Memory and Youth Activism in the Post-Conflict Balkans: The …€¦ ·...

# WarCrimes # PostConflictJustice # Balkans:

Youth, Performance Activism and the Politics of Memory

Arnaud Kurze, PhD Center for Global Studies George Mason University

Prepared for the

ECPR General Conference September 4-‐7, 2013 Bordeaux, France

Abstract

Past post-‐conflict justice processes in the Balkan region were comprised of a variety of protagonists, such as governments, international institutions, and civil society. Mechanisms to cope with mass atrocities committed during the conflict in the 1990s included international trials in The Hague, domestic trials in many of the former states of Yugoslavia, and several truth commission attempts. In recent years there has also been a rise in youth activism to confront war crimes. However, literature in transitional justice that addresses this phenomenon remains underdeveloped. This research draws on over two-‐dozen in-‐depth interviews with youth activist leaders across the former Yugoslavia focusing on their performance-‐based campaigns. Additional data was collected from online prosopographic analysis—which consists of studying common characteristics of these activists by means of a collective study of their lives and careers. In his findings, the author explains why the emergence of transitional justice youth activism in the Balkans falls short of the significant institutional reforms of earlier youth movement mobilizations in the regions. He also throws light on why their performance activism is distinct from practices of older, established human rights organizations in the region. Notwithstanding, he argues that this performance-‐based advocacy work has fueled the creation of a new spatiality of deliberation—so called strategic confrontation spaces—to contest the culture of impunity and challenge the politics of memory in the former Yugoslavia.

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Introduction

In the early 1990s the breakup of the former Yugoslavia fueled violent ethnic conflicts

across the entire region. Today, over twenty years later, Southeast European societies still

bear deep scars despite many retributive and restorative post-‐conflict justice efforts, also

affecting less obvious victims, such as youth who have not necessarily experienced the

violence but suffer from its lingering consequences. Instead of surrendering to feelings of

apathy, however, many of these young adults actively engage in human rights work to

account for war crimes and human rights violations. This research examines the emerging

role of youth activism in post-‐conflict societies across the former Yugoslavia. It seeks to

understand why and how younger generations—who often times have not directly

witnessed the 1990s ethnic conflicts or were too young to understand what was

happening—deal with the past.

The rise of recent youth activism to cope with mass atrocities and injustice is part of

a number of efforts to reckon with the past across the region. It complements years of post-‐

conflict justice processes in the Balkan region, initiated by a variety of protagonists, such as

governments, international institutions, and civil society. These actors put in place various

mechanisms to account for mass atrocities committed during the conflict, including

international trials in The Hague, domestic trials in many of the former states of Yugoslavia,

and several truth commission attempts. Reminiscent of many other transitional justice

actors, the main reason of engagement for youth activists is the fight against impunity and

oblivion. Although, as this research shows, youth activists are the product of a global

spillover effect of international human rights practices in combination with the work of

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domestic human rights advocates, the activities of youth advocates diverge from

mainstream advocacy work. Rather than courting political institutions in order to push for

reform at the state level—such as several domestic human rights organizations promoting

the recent transnational fact-‐finding body also known as the Coalition for RECOM1—these

young activists use performance-‐based campaigns to disseminate their ideas. Their

performative acts combines elements from the art world as well as the human rights

advocacy field and raise a couple of questions: First, what is the activists’ rationale behind

this modus operandi? And second, what are some of the consequences these practices

trigger?

Relying on social movement theory and performance studies, this article analyzes

over two-‐dozen in-‐depth interviews with youth activist leaders across the former Yugoslavia

and discusses a selection of performance-‐based campaigns. Supplementary data was

collected via an online prosopographic analysis, studying common characteristics of youth

activists by aggregating data on of their private and professional lives. The author

underlines that the emergence of transitional justice youth activism in the Balkans cannot

be compared to the sweeping impact of earlier youth movement mobilizations in the

regions that triggered significant institutional reform, such as the case of the Otpor

movement in Serbia. However, he explains why their performative acts are distinct from the

mainstream practices by established human rights organizations in the post-‐conflict

Balkans. He also argues that their performance activism has fueled the creation of new

1 See for instance Arnaud Kurze, “Democratizing Justice in the Post-‐Conflict Balkans: The Dilemma of Domestic Human Rights Activists,” CEU Political Science Journal no. 03 (2012): 243–268.

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deliberative spaces to contest the culture of impunity and challenge the politics of memory

in the former Yugoslavia.

