Concordian’s book recognized with fourth major award

Excerpt, Violence as a Generative Force: Identity, Nationalism, and Memory in a Balkan Community by Max Bergholz

On a September afternoon in 2006, while I was sifting through uncatalogued documents in the Archive of Bosnia-Herzegovina in Sarajevo, a handful of arresting words on a bundle of tattered blue folders stopped me in my tracks: “Examination of sites of mass executions in the Socialist Republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina.” The documents inside revealed that in 1983 the then communist authorities ordered a confidential, republic-wide investigation. Its objective was to gather information about all sites where the mass executions of civilians had occurred during the People’s Liberation War, which referred to the years 1941–1945. Several questions framed the investigation: How many civilians were killed in each local community, and where? What were their “nationalities” or “ethnicities”? And had these sites been marked with monuments? Local war veterans affiliated with the communist authorities surveyed each community during the next few years, and then sent the findings to their central organization in Sarajevo for analysis.

Completed in 1985–1986 (but not released publicly), the investigation’s final reports repeatedly mentioned the wartime experience of a largely unknown community: Kulen Vakuf, a small town in a rural region of north-west Bosnia that straddles the Una River, just a few kilometers from the present-day border with Croatia. There, in September 1941, the report said that as many as 2,000 people—men, women, and children “of the Muslim population”—were killed. Who exactly was guilty for their deaths was discussed in a few complicated, unclear sentences. The “Partisans,” who fought under communist leadership during the war, were declared not to have been responsible. Neither was any foreign army, such as the German and Italian forces, which invaded the Kingdom of Yugoslavia in April 1941 and dismembered the country. Nor was any role mentioned of “Serb” or “Croat” nationalist forces (i.e., “Chetniks” or “Ustašas”), which historians generally identify as among the main perpetrators of violence against civilians in this part of Europe during 1941–1945. Instead, the report named an amorphous group that has not figured prominently—or even at all—in most wartime histories as perpetrators: the “insurgents” or ustanici, who appeared to have been neighbors of those whom they killed. Yet strangely, in the decades after 1945 the communist authorities did not designate the approximately 2,000 victims in Kulen Vakuf as “Victims of Fascist Terror,” the category created for official civilian war victims. Thus, they were not counted among the region’s wartime dead, and no monument had been built for them. The report said that lack of clarity about what happened in Kulen Vakuf remained an ongoing “political problem.” Solving it—and finally breaking the public silence about the existence of these victims—would require clear and precise answers about the violence of 1941.

Your title, Violence as a Generative Force, gets at your discovery of the myriad ways these events changed identities, relationships, and power structures. Why is it important to look at the aftermath beyond just the incredible trauma?

MB: Studying the aftermath of extreme intercommunal violence is crucial because the societies that emerge after so much intimate killing are fundamentally different. These differences have been underappreciated due to an unhelpful division of labour among historians and other scholars. On one hand, there are those who study violence in its myriad forms, and their work tends to conclude when the violence stops. On the other hand, there are those who study the memory of violence, and post-conflict reconstruction, and their work tends to begin after the violence stops. But the latter cannot be understood without paying close attention to the former, and especially how the experience of violence influences patterns of human belief and action long after the killing stops.

An approach I take in my book is what sociologists would call ‘eventful analysis,’ whereby we examine local conflicts to discern how unexpected events might radically and suddenly transform social relationships. By noting how local incidents can trigger collective ethnic categorization based in traumatic memories and experiences of violence, we can better understand how nationhood can rapidly become a primary lens through which people make sense of unfolding reality. Whether those who seek to fuel instances of sudden nationhood are successful depends on a host of factors like support from relatives and neighbours and the threat of sanctions from the authorities. What remains striking is the degree to which memories of local intercommunal violence, when triggered during moments of conflict, can generate sudden nationhood for decades. These concrete micro-dynamics of how people in local communities actually practice nationalism have historically been understudied and thus underappreciated in the voluminous literature on nationalism.

Do you think this book will inspire more people to look at this region in a different way, to take your approach and apply it to other regions?

MB: I hope that my book can both inspire younger scholars in the region, as well as those working elsewhere in the world, to take a different approach to the research and writing of this region’s history, especially its violent past. It is a part of Europe that, at best, would be considered by most to be of little to no importance to the study of European history. Yet my book was able to win several awards considered to be among the most prestigious in North America. This suggests that micro-level studies of any region, which seek to use very small units to study big questions in innovative and empirically rich ways, can be of use to large numbers of scholars—and not just to ‘area specialists,’ such as those who study the Balkans. The study of an incredibly complex phenomena like violence demands a multidisciplinary approach.

Much of the positive feedback that I have heard has come from scholars who do not work on the Balkans, but rather who study the history of violence in places such as Africa, the United States, and the Middle East. Uğur Ümit Üngor of Utrecht University in the Netherlands, who is a historian of violence in Turkey and the wider Middle East, found that my approach and conclusions could be applied to the Syrian catastrophe in examining how multi-ethnic and multi-religious communities can turn against each other. In a book roundtable published in the journal Canadian Slavonic Papers, he wrote that my book had “done a major favour to the study of mass violence in other societies.”

What surprising discoveries did you make during the ten year process of preparing this book?

MB: At the most general level, what I continuously discovered was the importance of being receptive to counter-intuitive findings, and to avoid conflating results with causes of historical phenomena. For a long time now, much of the literature on nationalism and violence has suggested that violence erupts in societies that are deeply and antagonistically divided along ethnic lines and historical memories. Against this perception, my micro-level research confronted me with the idea that identity, nationalism, and memory are often not what caused violence to wreck the lives of so many; instead, far fewer people chose to perpetrate violence, and in so doing they created and recreated highly antagonistic forms of identity, nationalism, and memory.

What are you working on at the moment?

MB: I am currently finalizing the translation of the book for the Bosnian edition, which should be out by mid summer 2018. While a handful of individuals in the region have read the English version, its translation and publication by the major Bosnian publisher Buybook will now bring my telling of this history into the hands of readers not only in Bosnia-Herzegovna, but also in Croatia and Serbia.

This first book left me with a number of questions, some of which I want to explore in future research projects. Why does mass killing happen in some communities, but not in others, despite their similar histories and geographical proximity? To answer this question, I am now researching and writing a history of four local communities in the Independent State of Croatia during 1941. They all had mixed ethnic structures and little history of inter-ethnic violence prior to that year. But their histories diverged sharply during the summer of 1941: two experienced enormous levels of violence, while the others—located close by—remained peaceful. These communities provide excellent sites through which to account for the broader puzzle of subnational variation in inter-ethnic violence.

Learn more about Max Bergholz.