Book Talk: Inner Zone: The Untold Violence of Retribution in Besieged Sarajevo

Book talk: Inner Zone: The Untold Violence of Retribution in Besieged Sarajevo
Jelena Golubović, Assistant Professor of Anthropology and International Affairs, Northeastern University.
Discussant: Danilo Mandić, Associate Senior Lecturer, Department of Sociology, Harvard University

About the book

Between 1992 and 1995, Bosnian Serb forces besieged Sarajevo — but not every Serb stood on the side of the besiegers. Inner Zone returns to that emblematic conflict through the experiences of Bosnian Serb women who stayed in the city throughout the siege. Cast as kin to the ethno-national aggressor, they became targets of collective punishment and retribution inside the encircled city, and the crimes committed against them were largely written out of scholarly and journalistic accounts of the war, surviving in Sarajevo only as a kind of public secret.

Drawing on ethnographic interviews, Golubović pluralises the familiar, monolithic story of the siege into distinct zones of violence, locating an inner zone of retribution nested within the outer zone of besiegement. The result is a layered history that unsettles neat divisions between victim and perpetrator, and complicity and innocence, on both sides of the front line. The book also confronts a difficult political question: what happens when recognition is withheld from those who suffer on the “wrong” side of a conflict? Golubović argues that this unacknowledged injury and sense of misrecognition can itself become a route by which victims are drawn toward the very ethno-nationalist narratives that claim to speak for them — even as nationalist elites selectively appropriate their suffering to assert exclusive victimhood.

An unflinching study of memory, gender, and the politics of victimhood after atrocity, Inner Zone offers new tools for telling the contested histories of war.