Paper short abstract:

I investigate ethnographically how Serbian veterans of the post-Yugoslav wars framed their predicaments through narratives about multiple lacks and losses, as well as how they used them as a form of critique of the state policy of neglect and tools in their own political subjectivation.

Paper long abstract:

In this paper I investigate ethnographically how Serbian veterans of the post-Yugoslav wars framed their predicaments through narratives about multiple lacks and losses. I am particularly interested in the ways in which veterans mobilised their sense of (ab)normality and (lack of) direction to voice their discontent with what they perceived as a deliberate policy of state neglect. Their discontent was typically framed in reference to continued refusals by the Serbian political elites to formally acknowledge their direct involvement in the wars, instead referring to them as 'armed actions' and 'military maneuvers', as well as the disorienting social and political-economic context of their 'democratizing' state and society. The absence of a sustained effort to deal with the effects of the unpopular lost wars conditioned the emergence of new ways of knowing and acting so that veterans' associations started to flirt with civil sector organizations that were in the past typically regarded as belonging to the opposite side of the political-ideological continuum. Therefore, at the same time as the Serbian state appeared unable and/or unwilling to provide for war veterans and their families, the latter became an object of interest to a range of new stakeholders. Using these insights, I will place narratives about multiple lacks and losses within the existing body of knowledge of the anthropology of hope and displacement, as well as seek new routes to account for their uses in the emerging processes of veterans' political subjectivation.