In the first part, this study describes the qualitative mixed methods used for the

research, with a particular focus explaining the value of online prosopography to analyze

common characteristics of these emerging youth activist groups. Subsequently, the author

situates his work within a body of interdisciplinary literature, arguing for a theoretical

framework that draws from social movement theory and performance studies to explore

new developments in transitional justice practices in the former Yugoslavia. The third part

of this article portrays a selection campaigns that rely on performative activism, illustrating

the different techniques and conditions in each of the cases. In the following part, the

author shows how performance activism created a new deliberative space in post-‐conflict

Balkan societies to deal with the past. In concluding, the article points to potential research

avenues to apply the findings to other global post-‐conflict context.

Mixing Methods: In-‐Depth Interviews and Online Prosopography

Initially, this research was only based on interview data and content analysis. In the course

of the data collection process and preliminary data analysis, however, the author realized

that it was necessary to find additional tools, in particular, to get to the bottom of why

youth activists emerged in recent years and engaged in transitional justice advocacy work.

As a result, he decided to include online prosopography.

Prosopography consists of an investigation of the common characteristics of a

sociopolitical group by means of a collective study of their lives using multiple career-‐line

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analysis. The analysis process can be compared to the process of building a brick wall. While

each brick represent the factual information, the mortar that holds together all the stones is

made of the interpretations.2 By focusing the data pool on young adults around the ages of

eighteen and twenty-‐five, the research analyzes a social group that did not participate in the

acts of violence although some had experienced the war first hand. Often, their socially

constructed childhood images of the “other”3—the other being here in particular ethnic

groups that opposed each other during the war—were characterized by animosity and

distrust.4 In spite of this childhood experience this young generation of activists is at the

forefront of a movement that actively deals with a past that they had to passively live

through due to their young age. Prosopographic methods thus provide a useful analytical

tool kit to lay out their motivations for getting involved in their current work by examining

their early childhood, education and other important moments in their lives that shaped

their career trajectories.

This study draws on over two-‐dozen in-‐depth interviews with youth activist leaders

across the former Yugoslavia. The data from the interviews was collected systematically,

using snowball sampling, in which existing study subjects recruited future subjects from

their acquaintances and professional networks. The design choice was made according to

Chaim Noy’s findings, who has illustrated that snowball sampling helps investigate social

knowledge from particular sociopolitical groups' organic social networks and social

2 Thomas F. Carney, “Prosopography: Payoffs and Pitfalls,” Phoenix 27, no. 2 (1973): 176. 3 See Edward Said, Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient (New York: Vintage Books, 1979). 4 The majority of the interviewees described that they were growing up in households that expressed varying degrees of distrust or even animosity towards other ethnic groups that were adversaries during the conflict.

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dynamics.5 The research also relied on content analysis, including official documents, policy

briefs, news articles, and online information from institutional websites, among others.

Although some of the preliminary interviews were conducted during fieldwork as

part of a larger project, the bulk of the data were collected online using Skype video calls. At

the beginning of the project, the author was skeptical as to whether the methodological

choice of online interviews would be conducive to capturing the thick data, which is

generally gathered during extensive ethnographic fieldwork based on narrative interviews

and participatory observations. However, only after a few completed interviews with a

variety of subjects from across the region, it became clear that the virtual online “field” was

less of an obstacle for the data collection process than expected. On the contrary, in the

course of the research project it contributed to a better understanding of the youth’s

activism. The author noticed, for instance, that the subjects were immersed in a web of

social media online and all of them were at ease with using Internet technology as an

indispensable communication tool not only for work, but also with friends and family.

Skype, Facebook and Twitter, thus turned into essential analytical tools for this project.

While the author was used to participatory observation from his past research projects, he

was unable to directly apply these methods in a traditional sense to this particular study.

Nonetheless he was able to create a continuous information flow by communicating

regularly over Skype and Facebook with his research subjects. Instead of carrying out only

one-‐hour interview sessions, the author established a rapport with his geographically

remote subjects by holding several short and long online conversations with his

5 Chaim Noy, “Sampling Knowledge: The Hermeneutics of Snowball Sampling in Qualitative Research,” International Journal of Social Research Methodology 11, no. 4 (2008): 327–344.

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interlocutors, thus drawing on his ethnographic fieldwork experience. Over time, the

Internet became the gate to understanding the lives of these young activists, despite the

physical distance.

