Life History Research and the Violence of War: Experiencing Binary Thinking on Pain and Privilege, Being and Knowing
Abstract
:1. Introduction: Life History Research and Polyphony of Voices
Being and Knowing
- Evidence
This has been a trying time. In so many ways also the best time of my life. Because for the first time in my quite a long life, I know what knowing means. I can experience it. I feel it. It runs throughout my body and mind. Notice ‘the order of things’ I use! Realising this, experiencing it, has been the single, most important thing in my life, so far. The one on which all else can be built. In a meaningful way.
Except that it also left me deeply troubled about one aspect of my life. A very important one, at that. My profession. I am a social scientist, and a scholar. My profession requires me to take an active part in the process of the production of knowledge through a creative link between research, teaching, and public engagement. Some like to call this last bit—‘impact’. It is also known as—evidence-based research in social sciences. In what I do, I’ve been grappling with the idea for quite some time now. How do I evidence the evidence that may not be seen as evidence by others?
This is what happened to me at one of these mega-big international, evidence based, EU funded, mega project conferences on migration. A fellow Canadian was one of the plenary speakers. His talk is on Canadian multiculturalism and he is critical about it. I listen. I follow the categories presented on slides. The statistical data, too. His talk is based on a big pan-Canadian survey of immigrants. Impressive. How many people had to work very hard to develop and carry out that kind of research, I think to myself? How much statistical and other knowledge was required to come up with all these categories? The cost of it all must’ve been equally impressive. I mean, if you compare it to what I need to travel to a place and ‘talk to a few people and mingle’, as some funders as well as some colleagues view what I do. Or I even do not have to travel. I can stay put, and still do it.
The categories were impressive, as I said, the number of them, the way they were neatly presented on the graphs. All very scientific. But I was unable to find myself in there. My experience, as an immigrant in Canada, as a naturalised Canadian who now lives and works abroad, was not in these categories. I was not on the graphs! And I am sure that I was not the only one missing. Even if I am to be reduced to a statistical error, I want my voice to be counted in. I, my experience, make the knowledge—whole. Without me or you, it is incomplete.
During the break, I approach the fellow Canadian speaker, I introduce myself. I tell him briefly that my experience with and of Canadian multiculturalism was somewhat different from what was presented. I talk. He listens and he asks: But where is evidence for what you are saying? I smile and say: I am the evidence. This closes our scientific exchange.
2. Family Stories from the Past: Flexible National Identification, Social Justice, and Emancipatory Family Traits
2.1. Otherness Was Just Part of Life
One needs to remember that this was in 1946, in Yugoslavia, where Germans faced deep hatred, like elsewhere across Europe. I am mentioning this because it was very remarkable. Many people at the time would have said that she was the enemy. They would have been ashamed, engaged in self-censorship, and they would make sure no neighbour hears. But my grandmother had a remarkably openminded attitude at the time; she wanted my father to get in touch with Elsa because, as she told him, she was with her son when he needed support the most.
The family story about Elsa helps explain, among other things, why I was always looking at people as individuals, not as labels. The first German I ever knew was Elsa. Only later did I learn about Germans who were Nazis... The point I am making here is that I have lived and experienced openness towards others since I was a child.
2.2. Social Justice: Acting and Speaking Up
I also grew up knowing that my parental grandfather made his will in 1938, just six months before he was assassinated. He left everything to his wife, my grandmother, including his trading business/company to lead/manage with one of their three sons, the one she would feel the most comfortable to collaborate and work with, the will states. At the time when my grandfather wrote this will, his two elder sons were 26 and 22 years old (my father was 14 years old at the time), and his eldest son was already working with him in his trading company. He had also stipulated that it is up to his wife to decide how she would want to divide up his estate among their sons. The only property left explicitly to his sons or one of them, were his books, that is—his quite large library, under the condition that they or one of them would be pursuing intellectual career/path. Otherwise, it was to be left to the local, town’s library with a clear indication that the books came from his library.
In 1949, my parents were just married. This was also less than a year after the breakup with Soviet Russia, when Yugoslavia officially embarked on its unique socialist path, to become a socialist country ‘with a difference’, as Meg Coulson (1993) characterized it.3 In 1949, however, the process was just starting and it was extremely, extremely difficult, both economically and politically. Although there was this formal separation from the Cominform politics, led by Stalinist Soviet state, much of it was still ‘the Soviet/Stalinist way’. For example, in how the everyday party life was conducted.
