Ideology, war, and genocide – the empirical case of Bosnia and Herzegovina

ABSTRACT

This article explores the connections among the discursive nature of ideology, identity politics, forced displacement, and symbolic and actual war violence leading to genocide. The general framework of the article is the Bosnian War (1992–1995), waged against the country and its civilians. The analytical basis is a literature review of various studies from the domains of sociology of knowledge, war sociology, and social epistemology. It is based on the perspective of the genocide in Bosnia as a process that began in northwest and east Bosnia in 1992 and terminated in Srebrenica in 1995 (in the municipality Prijedor in northwest Bosnia in 1992, more than 3000 civilians were killed). Mass crimes and the policy of fear mongering were intended to create and recreate the collective belief that coexistence in Bosnia was impossible and that establishing “ethnically pure cultures” and “ethnically pure territories” should be accepted as a deterministic historical necessity. The results of our research indicate that crimes against civilians can be “normalized” only after a “new social order” has been established as a war order with the help of media propaganda. Genocide can be committed only if the perpetrators (and its advocates acting in the name of specific identity politics) believe that committing violence can be justified by a “higher cause.”

KEYWORDS:

• Ideological dimension of the war
• symbolic dimension of the war
• institutional analysis
• critical analysis of discourse
• democracy
• phenomenology

Disclosure statements

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. This text has been in some parts published earlier in Swedish in the article “Definitioner av våld i överlevandes berättelser efter kriget i Bosnien” (Basic 2015c) and in English in the article “Definitions of Violence: Narratives of Survivors from the War in Bosnia and Herzegovina” (Basic 2018).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Linnaeus Knowledge Environment: A Questioned Democracy.

Notes on contributors

Goran Basic

Goran Basic is associate professor of sociology and senior lecturer at the Department of Pedagogy and Learning, Linnaeus University, Sweden. His research concerns social and pedagogical processes and collaborations among different actors in school, university, youth care, social care, police, and coast guard. He has also written articles on post-war society and carried out an evaluation of several projects in juvenile care. Special analytical focus in Basic’s research is on the functions of the context and its impact on the non-professional actor in the relationship (child, youth, pupil, student, service user, parent, traveller, suspect, civilian, refugee, prisoner).

Zlatan Delić

Zlatan Delić is an Associate Professor currently working at the University of Tuzla, Bosnia and Herzegovina. He has published two books, several articles in the field of humanities and social sciences and he has participated in international research projects. The subject of scientific interest: sociology of knowledge, methodologies, critical discourse analysis, critical studies of science, technology and ideology, globalization, glocalization, multicultural and social epistemology, sociology of Bosnian society, sociology of sustainable communities, bioethics, social and deep ecology, new criminology, criminological theories, victimology, postcolonial studies and local and regional development.