2 Premises, setting and design of the research
2.4 In and beyond Sarajevo
The endurance of armed conflict barely two decades ago makes the process of memorialisation a truly contemporary, ongoing phenomenon. The fact that the conflict was culturalist in its justifications and foundational in its outcome has arguably crucial bearings that concern both identity and memory. The “culturalist” attribute refers to the fact that the war was fought around and in name of supposedly distinct cultural identities, forcing ethnonationalist projections of homogeneous essentialised purity, by means of extreme violence, upon a centuries-long reality of entanglement and pluralism. Some key features of the experience of Sarajevo further uncover the ways in which the siege entailed an attack on “culture” in broad terms: the encirclement and deliberate targeting of the urban population and built environment brought about the disruption of cultural meanings54 and pursued an annihilation of the possibility of heterogeneity and alterity.55
The “foundational” character of the war, on the other hand, refers to the aspirations and consequences the conflict had on the future of the country, and more specifically to the fact that the Dayton Peace Agreement signed in late 1995 between the warring factions gave rise to a new independent Bosnia and Herzegovina. The newly fashioned state embodies both continuity and rupture with the past: while its geopolitical boundaries coincide with those of the Socialist Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina, the state is now subdivided in two Entities (the FBiH and the RS) and one self-governing District (the Brcko District). One of the Entities is further fragmented into ten political-administrative Cantons (the FBiH).56 The geo-”ethnic” composition of the country has substantially changed turning the country into a patchwork of recognisable areas of predominance (see maps in chapter 1). Sarajevo has become the capital city of both one of the two Entities (the predominantly Croat- Muslim FBiH) and the overall State of Bosnia and Herzegovina.
The crucial symbolic value attributed to Sarajevo during the conflict somehow has a counterpart in the post-war role of the city as capital of the new state.
National capitals are usually bestowed with meanings and connotations that reach beyond their identity as specific urban localities. Hosting the seats of national institutions – legal, political, administrative and cultural – they come to embody the
54 Macek, Sarajevo under Siege. 55 Coward, Urbicide.
geographical place where issues concerning the whole country are tackled by decision-making agencies. Capital cities “act as gateways to their country” and “have a key role in presenting a nation to the rest of the world and to itself”, to international visitors as well as local residents.57 They do so by emerging as the location of
trademarks that have a symbolic value in relation to the nation: “particular places, monuments, buildings, ceremonies and events which resonate with a shared sense of belonging”.58 As Parkinson remarks, "in their public art, their public iconography, their public spaces and the built environment more generally, capital cities represent nations and people".59
Capitals provide the canvas for the portrayal of the state's identity, the urban landscape onto which symbols evoking narratives on the nation's memory and identity are inscribed for tourists and dwellers alike, and displayed as “heritage”. But because such “narratives” are created in and through (politically charged) processes that reduce and transfigure the versatility of lived experience and of a multitude of voices60 into signs and symbols, the urban heritage topography hints at much more:
"capital cities are, by design, by usage or both, symbols of national institutions, values, myths and norms – they contain such symbols and they are, in their own right, such symbols. But they are also symbols of who constitutes the nation, who is recognised as being a part of the demos and who is not. This is partly on the basis of who gets depicted in dignified, formal settings [...]; but is also on the basis of whose story lines and memories are given physical anchor points in the very fabric of the city itself".61
As mentioned above, in the post-war configuration of the state of BiH, Sarajevo has become a “double” capital, in that it is the political-administrative centre of both the FBiH and the overall state. Moreover, the city hosts the seats of international agencies of various kinds: military missions (EUFOR [European Union Force Althea] since 2004); offices of intergovernmental and international organisations (UNDP [United Nations Development Programme] since 1996, CoE [Council of Europe] since 1996); and the
57 Maitland, Robert, “Tourism and Changin Representation in Europe’s Historical Capitals,” Rivista di Scienze
del Turismo 2 (2010), 104.
58 Ibid., 107.
59 Parkinson, John, “Symbolic Representation in Public Space: Capital Cities, Presence and Memory,”
Representation 45, no. 1 (2009), 2.
60 Wertsch, James V., Voices of Collective Remembering (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). 61 Parkinson, “Symbolic Representation,” 17. Cf. also Chapter one.
Office for the High Representative (OHR), created with the Dayton Peace Agreement and constituting a real decision-making force in the country.62
The sole fact that the city is populated with the offices of agencies dedicated to post-war security and stabilisation, the implementation of the Peace Accords, reconstruction and development, the establishment of democracy, human rights and the rule of law, and the compliance with European standards and mechanisms, metaphorically construct Sarajevo as symbol not only of the state of BiH, but more specifically of a country engaged in post-war recovery, reconstruction and stabilisation, and on the path to becoming (sooner or later) a member of the European Union.
The symbolic function extends to contested cities as well: as Bollens remarks, these cities are "focal point[s] or magnet[s] for unresolved nationalistic ethnic conflict" or become “platform[s] for the expression of conflicting sovereignty claims involving areas outside the urban region".63
The multifaceted character of the city is caught in both its symbolic and practical aspects by Markowitz when she programmatically states that
"envisioning Sarajevo as a Bosnian kaleidoscope situates the city in its cultural legacies and shows how its people resist and comply with an urbanism that provides the conditions for blurring boundaries and forging overlapping belongings, while also enabling the entrenchment of state practices that demand unequivocal national distinctions and unwavering loyalties".64
This intermingling of various layers and elements in the fabric of the city complements the choice of Sarajevo as the setting of a case study research. In this perspective, the insights such a research can offer stem from the aptness of the capital to constitute that setting where recollections of the individual local identity entangle with representations of the national one. Concurrently, the study is concerned with detecting, exploring and analysing the ways in which memorialisation of armed conflict in the urban landscape of the capital comprise both the city's specific account of war (i.e. the siege) and narratives on the overall conflict that ravaged the country as a whole and led to its emergence as an independent actor.
62 EUFOR substituted previous missions (UNPROFOR [United Nations Protection Force] 1992-1995; IFOR [NATO-led Implementation Force] 1995-96; SFOR [NATO-led Stabilisation Force] 1996-2004). An office of UNESCO was present in the city between 1994 and 2003.
63 Bollens, “Comparative Research,” 3.
In this framework, investigation and analysis of the case of Sarajevo rely on the assumption that "changing power relationships and roles [...] intersect with place and its cultural and historical attributes to form a site of representation which signifies both 'the site to be represented [...], and the site (geographical, cultural, political, theoretical viewpoint) from which that representation emanates'".65
The significance and the insights that a case study research on Sarajevo can offer, in conclusion, rest on the multifaceted character of the city, its role as capital and symbol, and the fact that what is carved and performed in and onto the urban landscape has far-reaching implications well beyond the city's district.
65 Duncan, “Sites of Representation: place, time and the discourse on the other” 1993, 53, quoted in Maitland, “Tourism and Changin Representation,” 111.