In 1949, religion was completely forbidden grounds, although that changed to certain extent later. I’m absolutely certain that there were many people at that time and later on who through some sort of self-censorship did not dare say that they were marking a religious day. But that did not stop my father.
Even when he couldn’t do anything to stop political practices he deeply disagreed with, he was finding ways to speak up. For example, while he was in Cambridge, on a Yugoslav Government scholarship, in 1953–1954, he was aware that, at the time, all letters sent from abroad, and possibly not only from abroad, were intercepted and read first, before being delivered to their rightful recipients. Hence, when he was writing to my mother or his mother, he always added a paragraph, addressing the so-called UDBA (i.e., federal state security services) readers. As he used to say: ‘so that they are not bored by all that emotional and family stuff in my letters’.
In retrospect, I would say that he was refusing to be intimidated by what he saw as unacceptable political practice. And again, in retrospect, I think that his refusal to be intimidated is not primarily, or possibly at all, linked to so-called fearlessness or bravery. It stems from a very strong belief, in your mind and heart, that what you stand for is the only thing you can do.
He did not lose his position, he was promoted as an academic and, indeed, he was not imprisoned. The latter was not the way of dealing with political opponents in the country from the 1960, I’d say. My father was engaged in bitter public, political debates most of his life. He was quite often publicly attacked in the media […] He used to carry it quite well throughout his life. So, that was the price he had to pay for speaking up and pushing boundaries that he felt needed to be pushed.
This does not mean that there weren’t people who were actually crashed in different ways, but that never happened to anyone in my close environment. I guess that is why I speak my mind. And that of course, is not socially wise anywhere and at any time, not just during the time of socialist Yugoslavia.
3. Life in Yugoslavia before the Yugoslav Wars: Yugoslav Identity as Shared Identity and the Importance of Feminist Engagements
3.1. Growing Up and Forging Shared Identity: Memories of Travel
It was the height of the Cold War when we were in the States, and as people from a so-called ‘communist’ country we were the family to be seen, met, and touched, if possible [laughs] […] Everybody was keen to meet us, and my parents were subjected to all kinds of questions about freedoms, rights and liberties under the so-called ‘communist regime’. In a country in which, at the time, a huge percentage of its own population had no rights and freedoms because of the colour of their skin.4
This kind of dedicated traveling by car to visit places in Europe for around a month during summer was happening, for a period, every two years. It always involved catching up with people, sometimes with family friends who happened to live in the places we were visiting or staying with Elsa and her husband Mutz in Baden-Baden, as well as catching up with all kinds of professional contacts that my father had. They would take us around; they would invite us to their homes. These trips were never just pure tourism, visiting museums and historic sites. They were a possibility of meeting local people, everywhere we went.
We did not only travel abroad. We travelled extensively in Yugoslavia, mostly during summers; from the early 1960s on, by car. So, by the age of 15, there was practically no part of that country that I did not know and in which I did not meet someone who is local. My father was really a meticulous planner of these trips. Also, through his work, and because he was that kind of person, he knew someone almost everywhere. Like a former student now happily working somewhere. He would let them know that we were coming. Thus, we were always greeted by someone local, shown around, met other local people they knew.5 […]
I’m saying this because that is how I felt that these places—how would I say this now, without causing offense to anybody—are mine; that I know them, that I engaged with people everywhere I went. That is how all these places have become an integral part of me. They deeply formed me. I have formative links with all these places, smells, accents, languages. I am a true multi-cultural South Slav or Yugo-Slav.6 That’s probably one of the strongest and deeply emotional reasons that I have never made peace with that horrible war.
When faced with the violent re-composition of my social space based on the ultimate claim for ethnic-national ‘oneness’ and the creation of a hated other, my feminist experience—which I have defined as a choice of flexible identifications—remained crucial for who I am, and who I could become.
