CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2025
| Author | Bagrameli, Adi-Ibrahim |
|---|---|
| Title | The Problem of Collective Memory in Bosnia and Herzegovina: How Fractured and Competing Narratives Contribute to Ethnic Tensions |
| Summary | The problem of collective memory in Bosnia and Herzegovina is that the memory narratives of the constituent ethnic groups, based primarily on the remembrance of the Bosnian War of 1992-1995, appear as opposing and mutually exclusive of one another. In a country that depends on good relations between the three main ethnicities, tensions caused by contested memory further exacerbate already fraught interethnic relations. This thesis approaches the problem form a bottom-up, societal level perspective, by reviewing public and interethnic discourse on the topic of the Srebrenica Genocide, perhaps the most infamous event of the war. Specifically, a social media analysis of a select number of posts and the comments they generate is conducted as a way to analyze individual opinions of a large number of people of different ethnic backgrounds. The main aim of the thesis is to gain a better understanding of the impact of collective memory on continued ethnic tensions in Bosnia. The results of the analysis indicate that narratives propagated by elite level memory politics seem to be pervasive in wider public opinion and that interethnic discourse when it comes to contested memory appears to be largely antagonistic. However, the parameters of the research remain somewhat constricting, in that they deal primarily with the case study of Srebrenica and through it the interaction of two of the three different collective memory narratives in Bosnia. This means that avenues for further research through alternate parameters remain, especially in using a social media analysis, but it is debatable how differing the results might be in regard to the overarching issue of collective memory in Bosnia and Herzegovina. |
| Supervisor | Fetzer Thomas |
| Department | International Relations MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2025/bagrameli_adi.pdf |
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