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4 - ‘If We Do Not Talk About These Issues Now …’

Fragmented Truths and the Negotiation of Biographical Narratives

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 July 2025

Maja Davidović
Affiliation:
Cardiff University
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Summary

Chapter 4 is the first of the three chapters that draw on interviews, observations, and life stories from Bosnia and Herzegovina to narrate a story about what ‘Never Again’ means for the people in this country and formulate a claim about transitional justice’s complicity in the construction of conflict recurrence anxieties. This chapter proposes that the lack of state-sponsored, state-wide truth recovery and a national dialogue about the characteristics, dynamics, and consequences of the war creates anxieties about potential conflict repetition. It then demonstrates how the global project of transitional justice is complicit in creating and sustaining these anxieties. In particular, the chapter shows how the normative hierarchy of transitional justice and the positioning of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia as a key source of the historical status quo helped enhance the building of multiple, competing, and often parallel biographical narratives about the war that prolong anxieties about potential conflict recurrence.

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Chapter
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Governing the Past
‘Never Again' and the Transitional Justice Project
, pp. 95 - 123
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2025

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