3.2. Young Adulthood: Feminist Engagements as Critique of Socialist and Nationalist Patriarchy in the Region
I was not part of the ‘sisterhood is powerful’ process. The notion of sisterhood had always struck me as too much of a sameness, something that I could not identify with. What appealed to me was a critique of systems of power that feminism offers in exposing the sources of injustice that need to be addressed to achieve equality of opportunity. My ‘consciousness-raising’ was linked to reading and lively discussions with friends, mostly women of my generation. The process turned me into ‘the curious feminist’, to borrow from Cynthia Enloe (2004), a colleague and a dear friend.
During my PhD in Canada, some of my colleagues who studied in the 70s, remembered ‘staff common rooms’ to which women did not have access. Such an experience was alien to me. But it also explains why it was paramount to have strong feminist movements in the 1960s and 70s, in the Western world.
Women in Yugoslavia gained all these rights in 1945/6; but to translate that into equality of gender power relations, it is necessary not only to change the law, but also to tackle culture and customs, both of which remained deeply patriarchal. That is what feminism in Yugoslavia was tackling.
In 1990, we created the Women’s Parliament, as a space for women to get together, discuss pressing socio-political issues and come up with strategies to address them publicly. One initiative was to go to Croatia to talk to prominent intellectuals and other public figures who were mostly, but not exclusively, women. We talked about possibilities of bottom up organising to prevent violence. I was among those who went to Zagreb. Our meetings were followed by public statements we issued. However, mobilization towards violence continued in full swing, because the federal republics continued relentlessly to spread fear and hatred.
At that point, there was an initiative to start mainstream politics participation, rather than to operate only outside of the state system. Hence, the Women’s Party (ŽEST) was founded. One of the leading minds behind this initiative was my professor, supervisor, and dear friend, the late Andjelka Milić. The first founding meeting of the ŽEST party took place in my flat in Belgrade. Perhaps I should consider putting up a plaque! [laughs]
This party initiative did not go very far for various reasons. Personally, I grew uneasy about mainstream political engagement, because of my bitter disappointment with the official party politics in Yugoslavia, since the early 1980s. Ever since, I strongly felt that if I am to influence any social change, it has to be from outside the official political system. From below and from the margins.
As a person, a woman, and a feminist scholar from war-torn Yugoslavia, I did my best to support the peace processes, challenge nationalistic politics and fight against the victimization of women in war. In 1989, on the eve of the outbreak of armed violence in Yugoslavia, and throughout the 1990s, I was involved with local and international women’s initiatives against nationalism and war in the region. As one of the founding members of the Women’s Parliament (founded in 1989), as well as part of the Women in Black anti-war protests in Belgrade, London and Toronto, during the 1990s
4. From ‘Voluntary Exile’ at the Start of the Yugoslav Wars to Life as ‘Other’ in the UK: Trauma, Privilege, and ‘Othering’
4.1. Mobility Paths, Academic Trajectories, and Inescapable Identity Politics
I never left to leave. I went on a scholarship to Oxford. Just for one term. And then I got another one from the British Council. For an additional term, in London. I moved from Oxford to London just before Christmas 1992. By that time, I had already kind of acknowledged that the wars would not stop soon. My original plan to return, after my scholarships were over, no longer felt like a good one. […] I did not want, if I could help it, to return and live a life framed by my ethnic origin, as if nothing else makes us and ‘our’ states worthwhile. Besides, I never felt ‘ethnic’ and I do not now. I do not understand what that category and label convey about me. As a person. I feel it as violence. A brutal form of enforcement of meaning upon my sense of self. An invasion of my identity and the multiplicity of its elements.
There are also over 200,000 educated and highly skilled people between the ages of twenty-five and forty-five who left the country. This war is not their war, this leadership is not their leadership […] Among numerous problems they have to face […] is the psychological burden of being labelled as one of ‘them’, the most savage, aggressive and cruel nation in the region.
The revival of ethnic-nationalism and the disintegration of a familiar social space disrupted my own sense of belonging and radically displaced me. It left me, I feel, without the option of being either Yugoslav or Serb. On the one hand, the geographical space that is still officially called Yugoslavia is without the essential cultural, political, and social markers with which I identified.9 On the other, from my own sense of self, it is impossible for me to identify as a Serb, because that would now imply acceptance of the values of “purification,” “cleansing” of differences, and the process of exclusion. Thus, the place I am speaking from now, is somewhere in transition. It is a transition to a space where a new identity and new subjectivity can be articulated.