By listening to the narratives of the interviewees during the data analysis process,

the author was able to reconstruct reoccurring, common patterns for many of his research

subjects. As a case in point, some of the subjects had experienced war crimes and lost

family members which is a strong explanatory variable illuminating their engaging role in

post-‐conflict justice activism. Yet, the he majority of transcribed accounts showed that they

were also strongly influenced by workshops, lectures, and direct exposure to “first-‐

generation” human rights activists.6 Their professional trajectories thus coincide with the

spillover effect of a global human rights discourse.7 Thanks to combining narrative interview

methods and prosopographic analysis conducted online, the author was able to create a

thick layer of data to analyze not only the emergence of a new generation of transitional

justice actors, but also trace and examine their current activism patterns. In fact, the

strength of a qualitative mixed method approach is that scholars can use their “theoretical

resources” to: i) analyze a small set of data in which context and change are crucial; ii)

underline that coding plays a less important role, as data is dynamic and subject to change;

and iii) “show how the (theoretically defined) elements we have identified are assembled or

6 They include in particular peace activists from the 1990s who are currently involved in advocacy work that focuses primarily on war crimes and accountability issues. 7 See also Ellen Lutz and Kathryn Sikkink, “The Justice Cascade: The Evolution and Impact of Foreign Human Rights Trials in Latin America,” Chicago Journal of International Law 2 (2001): 1.

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mutually laminated.”8 Unsurprisingly, this mixed methods approach was the result of

conceptualizing the research question based on an interdisciplinary theoretical framework.

Filling the Literature Void: Memory, Youth Activism and Spatiality

Different forms of transitional justice mechanisms have been applied for millennia,

especially in times of regime change, including Antiquity, the French Revolution, and after

World War II.9 The scholarly debate around these issues and the term itself was in

particular shaped by Ruti Teitel’s early work published in Neil Kritz’s edited volume

Transitional Justice: How Emerging Democracies Reckon with Former Regimes.10 Only a few

years later, in 2000, Teitel published her groundbreaking book Transitional Justice, in which

she argues that the role of justice in political transitions is not a universal norm, but instead

has a unique and constructivist character. Grounding her research in legal analysis, she

posits that “[l]aw is caught between the past and the future, between backward-‐looking and

forward-‐looking, between retrospective and prospective, between the individual and the

collective.”11 Other authors have followed suit, studying transitional justice from a historical

and institutional perspective.12 While more recent transitional justice scholarship on the

8 David Silverman, “Analyzing Talk and Text,” in Handbook of Qualitative Research, ed. Norman K. Denzim and Yvonna S. Lincoln (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2000), 828. 9 For a historical account on different forms of justice applied after regime changes see for instance Jon Elster, Closing the Books: Transitional Justice in Historical Perspective (Cambridge University Press, 2004). 10 Ruti G. Teitel, “How Are the New Democracies of the Southern Cone Dealing with the Legacy of Past Human Rights Abuses?,” in Transitional Justice: How Emerging Democracies Reckon with Former Regimes, ed. Neil J. Kritz (United States Institute of Peace Press, 1995), 146–154. 11 Ruti G. Teitel, Transitional Justice (Oxford University Press, USA, 2000), 6. 12 For literature on institutional change during democratic transitions that has also influenced transitional justice scholarship see for instance Guillermo O’Donnell and Paul Schmitter, Transitions from Authoritarian Rule: Tentative Conclusions About Uncertain Democracies (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986). Their edited volume provides different case studies on several political shifts and regime changes in the 1980s, focusing on Latin America. They explore different democracy models and political efforts to build democratic foundations in times of uncertainty. While Laurence Whitehead describes international factors in chapter one of the volume—discussing for instance foreign policy tools—, other contributors, such as Adam Przeworksi, raise methodological questions, examining ways

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former Yugoslavia has provided excellent insights on the politics of justice, it still says very

little about state society relations.13 Some authors have addressed this void, focusing on civil

society actors across the Balkans.14

Yet, research on the impact of youth activism in transitional justice contexts remains

underdeveloped. In fact, current studies and reports analyze post-‐conflict youth issues from

a normative perspective, often suggesting best practices and policy strategies on how to

help traumatized youth deal with the past.15 Little is known about the advocacy practices of

bottom-‐up youth activism across the former Yugoslavia. A few studies that discussed the

institutionalization and the practices of the Otpor movement in Serbia—that eventually

ousted Slobodan Milošević’ from power—are the exception to the rule.16 These studies,

however, mainly examine the ability to mobilize civil society to foster regime change.

