"Sarajevo Under Siege" offers a richly detailed account of the
lived experiences of ordinary people in this multicultural city
between 1992 and 1996, during the war in the former Yugoslavia.
Moving beyond the shelling, snipers, and shortages, it documents
the coping strategies people adopted and the creativity with which
they responded to desperate circumstances.Ivana Maček, an
anthropologist who grew up in the former Yugoslavia, argues that
the division of Bosnians into antagonistic ethnonational groups was
the result rather than the cause of the war, a view that was not
only generally assumed by Americans and Western Europeans but also
deliberately promoted by Serb, Croat, and Muslim nationalist
politicians. Nationalist political leaders appealed to
ethnoreligious loyalties and sowed mistrust between people who had
previously coexisted peacefully in Sarajevo. Normality dissolved
and relationships were reconstructed as individuals tried to
ascertain who could be trusted.Over time, this ethnography shows,
Sarajevans shifted from the shock they felt as civilians in a city
under siege into a "soldier" way of thinking, siding with one group
and blaming others for the war. Eventually, they became
disillusioned with these simple rationales for suffering and
adopted a "deserter" stance, trying to take moral responsibility
for their own choices in spite of their powerless position. The
coexistence of these contradictory views reflects the confusion
Sarajevans felt in the midst of a chaotic war.Maček respects the
subjectivity of her informants and gives Sarajevans' own words a
dignity that is not always accorded the viewpoints of ordinary
citizens. Combining scholarship on political violence with
firsthand observation and telling insights, this book is of vital
importance to people who seek to understand the dynamics of armed
conflict along ethnonational lines both within and beyond
Europe.
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