Memory abuse, violence and the dissolution of Yugoslavia: a theoretical framework for understanding memory in conflict

Abstract

This paper explores the term “memory abuse” as an analytical framework to understanding politically constructed mnemonic tensions in the years preceding Yugoslavia's violent dissolution. Here, “memory abuse” represents an intersection between the literatures of memory and conflict studies and refers to the intentional manipulation of memory beyond an intangible threshold, past which violence inevitably results. Drawing on the typologies of collective and cultural memory by Aleida and Jan Assmann, I argue that the political mobilisation of both distant and recent memories in the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia in the late 1980s to a significant degree contributed to the outbreak of war in the early 1990s, and contemporary political actors have perpetuated an abuse of memory that has limited reconciliatory outcomes in the region since the end of conflict. In reformulating the memories of, inter alia, the 1389 Battle of Kosovo and the atrocities of the Second World War to fit nationalist narratives, political actors across Yugoslavia's republics sought to profit from forced divisions that ultimately brought about the country's end.