Sharon Wolchik and Valerie Bunce, for instance, compare variation of youth activists’ impact

in which different data sets could be analyzed to help researchers better understand these processes. This type of literature concentrates especially on the sociopolitical factors of democratic transitions, including political institutions and in some cases the role of civil society during these processes. See also Juan Linz and Alfred Stepan, Problems of Democratic Transition and Consolidation: Southern Europe, South America, and Post-‐Communist Europe (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996); Samuel P. Huntington, The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century (University of Oklahoma Press, 1993). 13 Jelena Subotić, Hijacked Justice: Dealing with the Past in the Balkans (Ithaca, London: Cornell University Press, 2009); Viktor Peskin, International Justice in Rwanda and the Balkans: Virtual Trials and the Struggle for State Cooperation (Cambridge, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2008); Christopher Lamont, International Criminal Justice and the Politics of Compliance (London UK: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd., 2010). 14 Olivera Simic and Zala Volcic, eds., Transitional Justice and Civil Society in the Balkans, 2013th ed. (Springer, 2012). 15 See for instance Pia Peeters, Youth Employment in Sierra Leone: Sustainable Livelihood Opportunities in a Post-‐conflict Setting (World Bank-‐free PDF, 2009); Robert Muggah, Security and Post-‐Conflict Reconstruction: Dealing with Fighters in the Aftermath of War (Routledge, 2008); Kareena McAloney et al., “Damaged Youth: Prevalence of Community Violence Exposure and Implications for Adolescent Well-‐Being in Post-‐Conflict Northern Ireland,” Journal of Community Psychology 37, no. 5 (2009): 635–648. 16 See for instance Oskar Gruenwald, “Belgrade Student Demonstrations, 1996-‐97: Rebuilding Civil Society in Yugoslavia,” Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies 13, no. 1/2 (January 2001): 155–174; Sharon L. Wolchik and Valerie Bunce, “Youth and Electoral Revolutions in Slovakia, Serbia, and Georgia,” SAIS Review of International Affairs 26, no. 2 (2006): 55–65.

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on institutional transformation across different case studies including Georgia, Serbia and

Slovakia.17

This research does not primarily examine institutional regime change, but focuses

on the processes of creating deliberative spaces. Deliberation is a concept of providing an

area for citizens to actively participate in the formation of ideas and policy matters. In

relation to this concept, Faranak Miraftab and Shana Wills coined the term “invited spaces,”

in order to underline how state institutions provide opportunities for civil society to

participate actively in certain problem areas.18 In the case of the former Yugoslavia,

however, governments only provide very limited opportunities to participate in broader

deliberation on war crimes issues within society. As a result of this deliberation void, young

transitional justice advocates have combined performance art and activism, staging

performance-‐based campaigns to fuel broad public debates about difficult and oftentimes

taboo war crimes topics.

Some fundamental questions can be raised in this context including the following:

Why did youth activists decide to embrace a new way of carrying out advocacy projects

compared to the older generation of human rights defenders. Why despite the moderate

response within society does the work of youth activists have a fundamental role in the

larger public transitional justice debate in the former Yugoslavia? In order to find some

answers to these questions, this ethnographic-‐oriented study examines the young leaders’

17 Ibid. 18 Faranak Miraftab and Shana Wills, “Insurgency and Spaces of Active Citizenship,” Journal of Planning Education and Research 25, no. 2 (2005): 200.

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campaign objectives and explores the advocates’ relationships to challenging questions

about truth, justice, and memory.

The creation of a collective memory does not only occur by means of an archive with

evidentiary documents. In fact, performative elements are part of it. Some researchers

suggest that the “performative elements of testimony, including silences, pauses and

emotional outbursts during trials, constitute the archive itself, for they communicate not

only fact but also meaning.”19 Against the backdrop of memory studies that contest

conventional notions of what kind of narrative element can be used to create historic

narratives, this research analyzes different performance-‐based campaigns across the former

Yugoslavia and discusses to what extent these practices contribute to the purpose of

establishing collective memories of the past and situate these memories in space and time.

Shifting Targets: Institutional Courtship vs. Street Performance Activism

The recent trajectory of transitional justice youth activism across the region is different from

restorative justice practices pursued by established human rights activists, such as members

of the regional fact-‐seeking initiative, Coalition for RECOM. In the past few years, the latter

made numerous attempts at convincing governments to provide political and institutional

support at the state level for their cause. 20 In this context, several leaders of participating

NGOs, including the Croatian and Serbian organizations Documenta and the Humanitarian

19 See Marianne Hirsch and Leo Spitzer in Pilar Riaño-‐Alcalá and Erin Baines, “The Archive in the Witness: Documentation in Settings of Chronic Insecurity,” International Journal of Transitional Justice 5, no. 3 (November 1, 2011): 413. 20 Anna Di Lellio and Caitlin McCurn, “Engineering Grassroots Transitional Justice in the Balkans The Case of Kosovo,” East European Politics & Societies 27, no. 1 (February 1, 2013): 129–148; see also Jelena Subotic, “Diverging Paths in the Western Balkans,” Current History 112, no. 752 (2013): 107–113.

