It has been 27 years since the end of the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina, and the history of the conflict, its consequences, and long-term implications for the politics and lives of its citizens has remained a source of interest for scholars across the globe and across disciplines. This scholarship has included works by historians and political scientists seeking to explain the war’s origins with a view to Bosnia’s traditional multi-ethnic character and background. The country has been used as a case study in state- and peace-building, as well as to study the implications of ongoing transitional justice processes. Other scholars within the fields of human rights and genocide studies have focused on documenting the war crimes committed against the people of Bosnia and Herzegovina during the conflict and the mass-scale displacement of people, mostly Bosnian Muslims, from their homes and homelands. International law scholars have carried this work further, tracing the development of courts created in response to war crimes in Bosnia and their effectiveness in generating justice for victims. Diaspora communities have formed in North America (especially in St. Louis), Europe, and Australia because of war and displacement, and have themselves become a considerable topic of study spanning the disciplines of anthropology, migration studies, political science, memory studies, conflict and security studies, psychology, and geography. This volume seeks to illuminate how Bosnian migrant and diaspora scholars are contributing to the development of Bosnian Studies. The authors included in this volume are either writing from their (new) home bases in Australia, Austria, Canada, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United States, among others, or they have returned to Bosnia after a period of migration. Their chapters have distinct entry points of inquiry, demonstrating how scholars have integrated Bosnia as a theme across the range of disciplines in which they are situated. The selections included in the volume range from literary analysis to personal memoirs of the conflict, from studies of heritage and identity to political science analysis of diaspora voting, to genocide studies and questions of (or lack of) ethics in the growing field of Bosnian Studies.

As a Slavic-speaking religious and ethnic “Other” living just a stone’s throw from the symbolic heart of the continent, the Muslims of Bosnia and Herzegovina have long occupied a liminal space in the European imagination. To a significant degree, the wider representations and perceptions of this population can be traced to the reports of Central European—and especially Habsburg—diplomats, scholars, journalists, tourists, and other observers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This volume assembles contributions from historians, anthropologists, political scientists, and literary scholars to examine the political, social, and discursive dimensions of Bosnian Muslims’ encounters with the West since the nineteenth century.

In April of 1992, war began in Bosnia. Sarajevo, site of the 1984 Winter Olympics, and, we were told, one of the most beautiful cities in the world, became a city under siege. For all of the people of Bosnia, life shifted in unimaginable ways in a matter of hours, days, or weeks. An immediate exodus began from Bosnia, and people who had never anticipated leaving their country became refugees, dependent upon a world system of resettlement for displaced persons. This book relates the experiences of a hundred Bosnian families who came to Utica, a town in upstate New York. Bosnians in Utica came here as refugees - ginning in 1993, having ?ed from the wars of succession in the former Yugoslavia. Our study evolved over several years as a result of our interests in the war in Bosnia and the massive ?ow of refugees that it precipitated. We began work on the project in the late 1990s as we set out to learn about the war and to explore refugee experiences of displacement, transit, and resettlement. Our intent is to portray the experience of Bosnian refugees in one American city and to capture, in their words, in as much detail as possible their adjustment to a new community and a new culture.

Bosnian Refugees in Chicago: Gender, Performance, and Post-War Economies studies refugee migration through the experiences of survivors of the 1990s wars in former Yugoslavia as they rebuild home, family, and social lives in the wake of their displacement. Ana Croegaert explores post-1970s Yugoslav-era socialism, American neoliberal capitalism, and anti-Muslim geopolitics to examine women’s varied perspectives on their postwar lives in the United States. Based on more than a decade of fieldwork, Croegaert takes readers into staged performances, coffee rituals, protests, memorials, homes, and non-governmental organizations to shine a light on the pressures women contend with in their efforts to make a living and to narrate their wartime injuries. Ultimately, Croegaert argues that refugee women insist on understanding their wartime losses as simultaneously social and material, a form of personhood she labels “injured life.” At a time of mass displacement and heated political debates concerning refugees, Croegaert provides an engaging portrait of a lively and diverse group of women whose opinions on citizenship and belonging are needed now more than ever.

This book provides a conceptual framework for understanding sexual violence in war, and its impact focussing in particular on the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina. It situates Bosnian war-rape in relation to subsequent conflicts; outlines how sexual violence in war can be studied from a political psychological perspective; and examines the effect of war- rape on victims and communities in the aftermath of armed conflict.

The Bosnian Diaspora: Integration in Transnational Communities provides an extensive exploration of a major post-conflict European Diaspora, presenting the latest trans-national comparative studies drawn from the US, Australia and countries across Europe, to explore post-crisis interactions among Bosnians and the impact of post-conflict related migration. Examining the common features of the Diaspora this volume addresses the influence of global anti-Muslim rhetoric on the Bosnian Diaspora's self-identification and refugees' relationships to their home country.

For displaced persons, memory and identity is performed, (re)constructed and (re)negotiated daily. Forced displacement radically reshapes identity, with results ranging from successful hybridization to feelings of permanent misplacement. This compelling and intimate description of places of pain and (be)longing that were lost during the 1992–95 war in Bosnia and Herzegovina, as well as of survivors’ places of resettlement in Australia, Europe and North America, serves as a powerful illustration of the complex interplay between place, memory and identity. It is even more the case when those places have been vandalized, divided up, brutalized and scarred. However, as the author shows, these places of humiliation and suffering are also places of desire, with displaced survivors emulating their former homes in the far corners of the globe where they have resettled.