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SLAVIC & EASTERN EUROPEAN STUDIES / ANTHROPOLOGY / HISTORY / GENDER STUDIES
“Undertaking what might be deemed an ‘anthropology of difficult truths,’
Elissa Helms unflinchingly examines the contradictions of women’s
activism in contemporary Bosnia-Herzegovina. This sobering book is as
courageous and complex as the women who populate its pages.”
—Pamela Ballinger, University of Michigan
The 1992–95 war in Bosnia-Herzegovina following the dissolution of socialist
Yugoslavia became notorious for “ethnic cleansing” and mass rapes targeting the
Bosniac (Bosnian Muslim) population. Postwar social and political processes
have continued to be dominated by competing nationalisms representing Bosni-
acs, Serbs, and Croats, as well as those supporting a multiethnic Bosnian state, in
which narratives of victimhood take center stage, often in gendered form. Elissa
Helms shows that, in the aftermath of the war, initiatives by and for Bosnian
women perpetuated and complicated dominant images of women as victims and
peacemakers in a conflict and political system led by men. In a sober corrective
to such accounts, she offers a critical look at the politics of women’s activism and
gendered nationalism in a postwar and postsocialist society.
Drawing on ethnographic research spanning fifteen years,
Innocence and
Victimhood
demonstrates how women’s activists and NGOs responded to, chal-
lenged, and often reinforced essentialist images in affirmative ways, using the
moral purity associated with the position of victimhood to bolster social claims,
shape political visions, pursue foreign funding, and wage campaigns for postwar
justice. Deeply sensitive to the suffering at the heart of Bosnian women’s (and
men’s) wartime experiences, this book also reveals the limitations to strategies
that emphasize innocence and victimhood.
Elissa Helms
is associate professor of gender studies at Central European Univer-
sity in Hungary. She is a coeditor, with Xavier Bougarel and Ger Duijzings, of
The
New Bosnian Mosaic: Identities, Memories and Moral Claims in a Post-War Society
.
PAPERBACK ORIGINAL
DECEMBER
LC: 2013011468 HN
320 PP. 6 × 9 21 B/W PHOTOS, 1 MAP
E-BOOK $21.95 S ISBN 978-0-299-29553-0
Critical Human Rights
Steve J. Stern and Scott Straus,
Series Editors
“This is a brave and important
book of significance both for our
understanding of postwar Bosnia-
Herzegovina and for what it says
about the unintended consequences
of initiatives aimed at improving the
lot of women and society as a whole
in a post-conflict environment.”
—
Wendy Bracewell, University
College London
Of re l at ed int e re s t
Diana Howansky Reilly
“A very readable book, dealing with com-
plex and controversial issues of World War
II and the early Cold War in a balanced
and enlightened manner.”—Serhii Plokhii,
Harvard University, author of
Yalta: The
Price of Peace
PUBLISHED JUNE 2013
LC: 2012037002 DK 192 PP. 5 ½ × 8 ¼
34 B/W ILLUS., 5 MAPS
E-BOOK $17.95 T ISBN 978-0-299-29343-7