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Law Center, however, reported that the success of their efforts was slow and that bulk of

their work to persuade a large number of the political establishment was still ahead of

them.21 In spite of youth activists’ close ties with the established, older generation of

human rights advocates—which also characterized by a mentorship role of senior-‐level

activists—many of the youth-‐initiated projects prioritize awareness-‐raising campaigns over

direct institutional change. On the contrary, one of the key objectives of the regional fact-‐

finding initiative’s work, for instance, consisted of urging political leaders across the former

Yugoslavia to pass legislation in favor of a transnational truth commission.22 Due to these

fundamentally different organizational goals of youth activism, youth leasers are not

necessarily required to court local and national governments to implement their objectives.

Recent youth campaigns particularly illustrate how activists use public spaces for

performance-‐based advocacy to trigger broader debates about dealing with the past within

society.23 A variety of current advocacy work has already been documented on social media

sites, such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. The different forms of performance activism

aim not only at directly—often physically—confronting the audiences, but also at

integrating them into the performance act.24 In the following, this research describes the

selection of two campaigns that underline the range of protests that youth staged to

address particular war crimes issues.

On April 27, 2011 YIHR Kosovo built a white brick wall on Zahir Pajazitis

21 Interviews with Vesna Teršelić on May 6, 2011 and Nataša Kandić on May 18, 2011. 22 Ibid. 23 While some of the activities have led to recognition by state officials, society at large constitutes the principal target group. 24 See for instance recent campaigns by the Youth Initiative for Human Rights in Bosnia and Herzegovina and Kosovo on Facebook https://www.facebook.com/yihr.bih/photos and YouTube http://youtu.be/m5tJwsTTDY8. Accessed June 7, 2013.

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Square near the city center of Prishtina—it was the size of a medium-‐sized open-‐air movie

theatre screen—in honor of the missing persons since the last war in Kosovo at the end of

the 1990s.25 Youth activists inscribed the names of 1819 missing persons on the wall and put

empty chairs in front of the installation to show that the families of the victims are still

waiting for recognition about the fate of their loved ones. The organizers witnessed a

collection of reactions after the commemorative piece of art was finished and people

curiously explored the names on the wall or specifically sought the names of their family

members on the temporary monument:

Our emotions were high when family members were finding the names of their loved ones

in the wall. Reactions were different, some stood strong and some shed tears of pain, and

some were experiencing some kind of a relief. The improvised wall was turning into

commemorative monument. People were astounded when they saw how many names

there were. Some of them didn’t even know what those names might be, but when they

realized they stopped and watched in silence and continued walking emotionally moved.26

The installation did not only attract random passerby, but also a number of international

officials, who laid down roses in commemoration of the missing. Members of the

international community were from political institutions, such as various Embassies, and

from military organizations, such as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s (NATO) Kosovo

Force (KFOR).27

25 For a photographic documentation of the event see https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.213755891987106.68842.174237825938913&type=3. Accessed February 19, 2013. 26 See YIHR Kosovo website at http://ks.yihr.org/en/article/68/Removing-‐the-‐wall-‐of-‐the-‐missing-‐in-‐Kosovo. Accessed May 23, 2013. 27 See YIHR Kosovo’s website at http://ks.yihr.org/en/article/59/Youth-‐Initiative-‐for-‐Human-‐Rights-‐and-‐Nisma-‐Ime-‐My-‐Initiative-‐activists-‐marked-‐the-‐national-‐day-‐of-‐missing-‐persons. Accessed February 1

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Yet, some reactions to the installations were also more critical and hostile, in part

because the list activists used to compile the names on the wall was an official document

from the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC). Hence, the inclusion of Serbian

names in addition to Albanian victims on the wall sparked criticism from various individuals

within the Kosovar victim community. Despite activists’ efforts to promote an inclusive

reconciliatory message, which the piece of art aimed for, YIHR Kosovo Program Coordinator,

Besart Lumi, explained that people were angry and “crossed out Serbian names on the wall

with a spray can.”28 Eventually, the creators of the ad hoc memorial had to take it down due

vandalism and the non-‐permanent nature of the hastily built structure.29

The second campaign selected for this study focuses on BiH. A few years ago, YIHR

BiH launched a campaign called “Flowers for Sarajevo Roses” to commemorate the

beginning of the siege of the city of Sarajevo in April 1992.30 Sarajevo roses are marks

mortar shells created in the pavement after their impact. Their imprints often resemble the

shape of pressed flowers on the ground. Every shell caused lasting, visible scars in many

different locations across the city—left after the heavy shelling during the siege. While the

physical damage in the streets is still noticeable, not every bomb struck a human being,

wounding or killing the person. Yet, for those craters that cost human lives, citizens filled

the holes with red resin to remember the victims.31

28 Interviewed on February 19, 2013. 29 Ibid. See also http://ks.yihr.org/en/article/68/Removing-‐the-‐wall-‐of-‐the-‐missing-‐in-‐Kosovo. Accessed February 19, 2013. 30 In 2008, Jasminko Halilović, a young activist and intellectual, published a text, “Disappearing Sarajevo Roses,” sparking great public reaction to preserve these commemorative landmarks. 31 Interviews with leaders of YIHR BiH on March 12 and August 25, 2013. See also Anne Marie Du Preez Bezrob, Sarajevo Roses: War Memoir of a Peacekeeper (Oshun, 2006).

