conflict states are forced to adapt their practices and rhetoric to better resist pressures to comply with particular norms. In the same fashion norm entrepreneurs and non-governmental organizations frame issues to help gain traction as norms, norm-violating states attempt to frame their own actions as being consistent with prevailing norms, even when they are not. Building on this insight, this paper analyzes mechanisms through which the ruling elite in present day Serbia strategically constructed commemorative arenas for the purpose of dealing with the opposing demands and norms made both on the international as well as the national level.

I suggest that the process of the construction of collective memory in Serbia after the wars of the 1990s has proved to be an exemplary case of how a post-conflict nation-state may mediate its contested past in order to bridge the gap between domestic demands and those of the international community. Within this process Serbia has utilized its transition towards Europeanization to appropriate, internalize, subvert, evade or transform categories of memory. Serbia’s situation, being cast in the role of the major villain in the wars of the 1990s, initially limited the options available to it. Subsequently the power imbalance between Serbia and the EU resulted in the Serbian political elite’s agenda of promoting a collective memory independent of international pressure. Within this enormous gap between the local demands to be recognized as the righteous party in the conflict and the international demands to confront Serbia’s problematic past, the ruling political elites in post-Milošević Serbia created mechanisms to best-manage its contested past.

Following three very different state-sponsored memory projects such as 1) the newly created national calendar; 2) state-sponsored veteran organizations’ projects and 3) the implementation of the Holocaust memory in school curricula, I analyze the ways norms of the Human Rights Regime influence the construction of memory politics in current Serbia. I suggest all three mechanisms are strategies of closing political spaces which thus prevent public debate, representation, negotiation and compromise. Additionally, these strategies of silencing were intended to reduce the tension between the contradicting demands at the international and the domestic levels.

Memory is an organizing phenomenon for both individuals and societies. Memory allows us to organize our past, foster an identity and ensure our belonging to a group (Connerton 1989; Halbwachs 1950). Accordingly, memory plays a central role in shaping of contemporary identities: it helps us re-construct our identity in relation to our past and other people’s past. Working from these ideas, my paper examines how the identity of the second generation born after the war is being shaped by their parents’ war experience. The paper seeks to answer the following questions: How is the war past of the parents understood and used by their children in shaping the present? What are the images of the war as re-constructed by those born in its aftermath?

The paper draws on data collected during my fieldwork in Bosnia and Herzegovina in 2012 in 30 families of war survivors of different ethno-religious background. It addresses its research questions through the prism of cultural anthropology and psychoanalysis using the qualitative methods of the semi-structured interview, children’s drawings and participant observation. The paper argues that the process of memory transmission does not take place in the presence of a consistent war narrative, but rather through the symbolic and often non-verbal platforms of the body, landscape, war jokes, commemoration, and art objects. There are four major reasons for the war generation’s inability to produce a comprehensive war narrative in first person: their perception of the war as a sudden, total and surreal event; the ambiguity of their experience of war, which originates in the shifts between the wartime positions of a victim, perpetrator and witness; survivors’ experience of the uncanny which challenges their capacity to comprehend extreme violence; and the wider context of the profanization of the war issue in politicized discussions on trauma and the clear-cut discourse on victimhood in present-day Bosnia which leaves out the politically incorrect narratives. Thus, parents’ autobiographical account of the war becomes displaced from the domain of language to the one of the act. Children struggle to imagine and understand the turbulent past of their parents in order to acquire identity and legitimacy for their claims (Bos 2003). Thus, they re-construct the world of the war as a scheme with no people, attack to the family home, survival at the expense of integrity, a dirty job assigned to heroes, and pure horror.