Paper long abstract:

The dissolution of Yugoslavia, accompanied by the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina between 1992 and 1995 meant enormous personal and collective losses for most, if not all Bosnians. In Western countries where large part of the Bosnian refugee population is living, there is a tendency to individualize and psychologize refugees' experiences, to understand them as individual 'trauma' cut off from the social and political context of their flight. In this paper, based on multi-sited fieldwork between Finland and Bosnia-Herzegovina, I will present a case study, a Bosnian man attending psycho -therapy in Finland, and his attempts to speak about his grievances for larger audiences, beyond the privacy of therapy sessions. I suggest that addressing meaningfully his current predicament calls for addressing layers of history, as well as questions of morality and accountability. This singular case will have implications for considering refugees' predicament in more general sense.