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The YIHR BiH campaign, “Flowers for Sarajevo Roses,” had two specific objectives:

preserving commemorative history sites and raising awareness about the disappearance of

these spaces due to construction and urban development.32 In fact, the urban sprawl and

reconstruction of the city incrementally led to the silent disappearance as new layers of

brick, cement or asphalt replaced some of the old spaces across the city. In order to counter

this development, activists—equipped with red spray cans and red paint buckets and

paintbrushes—set out for these landmarks and gave the often-‐faded crater holes a new

facelift with dark red weather-‐resistant outdoor paint. Public reactions to their initiative

were mostly positive, but there were also skeptical voices about their work. While many

intrigued pedestrians praised their project, some critics stressed the importance of letting

wounds heal and demarking these sites visibly with bright paint would be counterproductive

in view of this goal.33 Regardless of the criticism, YIHR BiH embraced performance-‐based

advocacy that deliberately aimed at an issue that affects the daily lives of Sarajevans,

international workers and tourists that live in the city. Activists directly confronted

individuals with a symbolic piece of history in their immediate environment, thus actively

shaping—and in this particular case reviving—Sarajevo’s collective memory about the siege.

Other groups of youth activists have organized comparable events. The Croatian

chapter of YIHR, for instance, built an installation in Zagreb on the Tuđman Square,

consisting of white flash cards with the names of war victims that were hanging from a net

32 Ibid. 33 Ibid.

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spun along park trees.34 Additional events organized by YIHR Kosovo and its partner

organization Nisma Ime in the city center of the capital include an enormous circle filled

with candles accompanied by a live solo violin performance in 2013 and a stream of floating

coat hangers in 2012.35 The candles were inside of paper bags, which were placed on the

main square. Each of them had a question mark on the front and a large fingerprint on the

back of the bag to honor and remember the missing. The coat-‐hanger campaign struck a

similar note. A big piece of white cloth was attached to each hanger with a large black

question mark printed on the front it. All of the hangers were dangling of a piece of chicken

wire fence that was installed on the sidewalk along the Mother Teresa Boulevard in

Prishtina, intentionally hampering the regular flow of pedestrian and inciting them to

engage with the installation. All of these protests raise important conceptual questions

about the significance of performance-‐based activism that youth organizations have

embraced more recently.

Street Performance Activism: A Tool to Create Deliberative Spaces

The various campaigns launched by youth activists are performances in the larger sense of

the term. As Guillermo Gómez-‐Peña correctly noted: “When performance-‐studies scholars

refer to “the performance field,” they often mean something different than what

performance artists mean: A much broader field that encompasses all things performative,

34 For detailed photos of the installation see for instance https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.457672924271768.98191.145459252159805&type=3. Accessed February 17, 2013. 35 For a photographic documentation of these events see https://www.facebook.com/nisma.ime/photos_albums. Accessed June 3, 2013.

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including anthropology, religious practice, pop culture, and sports and civic events.”36

Building a life-‐size brick wall in Kosovo or coloring war-‐damaged urban spaces in Sarajevo

with bright paint constitute performative acts that fall precisely under Gómez-‐ Peña’s

definition. The activists’ dedicated brushstrokes—with the aim of resuscitating spaces

threatened with oblivion—are thus an example of symbolic gestures that blend basic

craftsmanship of painting and politically motivated actions. Art, such as the act of painting

in the “Flowers for Sarajevo Roses” project, becomes a vector to sustain a collective

memory about mass atrocities by instrumentalizing geographic spaces that bear the scars of

war and by reintegrating these fading symbols into the daily lives of individuals occupying

this space.

