Challenges of Postconflict Coexistence: Narrating Truth and Justice in a Bosnian Town

Abstract

This article sets out to deepen our understanding of how people make everyday strategies for living together after mass atrocities and what role transitional justice may play for these strategies. Based on a study in the small town of Foča in Bosnia‐Herzegovina, the analysis unpacks the encounter between three clusters of narratives that make competing moral claims and offer different ways of ordering the past, present, and future: the “institutional” narrative formed globally at various institutions of transitional justice and here represented in the local by the International Criminal Tribunal for Former Yugoslavia (ICTY); the collective narratives of ethnonationalism constructed by entrepreneurs in politics and media and fed into daily discourses; and individual narratives “in the margins” that refuse collective categorizations. The article argues that the ICTY narrative, based on individual justice and factual truth, was, contrary to its aims, used to enforce exclusionist and collective claims. At the same time, less dominant narratives embraced the ICTY narrative, which suggests that the tribunal may potentially play a constructive role as an “archive for the future.”