Paper short abstract:

This paper aims to describe the role silence and denial play in the process of self-representation in the first generation of Bosnian Serbs grown up in postwar Gradiška, a Bosnian town administratively located in Republika Srpska, the ethnically Serb entity of Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH).

Paper long abstract:

More than 20 years after the end of the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH), the memory of the conflict constitutes the symbolic space where divisive narrations and policies are created and promoted by ethnonationalist movements and political parties.

Constitutionally grounded in ANNEX IV of the Dayton Peace Agreement (DPA), contemporary BiH is a state defined by its three constituent nationalities - Bosniak, Croat and Serb - as well as two territorial entities that are ethnically aligned, the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina (FBiH), and the Republika Srpska (RS). Today, a new generation of adults has grown up in this sectarian political landscape. A context where the recent past has been used to create exclusive institutional practices and narratives of belonging.

This paper aims to analyse the role silence has in the process of self-representation of Bosnian Serb youth living in the municipality of Gradiška (Republika Srpska). While many social analysts reasonably focused their efforts in pointing out the level of genocide denial and the nationalist policies that characterised Republika Srpska institutions since the end of the war, a close ethnographic account shows us a more complex dynamic. A dynamic where silences and omissions not only characterise the work institutions conduct in order to re-codify the past but most importantly they play a crucial role in defining the public as well as the private sphere of sociability, calling into being different moral economies and practices of resistance.