The wider success of these types of advocacy work depends on a variety of factors—

international support, domestic institutions and the ability to mobilize are a few of them—

but the immediate reactions of individuals engaging with the installations demonstrate the

significance of emotions in these situations. As Paul Routledge argues:

Politically, emotions are intimately bound up with power relations and also with relations of

affinity, and are a means of initiating action. People become politically active because they

feel something profoundly—such as injustice or ecological destruction. This emotion triggers

changes in people that motivate them to engage in politics. It is people’s ability to transform

their feelings about the world into actions that inspire them to participate in political

action.37

The emotional tipping point in view of the various youth activists’ agendas, however, is the

inclusive message to victims of all sides of the conflict. In other words, emotions do not 36 Guillermo Gómez-‐Peña, Ethno-‐Techno Writings on Performance, Activism, and Pedagogy (New York: Routledge, 2005), 21–22. 37 Paul Routledge, “Sensuous Solidarities: Emotion, Politics and Performance in the Clandestine Insurgent Rebel Clown Army,” Antipode 44, no. 2 (2012): 429–430.

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necessarily serve as a mobilizing factor and as a creative force to build a collective identity,

but they can also hamper transformations. Francesca Polletta and James Jaspers—both very

critical of the concept of collective identity—explain that “preexisting solidarities” can help

forge “affective connections one has to members of a group that oblige one to protest along

with or on behalf of them.38 Yet, in the case of the youth activists in the former Yugoslavia,

the advocacy is closer related of ruptural performances, an “interruptive, becoming-‐event,

confrontational, and baffling.”39 Ironically, in lots of cases, the gap between victim

communities that many activists initially attempt to bridge risks to widen. This issue, for

instance, particularly applies to installations that disclose victim names of minority

populations or formerly adversarial ethnic groups during the conflict.

Notwithstanding, the described performance activism is an important catalyst for

local populations to directly engage in processes that deal with the past. In performance

studies, a performance is defined by the existence of an audience that the performative act

is intended for. Paradoxically, installing empty chairs in front of a wall with names of the

missing in Kosovo emphasized the absence of an audience. By creating a forced emptiness

within the physical boundaries of the installation space, the organizers metaphorically

criticized the lack of public support for the issue. The audience who eventually came to see

the installation filled this void, thus initiating and actively engaging in a wider public debate.

The Kosovo example illustrates how performative acts are subject to different audiences

38 Francesca Polletta and James M. Jasper, “Collective Identity and Social Movements,” Annual Review of Sociology (2001): 290. 39 Tony Perucci, “What the Fuck Is That? The Poetics of Ruptural Performance,” Liminalities: A Journal of Performance Studies 5, no. 3 (2009): 2.

19

whose role evolves depending on structural and situational factors.40 The physical area of

the installation therefore becomes a public space for deliberation.

Deliberation, in the context of this study, refers to a process of interaction between

various subjects dictated by fixed boundaries. Reminiscent of Jürgen Habermas’s work on

the creation of the “public sphere” in 19th century Europe41, this shared public space

provides a specific social group—here victims or victim families—a physical location to

engage in a discussion on human rights issues within society. While the debate occurs in

direct response to the individual present at the installation, it is also, from a broader

perspective, directed at the state. According to Habermas these spaces were key to foster

relations between state authority and the emerging bourgeoisie and was contingent on

access:

The public sphere of civil society stood or fell with the principle of universal access. A public

sphere from which specific groups would be eo ipso excluded was less than merely

incomplete; it was not a public sphere after all.42

Contrary to Habermasian thought—based on the upper class’s historical exclusion of certain

social groups such as the poor, women and slaves from the public sphere—youth activists

who initially occupy the public sphere with their installations serve as facilitators for victims

groups to enter this deliberative space. By increasing victim’s visibility at the state level,

advocates break down fixed boundaries—in the case of mass atrocities in the former

Balkans it is the lingering veil of silence of governments to holistically address past

wrongdoings. Yet, breaking down boundaries does not necessarily equal redrawing the 40 Erving Goffman, Where the Action Is: Three Essays (Allen Lane, 1969), 174. 41 Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry Into a Category of Bourgeois Society (MIT Press, 1991), 29. 42 Ibid., 85.

Arnaud Kurze

20

boundaries. In other words, the efforts of creating a deliberative space are only the first

step towards a dialogue between the state and society.

Creating new spaces of deliberation in post-‐conflict settings to deal with human

rights violations are crucial. Alex Jeffrey, for instance, posits that transitional justice studies

have been absorbed in legalist analysis, focusing on the work of international retributive

justice—particularly the effects of the ICTY—on Balkan societies and thus ignoring larger

processes that could help these societies cope with the past.43 Although the ICTY created a

public outreach office to establish closer ties in particular with victims groups but also with

affected societies at large—which Jeffrey labeled invited spaces in reference to Miraftab

and Wills’s work mentioned earlier44—the success remained limited, leading to a debate

outside of the legal sphere. In Jeffrey’s case study on Bosnia, NGOs organized a range of

workshops, cultural events and seminars to fuel a public discussion on transitional justice in

BiH. He called them “invented [spaces] as they demonstrated the ability of these

organisations to operate outside the legal process and summon into existence new spaces

of deliberation.”45 The case of performance activism of youth advocates is yet another

example of Jeffrey’s invented spaces: social actors create new public spaces for society to

confront war crimes issues and human rights violations.

