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Letting Nature Swallow the Past: Politics, Memory, and Abandoned Monuments in Postwar Bosnia and Herzegovina

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 April 2019

Beth K. Dougherty Open the ORCID record for Beth K. Dougherty [Opens in a new window]
Beth K. Dougherty*
Affiliation:
Beloit College, Beloit, Wisconsin, USA
*
*Corresponding author. Email: [email protected]
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Abstract

During the 1992–1995 war in Bosnia and Herzegovina, the built physical landscape and places of cultural heritage were deliberately targeted and destroyed as part of the strategy of ethnic cleansing. The 1995 Dayton Peace Agreement recognized the potential for cultural heritage to contribute to postwar reconciliation and rebuilding; Annex 8 established a commission to preserve national monuments. This paper examines the politics of cultural heritage in post-Dayton Bosnia and the ways in which it has been (ab)used to propagate a narrow, exclusivist identity. It focuses on the struggles to control the Commission to Preserve National Monuments as well as the fates of two monuments in particular—Vraca Memorial Park and the Partisans’ Memorial Cemetery—whose abandonment signifies the wider struggles over memory and identity in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Keywords

Bosnia and Herzegovinamemorycultural heritagenational identity
Type
Article
Information
Nationalities Papers , Volume 47 , Issue 2 , March 2019 , pp. 248 - 263
Copyright
© Association for the Study of Nationalities 2019 

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