3rd Year PhD Presentation: 'The Untold Stories of Women in the Armed Forces during the Bosnian War (1992-1995)'
Monday 10 June 12.30-2.00pm, Yangtze Theatre CBG.2.01
Speaker: Aynura Akbaš (LSE)
Discussant: Dr Maria Rashid (LSE)
With the end of the war in Bosnia in 1995, women who joined the army ranks, enlisting in thousands and occupying diverse roles, were first in line for demobilization, and their stories remain undocumented. The erasure of their experiences from the historiography of the war has had profound epistemological ramifications in shaping the post-war, post-genocidal memorialization landscape in Bosnia. In this wider project, I set out to document and analyse their life histories to co-construct with them a critical feminist historiography of the war. While the wider research focuses on the various intersections of gender and militarism during the war, the focus of this paper is the methodological and epistemological framework behind my project. I discuss how and why a combination of methods, which include archival research, oral history, and collage-making, enables me to render visible the complexity of war veterans’ experiences, explore the factors that led them to become combatants in ethnonational conflict, their experiences within military structures, and the images and conceptualization of gender that are being constructed, reproduced, and/or resisted in this context. I reflect on some of the main challenges and dilemmas that emerged from fieldwork and discuss ways to move forward.
My work builds on the emerging field of Bosnian studies and critical feminist scholarship in the Balkans to argue that situated knowledges of women veterans, who have been largely overlooked in feminist literature on Bosnia, are critical tools for further theorizing and developing interdisciplinary frameworks for conversations about gender, militarism, and war, and for reimagining Bosnian past/present/futures.