Zones of violence: Serb women inside the siege of Sarajevo

This dissertation explores a silenced history of violence that took place inside the 1992 to 1995 siege of Sarajevo, when the city was held under attack by Bosnian Serb forces (the Army of Republika Srpska, or VRS, Vojska Republike Srpske). Inside the siege, Serbs came to be associated with the ethnic aggressor, and faced violent retribution. I conceptualize the retributive violence inside the siege as an internal “zone of violence” that was made possible by the much larger external zone of VRS aggression. Today, the siege’s internal zone of violence remains a well-kept public secret, too contentious to commemorate. This research is based on one year of fieldwork in Sarajevo and over 60 interviews with 23 Bosnian Serb women who lived through the siege. It is divided into two parts. Part one offers an oral history of the siege’s internal zone of violence from the perspective of Bosnian Serb women. I describe their social decline from “neighbours” to “aggressors” inside the siege, a moral shift that made retributive violence thinkable, and permissible. Part two offers an ethnographic account of the afterlife of this silenced history of violence, as Bosnian Serb women navigate a fraught post-war ethno-moral landscape. This research makes two interventions. First, it unsettles the victim-perpetrator dichotomy, focusing attention onto a segment of post-war society about whom we know very little: victims on the side of the perpetrator. Second, it provides empirical data about an often overlooked dimension of war: the complicity of civilian women, describing how a minority of Bosnian Serb women supported the besieging army, even as they suffered its violence. I make a case for “opening up” the victim-perpetrator dichotomy in order to recognize complex subject positions that blur the line between “pure” victims or “pure” perpetrators. Asking what is at stake for post-conflict societies when recognition is withheld from such “impure victims,” I argue for the importance of recognizing suffering on the side of the perpetrator

The Eastward Expansion of the European Union: Perspectives from University Students in Belgrade, Serbia

This thesis explores how the eastward expansion of the European Union (EU) affects the lives and identities of university students in Belgrade, Serbia, a post-socialist, post-conflict, and non-EU country. This study involved qualitative interviews of 17 students aged 20 to 30, a generation that grew up during the 1990s when the Yugoslav secession wars made Serbia isolated from Western Europe politically and economically. A central question of this project is what it means to live in a non-EU state in Europe as the EU expands to include more post-socialist and Eastern European states. This study finds that participants tend to identify as belonging in Europe despite Serbia’s geopolitical position on the outside of the EU, and explores how the issues of emplacement and exclusion affect participants’ perceptions of everyday life in Belgrade as they compare it to how they imagine life to be like in the EU

Mutual intelligibility in the Slavic language area

In de geglobaliseerde wereld waar we vandaag de dag in leven is internationale samenwerking erg belangrijk, maar niet alle Europeanen spreken goed Engels. Als talen tot dezelfde familie behoren zou iedereen in staat moeten zijn hun eigen taal te spreken en de taal van hun gesprekspartner te begrijpen. Deze vorm van communicatie is bewezen effectief tussen zowel Deense, Zweedse en Noorweegse moedertaalsprekers; Nederlandse en Duitse sprekers; als de sprekers van het Tsjechisch en Slowaaks.Dit proefschrift beoogt te ontdekken hoe goed sprekers van verschillende Slavische talen elkaar begrijpen en welke factoren dit beïnvloedt. Ongeveer 12.000 sprekers van zes Slavische talen namen deel in een online verstaanbaarheidsexperiment. De resultaten tonen aan dat het belangrijkst is dat woorden met dezelfde stam ook op dezelfde manier worden uitgesproken in twee talen. Daarnaast geldt dat hoe meer je bent blootgesteld aan een taal die je probeert te verstaan, hoe beter je de taal ook daadwerkelijk zult begrijpen. Hoe woorden worden gevormd en gecombineerd in een zin maakt ook uit, hoe gelijker de processen, hoe groter de kans dat je het begrijpt. En in het geval van een laag verstaanbaarheidsniveau laten we zien dat het mogelijk is om mensen in een relatief korte periode te leren hoe ze een gerelateerde taal beter kunnen begrijpen.In the globalized world we live in today international cooperation is extremely important, but not all Europeans can speak English very well. If the languages in question belong to the same family, each person might be able to speak their native language and understand the language of their interlocutor. Thus type of communication has proved to be effective between native speakers of Danish, Swedish and Norwegian; Dutch and German; as well as between the speakers of Czech and Slovak.This thesis aims to discover how well speakers of different Slavic languages can understand each other and which factors influence this. About 12 000 speakers of six Slavic languages took part in a web-based intelligibility experiment. The findings show that the most important thing is how similarly words that have the same root are pronounced in two languages. Also, the more exposed you are to the language you are trying to understand, the better you will be at it. How words are formed and combined into sentences also matters, the more similar the processes, the more you are likely to understand. And in case that the level of intelligibility is relatively low, we showed that it is possible to teach people to understand a related language better in a relatively short time