engleski

The Muralization of War Memories: Bilateral Relations and Memory Politics in the Yugoslav Successor States

While monuments, street names, memorial museums, and commemorative practices remain at the center of struggles over contested histories in the former Yugoslavia, graffiti, murals and other forms of street art are increasingly serving as new frontlines for these battles over the past. Collective remembrance can facilitate “dealing with the past”, but also allows mnemonic actors to perpetuate ethno-nationalist discourses and hinder reconciliation in post-conflict societies. Once considered subversive and exclusively in the realm of subculture, murals are now reproducing official state war narratives across the region. This research examines the impact this new form of memorialization has on post-Yugoslav societies thirty years after the conflict ended, specifically on bilateral relations between BosniaHerzegovina, Croatia, and Serbia. Drawing on almost two decades of fieldwork on ‘memoryscapes’ of war, this project seeks to understand how murals fit into the larger mosaic of mnemonic production: who is financing them, who is creating them, what is the legal framework for graffiti in public space, and what kind of typologies emerge when analyzing them across the region. While football Ultras (hooligans) have always been active in graffiti actions to demarcate territory and challenge rivals, in recent years this has shifted beyond tagging, vandalism, and radical right hate speech into aesthetically impressive murals that at times also function as semi-official sites of memory, indicating a troubling resurgence of nationalist politics intertwined with the aggressive street culture of disenchanted youth in the Yugoslav successor states. Authorities in the Yugoslav successor states have either turned a blind eye to provocative murals that celebrate war criminals or international acts of aggression, or have actively encouraged them, indicating a dangerous new frontline in the abuse of memory politics in the field of international relations.

cultural memory ; murals ; former Yugoslavia ; international relations

nije evidentirano