Call for papers: Living in the aftermaths

Trauma, politics and survival in Yugoslavia and successor states, 1945 - present

The conference aims to explore how war-related psychological distress was experienced, narrated, debated and reframed in Yugoslavia in the second half of the twentieth century.

It asks how the theme of wounded psyche and wartime suffering was addressed and acknowledged in political, psychiatric and broader cultural discourses of socialist Yugoslavia, and how Yugoslav citizens’ psychological experiences of extreme violence, genocide and displacement shaped the processes of postwar reconstruction and socialist state-building in the absence of an explicit language of trauma. Equally importantly, the conference asks how the broader political context of socialist revolution and war victory shaped these discourses and understandings of traumatic events.

The conference will also bring these questions to the wars of Yugoslav succession in the 1990s, examining how these later traumatic experiences and their psychological and political framing interacted with collective and individual memories of WWII. The societal and ethical dimension of psychological trauma will be addressed from different disciplinary angles and in different contexts. Finally, the recent interplay between notions of war suffering and victimhood on the one hand, and responsibility for large scale destruction, displacement and war crimes on the other, will also be discussed.