Tamara Banjeglav | Peace Process in Collective Memory of the 1990s War in Croatia

We invite you to a series of public lectures organised as part of the doctoral module Cultural History by the Postgraduate School ZRC SAZU and the Institute of Culture and Memory Studies ZRC SAZU. The second lecture in the series will feature a lecture by Tamara Banjeglav: Peace Process in Collective Memory of the 1990s War in Croatia.

The lecture examines how peaceful reintegration of Croatia’s Danube region is today publicly remembered and what role it plays in collective memory of the 1991–1995 war in Croatia. In the lecture, I attempt to move the attention from research on the memory of violent events during conflict and to focus on the memory of a peaceful process in the aftermath of violence. 

The 1990s war in Croatia ended with military operations, but the final integration of the occupied territory into Croatia’s constitutional and legal framework was achieved with a peace process and by signing a peace agreement. However, I argue that, in post-war Croatia, public remembrance of the war includes only violent episodes from the war and marginalises public memory of peace. This has created an impression that alternatives to violence were and are not possible, although a non-violent, peaceful solution proved exactly the opposite by playing a crucial role in ending the conflict. I am to expose the mechanisms behind the marginalization of both the peace agreement and the peace-building process in different memory politics and practices and to show how this cultural continuity of seeing conflicts as necessarily and inevitably violent leads to normalisation of violence in public space and discourse. 

Tamara Banjeglav is a research associate at the Institute of Culture and Memory Studies at the Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts. She holds the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions ERA fellowship, in the framework of which she is conducting research on the project “Time is (not) on my side: Remembering victims of slow violence in a post-conflict and post-disaster setting”. She has received her PhD degree from the University of Graz, Austria. Her research interests fall within the fields of memory studies, peace and conflict studies, nationalism studies, and transitional justice, particularly in the post-Yugoslav space.