4.2. Living with Trauma and Confronting a ‘Label of Shame’
In retrospect, the entire experience was far more traumatic for me than I was able to acknowledge at the time. I had to function. That all of it was extremely traumatic became clear to me much later, once I started to settle into a so-called ‘post-deep uncertainty’ era of my life. When I returned to Britain from Canada to start my first full-fledged academic position since I left my academic life in Belgrade, and after I found my soulmate in Mark with whom I have created a ‘home that transcends the geography of places’ (Korac 2020), some of these experiences have started to pop up demanding to be dealt with and articulated.
When I came to Britain, in 1992, I realized that people indeed don’t know much about the war that shattered my country and my life. I realised that there is no respite from that black and white picture that pretty much everybody took for granted…That first period was a particularly difficult period, because of that. All the tragic loss of so many lives, and destruction of the country that I loved so much. Plus, the label of shame.
The war was really a wound. And it was not just because it was happening there, and I was somewhere else. But also, because while the war was on, particularly during my initial time in Britain, it was a hot topic—politically, publicly, and in academia. So, I found myself in high demand [laughs]. I was invited to an endless number of different public and academic events in Britain and elsewhere in Europe.
It was a truly excruciating emotional experience for me to participate in these events as ‘an academic from Serbia’. In most cases, other panellists were from other parts of war-torn Yugoslavia, all of them expected to speak from a victim position. And there I was, in what at the time was an absolutely intolerable position for me. Central to my way of being is to speak up, but in these events, I was silenced, mute. Feeling that I could not say that I had also been victimized by the political developments that I or people like me could not stop. And there were literally hundreds of thousands of people like me in Serbia who were made invisible.
I felt strongly that I could not speak and have my voice heard. Instead, I would repeat the anti-nationalist and anti-war stuff that I used to say while in Belgrade. Also, always desperately trying to make a point that not all people there are monsters… All of it became emotionally so difficult for me that in the early spring of 1993 I told my friend Cynthia10 that I can no longer accept these invitations because I refuse to be a ‘rent-a-Serb’ panellist; that is how I felt, and it was a terrible position to be in
Since I have started my ‘voluntary’ exile here, in England, I have learned with sorrow that to Europeans […] there are no ex-Yugoslav citizens, as individuals, there are just ethnic-nations, some regarded as better than others. There is a history as well, full of conflicts, injustices, causes and ‘objective’ explanations. From that ‘objective’ point of view a person like me no longer existed.(Korac 1993, quoted in 1998a, p. 19)
- Theatre
It was latish March in 1999. One of these late winter days in Toronto when one feels that enough is enough, knowing full well that there is much more to endure. As you can imagine, it was not a great start of a day. I had a seminar with my Research Methods students that afternoon. So, there was preparation and all, no time for much else on that gloomy day. Especially because I had to travel all the way up to York campus from the Annex, where I lived. It was a blessing to have close friends from York within a walking distance from where I lived. That made it feel a bit like Belgrade to me. By the time I returned home that evening, mind you, I did not feel that there was anything homely about it at all. But I am running ahead of myself here.
During the break of my regular two-hour seminar on that day, I went as always to one of the cafes on York Lane, to have one of my daily doses of nicotine and caffeine. I was still a smoker then, and smoking was still allowed. That is hard to imagine now, but I was lucky to have a cigarette at that moment! Because, while I was sitting at one of the tables with my coffee and a cigarette, I found myself staring at one of the TV screens hanging down from the ceiling. The volume was turned down, but the images where crystal clear. Something was burning, I thought at first, a big fire. But as I continued watching, now intrigued by the fire, I saw a bridge being blown into pieces. The next image really caught my attention, because I thought for a moment that I am seeing a building in Belgrade, the one I know so well, against a backdrop of what looked like spectacular fireworks. Actually, it is a building in Belgrade. I am not imagining, I realised almost simultaneously. The big fire was the start of a NATO campaign, as violent attacks on places and peoples by bombing them have been termed in the military, diplomatic, and academic jargon to accompany a new paradigm in International Relations, the one that marked the last decade of the 20th century. The theatre, yet another piece of jargon created, where this campaign ‘was showing’ happened to be my hometown.
