CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2025
| Author | Nikolovska, Astrea |
|---|---|
| Title | Towards an Anthropology of Defeat: Serbia Trapped in the Binary Narratives of Perpetrators and Victims |
| Summary | This thesis explores the formation, development, and officialization of a Serbian memory regime (Bernhard and Kubik 2014) centered on resistance to moral obligations to recognize war crimes and deal with the troubled past, typically associated with transitional justice. It investigates how a society that perpetrated numerous war crimes reconfigures its historical narratives and creates memory politics around its victims, thereby challenging the prevailing discourse shaped by transitional justice mechanisms. The thesis shows how the victims on the side of the perpetrator as “impure victims” become alternative witnesses of the troubled past that aim to counterbalance the prevailing image of Serbia as a perpetrator in the Yugoslav wars. As the transitional justice often downplays the significance of “impure victims,” assigning lesser value to their voice within its moral economy of victimhood, the thesis analyses how, within the Serbian memory landscape, these marginalized victims adopt unconventional forms to mark their presence. Throughout the chapters, the thesis examines how, instead of being recognized as witnesses in traditional legal proceedings, these victims are voiced through different disembodied forms, from ephemeral monuments to wax figures and diverse artistic expressions. These alternative embodiments testify to an increasingly counter-liberal form of memory that challenges both the rigid dichotomy between victim and perpetrator and the particular liberal archetype of the embodied victim serving as the ideal witness in the regime of transitional justice. The thesis shows how contemporary Serbian memory politics strategically utilize the concept of victimhood, not only to legitimize Serbia’s role domestically, but also as a response to the broader liberal order. The analysis presented in this thesis shows how transitional justice, driven by the notion of “coming to terms with the past,” gives rise to a memory regime that diverges from the liberal conception of reconciliation. Rather than facilitating a presupposed reckoning with historical injustices, the thesis shows how transitional justice might lead to the neglect and a reevaluation of war crimes, resulting in silencing and denial. By showing how Serbia formed a counter-liberal memory regime, the thesis highlights one broader process. In contrast to the transitional justice mechanisms, this thesis implicitily reveals how the traditional concept of the state—centered on governing structures and centralized power—resists globalization, seeking instead to assert more conventional forms of sovereignty and control. |
| Supervisor | Naumescu, Vlad; Geva, Dorit |
| Department | Sociology PhD |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2025/pejovic_astrea.pdf |
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