Identity, ethnic boundaries, and collective victimhood: analysing strategies of self-victimisation in postwar Bosnia-Herzegovina

Abstract

Characteristics from the social construction of ‘self’ and of ‘others’ in Bosnia-Herzegovina show that the creation of a positive self-image in this post-war society is strongly connected with collective self-victimisation of one’s own in-group. An objective hermeneutical analysis of narrative interviews conducted with Bosniaks, Bosnian Croats, and Bosnian Serbs reveals five self-victimisation strategies: Two dissociative strategies, which conspicuously reproduce the dichotomy of victim and perpetrator along ethnic lines and candidly reinforce the ethnic boundaries–moral alchemy and double relativisation–and three strategies, which seem to transcend the boundaries between ethnic in-group and out-group–the associative strategies of subjectification of war, the externalisation of responsibility, and silence. A subsequent contextualisation of the identified strategies indicates, however, that, ultimately, associative strategies are equally conducive to the further manifestation of ethnic boundaries.