Monuments and Counter-Monument Sights in Post-Conflict Bosnia and Herzegovina: A Case Study of Gavrilo Princip’s Monuments

Abstract

The ever-present need of remembering and reimagining the memory through the culture of building memorial sights, as markers of identity, at the places of extreme violence in the immediate aftermaths of the conflict deescalation was a light motive for writing this paper. By allocating the empirical research on the ground of Bosnia and Herzegovina, there is a great opportunity to re-examine the dense perplexity of issues that are enhancing the momentum of the memory juxtaposed with the counter-memory, whereas different interest groups (political or civil) are simultaneously producing competing memories. The case study of BiH allows us to notice and highlight the multidimensionality of memory and counter-memoryalong the way of Bosnian postwar society towards the reconciliation, how it enables the identity building and the nation re-building during the processes of political consolidation and its didactic use for further conflict prevention. Using the discourses, visual materials and interviews from the field research adjusted on the post-conflict memory sites in Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina vs Republika Srpska(case study monuments of Gavrilo Principe in Sarajevo vs East Sarajevo), I would like to pinpoint the chasm between the actual purpose of memory sites that are built there after the conflict and the danger of them miscommunicating the conflict inflicted past that could possibly lead to a restoration of that latent conflict. Therefore, my research is concentrated on the coupled counter-memorial sites, which are of enormous importance for the process of reconciliation because of their role of keeping balance to the official narratives and memorials, despite of the fact that this role of them is usually neglected by scholars.