Paper short abstract:

The paper follows a 2019 project “Truth and Reconciliation in Serbia,” a series of workshops for young journalists and activists. This project represents a shift in memory activism in Serbia as it balances between narratives on crimes and victims.

Paper long abstract:

In 2011, I participated in a seminar about human rights organized by a Serbian liberal NGO, Youth Initiative for Human Rights (YIHR). One of the topics was war crimes committed by the Serbian army during the 1990s wars in former Yugoslavia. The seminar allocated little space for Serbian victims and insisted on narratives of Serbs as the foremost perpetrators in the conflicts. Knowing the background of the YIHR, insisting on Serbian war crimes was not a big surprise. During the wars of the 1990s in former Yugoslavia, NGOs dealing with peacebuilding and reconciliation mushroomed across the region. Memory activism became an essential aspect of Serbian civil society, where war-related issues represented social taboo. While the Serbian state’s official memory politics worked towards silencing the war crimes, the NGOs aimed to face society with past wrongdoings.

A decade after my first contact with the organization, the focus of the memory narratives was rebalanced from exclusively Serbian crimes to an equal talk about Serbian victims. In this paper, I analyze a 2019 project by YIHR, “Truth and Reconciliation in Serbia,” a series of workshops for young journalists and activists. The paper aims to understand how the switch of memory discourses towards more space for Serbian victims occurred. Based on participant observation and interviews with the organizers and activists, the paper shows how the new generations attempt to relax the polarized discourse about crimes and victims.