The course will address the wide range of issues concerning the ways in which the post-conflict societies of Southeast Europe have struggled to recover after the devastating armed conflicts of the 1990s. Rather than focusing on the region’s principal political and economic transitions and conditions, this course will zoom in on the question of how people negotiate their pasts, presents, and futures in the aftermath of armed conflict. In doing so, students will employ a multidisciplinary tool-kit composed of political science, sociology, and international relations, as well as the study of conflict, anthropology, and culture. More concretely, this course will explore how people in post-conflict societies deal with issues of identity, the ways in which they remember and forget the past, and how the past affects their present lives, responses to reconciliation efforts, transitional justice mechanisms, and cultural transformations experienced. Importantly, while never losing sight of the concrete, externally-imposed policies introduced and implemented by the international community in the decades after the armed conflicts, this course will aim to primarily employ a bottom-up approach, giving primacy to individual over collective experiences, opinions, and evaluations. In this way, by comparing individual to collective, internal to external, and bottom-up to top-down, the class will illuminate the roles of different actors, structures, and processes in post-conflict reconstruction; it will inspire debates on the reach of the international and state policymaking within this particular region, and it will encourage students to better their own understanding of contemporary Southeast Europe societies. Upon completing this course, students will become familiar with Southeast Europe’s cultures and societies and gain better understanding of how the 1990’s armed conflicts affected people’s everyday lives. Students will learn how war shaped and re-shaped people’s identities, how people remember and narrate the past, how they deal with their traumas and losses, and how to challenge the dominant cultural discourses. Building upon the lessons of the semester-long immersion in the Southeast European political narratives, students will be able to theorize about post-conflict cultural reconstruction and apply their conclusions to other post-conflict regions in the world. (Lecturer: Maja Maksimovic)
