Extreme Case of Crisis: Definitions of War Violence in Narratives of Survivors from the War in Bosnia and Herzegovina

The starting point of this article is the war that took place in northwestern Bosnia and Herzegovina and more specifi cally interpersonal interpretations of violence and the biographical impact of war-time violence. Serbian soldiers and police targeted their use of violent force directly against the civilian populations in northwestern Bosnia. In their quest to expel Bosniacs and Croats from this area, Serbian soldiers and police used mass executions, forced flight, systematic rape, and concentration camps. The aim of this article is to analyze how the survivors describe war-time violence and which discursive patterns emerge in the
construction of the category “war violence.” My questions are as follows: How do the interviewees describe wartime violence? Which categories of violence are highlighted in the stories? How do war survivors describe sexual violence and other sexual abuse during the war? In this study, I seek to touch on the phenomenon “war violence” by analyzing the narratives of the informants, namely their descriptions in relation to themselves and others. This analysis will show that the interpretation of the biographical consequences of war violence is intimately related to the subject’s own war experiences. In the following, I try to highlight how the creation of the concept “war violence” is made visible when the interviewees, in the empirical material, talk about (1) a new social order in society, (2) human suffering, (3) sexual violence, and (4) slaughter of humans.