Theatre it was, staging a tragedy of a deeply personal nature. My mama and dad. My sister and my nephew. My dear friends. My known and unknown neighbours. Nice and not so nice shopkeepers, waiters, hairdressers, teachers, bus drivers, postmen, and the rest of the fellow citizens of Belgrade. They were all there at that moment as I was watching the campaign unfolding. From Toronto, sitting in a busy café on York campus. At the very moment that the campaign was unfolding in front of my eyes, my ears were bombarded by the ‘French fries and a coke walking’ shouts by the staff at the bar. See, there is a proper way to use appropriate language to fit the context.
As there is also a proper way to do the appropriate thing in any given moment in life. As any well brought up and well-mannered person would tell you. I looked at my watch, I noted that it is the time to return to my students and the seminar I was responsible for. Responsibility. Professionalism. I did the seminar. I engaged with the students following the pre-planned class schedule. I went home. I called my parents. My father picks up the phone and I start wailing. His attempts to comfort me and bring me back to a state in which it is possible to talk were interrupted by loud, yes loud, even all these miles and an ocean away, sound of sirens. It’s best we talk again later—I could hear him saying between my sobs. We do not intend to go to the shelter, we are too old to do that. But let us handle this on our own, and I promise, I’ll be in touch later. Do not worry about us, he tells me from Belgrade at the moment when he was just about to be subjected to a continuation of the campaign. ’Lightning never hits the nettles’ he manages to say in a jovial manner using that old local proverb to convince me that they are untouchable. And the line went dead. Or so it felt. He did say ‘ciao’, and mama is kissing you.
I never told this to anybody. You are the first one to hear it.
4.3. A Sense of Privilege: Holding to Professional Identity and Moving on
I realized at that time, that to do a PhD in the UK, my legal options for staying were only to seek exceptional leave to remain, which would put me in the refugee category. And I simply could not bring myself to do it. It was an ethical and moral issue for me. I felt very strongly that there were many thousands of people who literally fled to save their lives. Hence, taking that route was absolutely out of the question.
Stasa was very surprised at how I felt, and argued that my reflections on the problem were important because my position as an ‘insider’ as well as an ‘outsider’, provided me with a perception that was not readily available to feminist activists who were immersed in day-to-day work.
I am fully aware that however all this was difficult for me, it was also a story of extreme privilege compared to so many millions of other people. Not just from the Yugoslav conflicts. How many people like me have ended up in horrible places like Calais. Without any chances whatsoever. Thus, for me to say, “I actually suffered from what I lived through”, feels really deeply ethically problematic. Compared to so many other lives, mine was almost paved with gold [laughs]. I never did anything else but my academic job. If I am to be labelled using one of the categories created to ‘describe’ me, I would be labelled as a professional being abroad to develop her career.
4.4. Becoming ‘Other’ in Britain
Many important, life-changing things happened while I was in Canada and before I moved back to Europe to the next stage of my life. PhD completed, fieldwork and successful fundraising experience gained, first book in English published (Korac 1998b), Canadian citizenship acquired. All looked very nice. Except that I was moving during the time of the NATO bombing of Serbia and Kosovo; my parents and everyone who was dear to me, lived there. It is an understatement to say that it was a terribly difficult situation to handle.
Preparing for the move, I realised that I would be leaving Toronto without any keys in my pocket. No door to lock when I leave and no door to unlock when I arrive there. It was a truly devastating feeling…. I shared it with my close friends and colleagues Pat and Wenona12, and they said, ‘don’t worry, we’ll give you the key to our houses and you can come back whenever you want’. That was precious. These kinds of gestures from people I met throughout my journey, literally saved my life.
Being from elsewhere in Europe—and especially in Britain—is very different from being from elsewhere in Canada. Unlike in Canada, in Britain, I am constantly asked where I am from, because my accent suggests that I am not ‘genuine’. The way I speak puts me in the category ‘Other’. And frankly, after all these decades and movements, I do not think that I can answer that question in any straightforward way.
If I am to use social science categories to describe myself, I am fully integrated in British society, after returning from Canada. I have a university position. I became married to a British academic. Consequently, I am embedded within mainstream society. However, this means nothing in terms of a host of processes of othering, subtle and not so subtle, which make me feel the odd one out.
