Abstract: The paper argues that the narrative of the independent Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina and of its capital city Sarajevo under siege (1992-1995) was built on the trope of Sarajevo’s European, Western-oriented, cosmopolitan cultural identity, based on the image initially nurtured by Socialist Yugoslavia. In the new context of the implosion of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (1945 -1991) the siege of Sarajevo and the war in one of the Yugoslav republics, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Yugoslav socialism was replaced by the multi-ethnic and cosmopolitan character of the young Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina. I argue that the image of Sarajevo during the siege, as a by-product of foreign attention to the plight of the country and its citizens, was built on the pre-existing premises that promoted Socialist Yugoslavia as Western oriented and therefore progressive, in contrast to other communist countries beyond the Iron Curtain.

The crisis of state cultural institutions in Bosnia and Herzegovina that started in 2010 peaked with the closure of the National Museum in 2012. The crisis exposed the fragmentation that was taking place within Sarajevo’s cultural elite and the increasing gap between the former state cultural institutions and the civil sector. This paper examines the entanglement between the memory of the siege of Sarajevo and the fractioning within Sarajevo’s cultural elite through Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of cultural capital and social distinctions, using the examples of the National Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina and the Sarajevo Film Festival.

As Yugoslavia fell apart in the 1990s, the Serbs used violence strategically, to achieve permanent divisions between ethnic categories and to thwart future attempts to rebuild trust and normalize interethnic relations. The goal of the violence was to intensify national and religious differences within socialist Yugoslavia’s highly multicultural society. The violence of the war, and the sexual violence in particular, influenced the identity of Bosnian Muslims. It heightened their sense of endangerment and consequently, their feeling of belonging to a persecuted group. This paper analyzes the visual representations of motherhood, violence and victimhood in four films directed by Jasmila Žbanic. It finds inspiration in Žarana Papic’s critical approach to patriarchy and nationalism and Inger Skjelsbaek’s field work among the survivors of sexual violence in Bosnia and Herzegovina. The paper’s main goals are to trace the link between patriarchy, nationalism and the memory of gender-directed violence, and to highlight the transformation of Bosnian Muslim identity within the context of history. Keywords: Bosnia and Herzegovina; genocide; war crimes; sexual violence; patriarchy; victimhood; motherhood DOI: 10.14712/23363231.2019.12 © 2019 The Authors. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the  Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License , which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited, the use is non-commercial and no modifications or adaptations are made.

Jasmina works as Assistant Professor at the Art Education Department of the Academy of Fine Arts in Sarajevo. Recently, a colleague of mine at the Academy of Fine Arts in Sarajevo told me she had felt more enthusiastic about working during the war. She said: “You know it was better in the time of war, even in the few years after it ended.” Considering that the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina (1992-1996) produced colossal human casualties estimated at 100,000, and that it was characterized by severe acts of inter-ethnic aggression, mass rape and genocide, as well as enormous economic and infrastructural devastation, her remark might seem odd.