Contested Memoryscapes in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Absences and Silences in Everyday Peace

We invite you to the presentation of Johanna Mannergren's book Contested Memoryscapes in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Absences and Silences in Everyday Peace (Central European University Press, 2026), which will take place as part of the public program "Source as a Choice."

Memory scholars have long noted that reconciliation politics after mass violence rarely plays out only in the visible, official register — trials, memorials, state ceremonies. A great deal of how societies live with a difficult past unfolds instead in the register of silence, the unsaid, and the absent.

It is precisely this register that Johanna Mannergren 's new book, Contested Memoryscapes in Bosnia and Herzegovina: Absences and Silences in Everyday Peace (Central European University Press, 2026), sets out to address. The book argues that to confront the painful legacy of mass violence and atrocities, we need to consider everything that goes beyond immediate, visible politics: silences and secrets, voids and erasures.

Through the conceptual lens of "the presence of absence," the book undertakes several in-depth accounts of the difficult peace in Bosnia and Herzegovina three decades after the end of the war. The inherent paradox of the presence of absence captures the tension between the loss in the past and the politics around this loss in the present — emerging as a productive, frictional power with the potential not only for denial and oppression, but also for resistance and restoration.

The book employs emplaced, embodied, and narrative perspectives, advancing theoretical understandings of the impact of memory politics on peace and offering unique insights into lived realities in Bosnia and Herzegovina — relevant for other societies grappling with the long-term consequences of mass violence.

The event will take place in English with simultaneous interpretation into Ukrainian.

The event will take place as part of the public program "Source as a Choice" organized by the Center for Urban History in partnership with Documenting Ukraine / IWM and Research Centre Ukraine / Max Weber Foundation.  

During the meetings, researchers will share their work with various sources on war and mass violence in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The choice to create and preserve sources can be one of the tools for embodying this violence or, on the contrary, for opposing it. Our choice to talk about these events through the prism of certain sources creates a field in which the complex past will live on in the present and future.