Jeffrey’s definition, however, remains very broad from a conceptual perspective,

mainly concerned with recognizing the social phenomenon. Given the particular

circumstances of performance-‐based advocacy work of youth activists that this research

43 Alex Jeffrey, “The Political Geographies of Transitional Justice,” Transactions of The Institute of British Geographers (2011). 44 Ibid., 354. 45 Ibid.

21

focuses on, it is useful to further define these newly created spaces of deliberation. In fact,

activists pursue a specific agenda based on an inclusive vision of victimhood. Despite the

existence of different and sometimes competing narratives of victimhood 46, youth activists

promote a discourse of addressing all victims in a given area, avoiding marginalization issues

despite recurring criticism of the dominant victim discourse in the respective area. Their

performative acts were therefore deliberately and strategically calculated to provoke a

public response even if this meant confrontation to draw attention to war-‐crimes-‐related

topics. Simply labeling these physical locations as deliberative spaces then, does not capture

the motivations behind the performative acts of youth advocates. In order to reflect the

objectives and the performance activism part of young human rights activists’ work the

term “strategic confrontation spaces” is more suitable definition, as it succinctly describes

the purpose of the new spatiality that can be observed in Balkan post-‐conflict justice

practices. The regional case study of these young human rights advocates, however, are not

the example of individuals and social groups engaging in performance activism, but they are

part of a larger global trend that should receive more scholarly attention in the future.

Conclusion

This study discussed the growing role of youth activism in post-‐conflict societies across the

former Yugoslavia and explained why and how younger generations, who might not have

first-‐hand experience of the last conflicts in the region, deal with the past. In the beginning,

46 Arnaud Kurze and Iva Vukusic, “Afraid to Cry Wolf: Human Rights Activists’ Struggle of Transnational Accountability Efforts in the Balkans,” in Transitional Justice and Civil Society in the Balkans, ed. Olivera Simić and Zala Volčič, Springer Series in Transitional Justice (Springer New York, 2013), 210–212.

Arnaud Kurze

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the author described the qualitative mixed methods used for the research, stressing the

value of online prosopography to analyze common characteristics of emerging youth activist

groups. He then outlined the relevance of his work within a body of interdisciplinary

literature. He argued for a theoretical framework that combines elements from social

movement theory and performance studies in order to explore new developments in

transitional justice practices in the former Yugoslavia. Subsequently, this work presented a

selection of performance-‐based activist campaigns to illustrate the different techniques and

conditions in each of the cases. In the discussion of his findings, the author demonstrated

how performance activism created a new deliberative space in post-‐conflict Balkan societies

to deal with the past. Despite the Balkan-‐centric analysis, this research conveys valuable

insights that go beyond these geographical boundaries. In fact, the findings also apply to

other global post-‐conflict context and calls for further comparative research.

As a case in point, the recent uprisings in in the Middle East that fueled a wave of

social movements also referred to the Arab Spring in 2011 are one of the most recent

examples illustrating the importance of youth activism in transitional contexts.47 Other

regions such as Latin America—and even the United States—have also witnessed increasing

youth activism for a variety of reasons.48 While the current literature on these topics

grapples in large part with the idea of institutional change, the case of the Otpor

movement—despite toppling the authoritative leader Milošević—could hardly deal with the

scars left by the conflict. This research is therefore crucial to emphasize the significance of

47 See for instance Suad Joseph, Susan Slyomovics, and Sherine Hafez, “Anthropology of the Future: Arab Youth and the State of the State,” Anthropology of the Middle East and North Africa: Into the New Millennium (2013): 105. 48 See for instance Jessica K. Taft, Rebel Girls: Youth Activism and Social Change Across the Americas (NYU Press, 2011); Cynthia Bejarano, “Border Rootedness as Transformative Resistance: Youth Overcoming Violence and Inspection in a US–Mexico Border Region,” Children’s Geographies 8, no. 4 (2010): 391–399.

23

studying the dynamic advocacy processes of youth activists with the aim of creating a

culture of remembrance within society, in lieu of overthrowing institutional structures.

Although regime change is fundamental for democratization processes, the resurgence of

state powers across much of the Middle Eastern region as well as the widespread culture of

impunity across the Balkans are an indicator for addressing these issues with different,

alternative ideas and actions.

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