Bosnian Women Survivors of War and Ecologies of Peace

My presentation will draw upon my recent book, Unforgetting: Contemporary Voices from Bosnia and Herzegovina and the Politics of Representation (forthcoming, Routledge 2025). Based on interviews and conversations with women survivors of war rape, young women who belong to the group Children Born of War, and a woman who took up arms during the conflict and fought on the frontlines, I challenge one-dimensional representations of the Yugoslav war and subsequent peacebuilding processes. Relying on feminist epistemology which foregrounds individual ways of knowing, I focus on the complex role that women survivors have played in transforming current conceptions of peace and justice within Bosnian society over the 30 years since the end of the war.

Based on careful reading of their first-person accounts, I develop the concept of peace ecologies. I posit that traumatic experiences are multifaceted, encompassing individual, social and physical ecologies or “ecosystems” that constitute people’s habitats and life histories. The continuities between personal and public, individual and collective are evident in survivor accounts of violence inflicted against them as something affecting not only themselves, but also their families, communities, and all those who may have witnessed the violence over the long term, thus acquiring a social or discursive dimension. Focusing attention on individual women survivors and their stories shows the diverse ways in which their perspectives actively participate in the weaving of communicative and cultural memory within the larger context of justice and peacebuilding. Such an approach entails that we think of peacebuilding in terms of individual, community- based, and state-level capacities to develop ecologies of peace, challenging totalizing accounts of women’s victimization, and revealing understudied aspects of women’s political agency across different personal and social spheres.