(Re)producing Victimhood: Exploring Narratives in Bosnia and Herzegovina

Talk about the War Again (2011). In the video, the artists, both dressed in black are facing one another. They repeat the phrase ja više nikada neću pričati o ratu or I will never talk about the war again, in various registers, as if having a conversation or a dialogue. Through the repetition of the phrase, it also becomes a promise to one another. However, this is a promise that is continually broken. This video, for me, captures the everydayness of conversations about the war. Indeed, in the caption to the video, Adela Jusić states that ‘it is impossible to not talk about the war’. In this context narratives of victimhood are continually (re)produced. The purpose of the video, for Jusić is ‘to expose all the possible emotions we have about this fact ’ (Jusić 2014). In the paper I draw upon Jacoby’s theory of victimhood as a starting point for thinking about how this politics might emerge, making the crucial distinction between victimisation, and victimhood. She maps out a process by which a collective identity of victimhood is produced. The theory she outlines contains five sequential stages of victimhood, which she argues neither have to be complete or exercised in a linear fashion: 1. Structural conduciveness; 2. Political consciousness; 3. Ideological concurrence; 4. Political mobilisation; 5. Political recognition. This paper then argues that various actors, or in Jacoby’s terms, ‘bases ’ for the mobilisation of a politics of victimhood (re)produc