BOOK: Governing the past
Now out with Cambridge University Press
The way we govern the past to ensure peaceful futures keeps conflict anxieties alive. In pursuit of its own survival, permanence and legitimacy, the project of transitional justice, designed to put the 'Never Again' promise into practice, makes communities that ought to benefit from it anxious about potential repetition of conflict. This book challenges the benevolence of this human rights-led global project. It invites readers to reflect on the incompatibility between transitional justice and the grand goal of ensuring peace, and to imagine alternative and ungovernable futures. Rich in stories from the field, the author draws on personal experiences of conflict and transition in the former Yugoslavia to explore how different elements of transitional justice have changed the structure of Bosnia and Herzegovina and neighbouring societies over the years. This powerful study is essential reading for students, scholars and practitioners interested in human rights and durable international peace.
CURRENT RESEARCH PROJECTS
Book project: Voids in Global Politics
Co-authored with Hannes Hansen-Magnusson, Ingrid Medby, and Christoph Laucht.
Identifying, filling, and creating gaps in knowledge have triggered, driven, and defined political action and collective identities of political actors over the centuries. We argue that these phenomena are parts of what we call the ‘politics of voids’. Voids play a central role in societies’ internal and external politics, but they have been largely overlooked, treated as epiphenomena, or as individual cases.
Drawing from the multidisciplinary background of the authors of this monograph in International Relations, Politics, Geography, and History, the book underlines the central role of voids for the functioning of societies, especially through the way they are embedded in political projects. The emptiness of voids is addressed through an exploratory and interpretive approach that enquires questions of power and agency while exploring cases that speak to high politics as well as everyday and bottom-up perspectives. As a co-authored, collaborative project, the conceptual framework and
empirical parts offer an integrated perspective throughout the book, building on a typology that can be made accessible from different disciplinary angles. As such, the book builds bridges across different subfields of IR and between neighbouring disciplines like ontological security, IPS, critical geography, social movement analyses, transnational history, and critical security studies.
This book project is in the final stage of development.
New project: Knowing War
This project investigates how war as an object of inquiry came to be known by historical international fact-finding commissions. Underpinned by theories of epistemic violence and postcolonial methodologies, the project 1) explores how the commissions shaped commonsense views of war, produced epistemic subjects and organized relations among them to establish war as governable; 2) interrupts the commonsense views by drawing on plural interpretations from multiple connected sites to challenge silences and hierarchies and 3) evaluates the continuities and disruptions of such epistemic violence in contemporary global governance of knowledge.
This project is in the early stages of development.
Work-in-progress: What Makes and Breaks Revisionist States? Historical Revisionism, Ontological Secu
Work-in-progress: What Makes and Breaks Revisionist States? Historical Revisionism, Ontological Secu
While historical revisionism is commonly used to justify offensive foreign policies and mobilise war support, little scholarly attention is paid to its scope and importance in the Western Balkans, a region that continues to test Europe's security assurances. To advance the knowledge on prevention of conflict repetition and ontological security, this project investigates how historical revisionism, particularly atrocity crimes denial, emerges, develops and diminishes in states' foreign policies during post-conflict reckoning with the past.
Underpinned by Critical Security Studies, the project aims to a) map out the use of historical revisionism by revisionist governments in Serbia, Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina, b) establish the factors influencing revisionist behaviour and c) understand the role of 'ordinary' people in triggering, challenging and correcting such behaviour. The project employs document analysis, focus groups and interviews to trace the external/internal dynamics influencing the development and decline of revisionist states and carries significant policy-oriented implications.
This was a British Academy funded sponsored project [May 2023 - January 2025] that is now preparing its final outputs.