Shadows of the past: violent conflict and its repercussions for second-generation Bosnians in the diaspora

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article explores how diaspora youth is impacted by and deals with the legacies of the violent conflict in their parents’ homeland of Bosnia. Based on the analysis of narrative-biographic interviews with second-generation Bosnians in Switzerland and ethnographic observations in diaspora spaces, this paper highlights the repercussions that Yugoslav disintegration wars and, particularly, the war in Bosnia (1992–1995) have for young people who were raised in Switzerland. First, it demonstrates that instead of a coherent picture about the past, young people receive fragments and pieces of personal memories and experiences that their families went through. Second, the history of conflict has repercussions for the ways young people establish and articulate their sense of attachment and belonging to the homeland of their parents. Third, while second-generation Bosnians rarely reproduce the conflict dynamic themselves, they move in spaces in which the legacies of conflict continue to be an important discursive and structural force.