What has been a source of acute pain during all these decades, though, and what I am still grappling with, are those continuous bordering processes that are part of daily othering systems and misidentifying practices in our lives—particularly in the lives of we, who are labelled as ‘migrants’, ‘immigrants’, ‘emigrants’, ‘foreigners’, or ‘others,’ who are also coded as ‘ethnic’ or ‘racial’ or somehow ‘visibly’ different. And that is how one becomes invisible. Erased. As a person. As someone. As a life with a history and a meaning. Beyond any attempt to box you in and shelve you with ‘others’.
5. Academic Research as Activism for Social Justice and Change: Feminist Analysis, Politics and Knowledge Creation
5.1. Addressing Gendered Consequences of Violent Conflict: Feminist Scholarship versus Local and International Politics
It is an understatement to say that I found the interviewing process difficult. On many occasions I felt very angry, frustrated and depressed by the women’s revelations concerning experiences with the social and political turmoil in the post-Yugoslav states. Interviews with refugee women were particularly difficult, emotionally draining and disturbing. I found it impossible to conduct a consecutive interview without having a considerable amount of time to recover emotionally and, in a sense, to recompose myself. Some of the stories I found extremely emotionally disturbing and I felt, at times, that I needed counselling.
When I was reading the original transcripts, I realised that they bring back the entire interview atmosphere, feelings included. At one point, I picked up a translated transcription, which I also had, and I realized that it did not trigger any emotional baggage I carried […] Because it was in a different language, I was detached from the interview situation.
The recognition of rape of women in war as ‘war crime’, however, did not stop this despicable type of victimisation of women. It did not even help the women victims of rape during Yugoslav wars, nor those who were raped in wars that broke out later. In actual fact, this legal victory has often contributed to their further victimisation, because of the still prevailing gender insensitive justice and court systems. Or because they were victimised in their communities after testifying in court. Regardless of these extremely serious problems, this very change of the international law positively marked an era because it brought about a possibility of their legal protection.
International players involved in humanitarian interventions are not prone to recognise and encourage the politics of ‘small steps’, which are inherent in many grassroots movements and initiatives, and particularly in women’s groups. Current humanitarian responses to new wars are oriented toward ‘quick fix solutions’ or momentary peace-making, rather than long-term peacebuilding approaches, which are central to addressing humanitarian, socio-economic and political problems of new wars and their aftermath.
5.2. Tackling Gendered War Violence: Critical Engagement with Maja’s Published Work
5.3. ‘Objectivity’ and Positionality: Navigating Different Approaches to Knowing
There were colleagues who questioned what I was saying because of ‘my ethnicity’. I remember when one of my articles was peer reviewed for an American journal in which it was later published (Korac 1998c). I was explicitly asked to declare my ‘ethnic and hence, political position’. And I did, starting the paragraph and the sentence with: ‘For those who are interested in the messenger and not only in the message, I am….’
What helped me during that difficult process of being made to feel that everything I do or say requires a special moral, ethical, and ‘security’ scrutiny, is that I, as a feminist scholar, was able to express and explain my own position as a researcher, and also to reflect upon difficulties I had due to my own positionality during the research.
Over time, I have become dissatisfied by scholarly attempts to create categories that are tidier than life, to borrow the term from my colleague and dear friend Sandra Wallman (Wallman 1986), because they create a world of knowing that is far from actually understanding anything. Such categories certainly do not help understand conflict situations. I am saying this because I am not only part of that specific area of study, academically, but I also feel that I am, in a way, the subject of study. I lived with it. This is one view of conflict that is seldom, if ever, addressed. And I think that that has to change if we are to claim that we contribute to knowledge, understanding and critical thinking. And we claim all that, but our view and approach is so terribly limited.
This first-hand experience of displacement and of the struggle to emplace myself professionally, socially, culturally, and legally, prompted me to question many of the concepts and much of the knowledge produced about refugees. It made me aware, for example, how the notion of ‘community’, to which, somehow, all people coming from the same country naturally belong, or for which they strive, can straight-jacket our understanding of the processes of nesting of refugees who may, and often do, have different ideas about connecting and belonging. In the case of people coming from Yugoslavia and its successor states, the understanding of community also had specific connotations. The conflict brought to the attention of the international media, public, political, and academic realms the issue of ethnic difference, the grievances, and animosities within the region. As a consequence, interpreting and understanding these differences and constructing the ‘identity’ and the community’ of those labelled by their ethnicity became central to approaching people from the war-torn country as well as to creating knowledge about them. This experience made me particularly sensitive to the processes and consequences of labelling people who were forced into decisions to flee their homes, the processes associated with institutional and legal systems, as well as those relating to public discourses and professional/academic settings.
