Geographies of Crime and Justice in Bosnia and Herzegovina

Abstract

‘Space’ has become a keyword in a variety of critical approaches to the study of culture, and the ‘spatial turn’ — the acknowledgment of the constitutive role of space in social relations — has proved to be a productive one in a range of disciplines across the humanities and social sciences (see e.g. Buck-Morss 1983; Innis 1951; Lefebvre 1991; Soja 1989; Thrift 2002). The identity of spaces is very much connected to the histories which are recounted about them, how those histories are narrated and which interpretation of history becomes dominant. Hundreds of diverse locations across today’s Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) are associated with the armed conflicts of the the 1990s — these are the spaces that witnessed rape, torture and massacres. Some of these were purpose-built, but many everyday ordinary places were also transformed. For example, schools, sports halls and hotels were reworked for ‘extraordinary’ purposes into spaces of crime.