Trauma and Memory: Intergenerational Memories of the Siege of Sarajevo

Join us for the next edition in the Fireside Peace Chats event series! This edition focuses on themes of trauma and memory with guest speaker Emina Zoletic from the University of Warsaw. 

Emina will talk about the Siege of Sarajevo, which lasted from 5th April 1992 to 29th February 1996. Emina’s research engages with issues of national, cultural, and ethnic identity and postwar memories, which intersect with traumatic memories and social justice issues. The central part of this research explores intergenerational war memories in Sarajevo and diasporic families across several locations in the EU and the USA.
Looking at local and transnational dimensions, it was essential to show how intergenerational transmission of war memories is processed, experienced, reshaped, and activated by research interlocutors 30 years after the war. How is the siege of Sarajevo remembered by those who directly experienced it? How do war and migration memories play out in family and broader social, political, and cultural contexts? Looking at two groups helped the research to determine the influence of the broader victimhood narratives and how they are mediated through diaspora groups. Emina’s research demonstrates how, on the level of family units, there is a persistent inability to process and deal with traumatic memories in a space where re-traumatization is ongoing, which affects the meaning-making processes.

This Edition's Guest Speaker

Emina Zoletic is a doctoral candidate at the University of Warsaw, Centre for research social memories.  She is currently doing a CEEPUS fellowship (March-June) at the University of Vienna Institute of Sociology. She was a Fulbright visiting researcher at Syracuse University's Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs, New York, from 2023 to 2024. She leverages her background in psychology and a decade of clinical experience to focus on families from Sarajevo whose older members survived the war in Bosnia and their children born after the war. 

More About Fireside Peace Chats

The Fireside Peace Chats series is an event series consisting of informal, intimate chats with peacebuilders who have either lived in for an extended period of time or are from conflict-affected environments. Fireside Peace Chats are a joint initiative of Leiden University College The Hague (LUC), Knowledge Platform for Security and Rule of the Law (KPSRL), and The Hague Humanity Hub (THHH), with an aim to open a space where practice, research and policy in peacebuilding come together in an informal way, through experience of people on the ground. This initiative aims to contribute to a locally informed paradigm shift in liberal peacebuilding.