5.4. Making Sense of Lived Experience and Creation of Knowledge: In Lieu of Conclusion
- Responsibility to Protect
I have been teaching an undergraduate course on conflict, intervention and development at a British university for nearly two decades. Little did I know when I started teaching it, how popular it would become. And it was very popular. Despite the grim topic. And grim it is, indeed. Ghastly questions to cover. Who gets the privilege to be bombed into the Stone Age in the name of humanitarianism, and who does not? Which people, once bombed into their deaths, get to be buried in a mass, unmarked grave with the ‘collateral damage’ label?
Picture yourself in my shoes. How does it feel to you? How do you see yourself engaging students in an active process of learning and understanding some of the greatest International Relations concepts and paradigms of the late 20th and the early 21st century, as some would argue? Humanitarian intervention, responsibility to protect, known also as R2P to those who talk only to themselves. And all of that, it goes without saying, you do in the scholarly way. Objectively, that is. How else to do it, given that scholarly approach is objective and methodologically sound. It is as simple as that. Well, there has been the postmodern turn in social sciences and also that thought-provoking anthropology stuff about being an engaged observer. Not to mention feminist epistemologies and standpoint theories. But the ‘scholarly’ way is still prevailingly seen as the view from nowhere, however difficult it may seem to picture that type of view of any-body.
How would you explain to students the idea of humanitarian intervention without letting your deeply personal views on the subject distort the true meaning of it? As a scholar, I am not supposed to burden them with my biased and limited views. Based on my personal experience. Surely, that is not scholarly work. What can they learn from it, after all? As a social science scholar, I am in the business of producing knowledge, as I am repeatedly reminded by the neoliberal power structures in British universities and society. And true knowledge is based on methodologically sound paradigms, all of which exclude me as a person. I am only there as a scholar, as a role, not as a life. And an embodied life at that.
And my life during the last decade of the 1990s was more than eventful! At the time of the so-called NATO campaign unleashed on my hometown, I was furious. Oh yes, I was. But that very anger was also making me sick with guilt. Not because I was not there. Not because bombs were not dropping on my head too. Oh, I wish it was that simple. But it wasn’t. Far from it. I felt guilty beyond words for worrying about my loved ones and for caring about the people and places that are labelled as ‘genocidal’, ‘barbaric’, and ‘backward’ or referred to as ‘collateral damage’. I felt ashamed and somehow beastly for being concerned about them at all, let alone for being emotional. Everybody knows that scholars do not get emotional. All this is certainly distorting my judgement as a social science scholar about what is right and what is wrong. And who do I have the responsibility to protect. As a scholar, a social scientist who is in business of producing knowledge and impacting a positive social change.
Author Contributions
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Acknowledgments
Conflicts of Interest
1 | The life history part of this article is a shorter version of the piece that was to be published in Cindy’s book (Horst 2023). I took the cutting decisions and the related necessary restructuring of the life history text that became the core part of this article. These changes, however, did not substantively alter the original content or the structure of the life history section of this paper, as our aim has been to preserve its original narrative format and approach. The shortening of the original life history text only tightened it and made it more relevant for its ‘I am the evidence’ focus (Korac 1991). |
2 | Conflict-induced displacement linked to the Yugoslav wars of secession during the 1990s was, at the time, the largest refugee movement in Europe since the second WW. This article and my life history narrative account relate to these well-documented and analysed events only as a backdrop, to reveal the problems of performing research and producing knowledge related to these deeply disturbing events—from a personal, humanitarian, and political perspective. Equally, this was a background for our engagement with my sense of privilege in how, when, why, and where I moved during the war; the experience that was not shared by many, but a few from the region. Those interested in the refugee movements from and within Yugoslavia of the 1990s, are encouraged to consult relevant academic sources, including my book (Korac 1991, 2009). |
3 | In the public discourse, as well as in academic settings, there is hardly any memory left of the basic facts about socialist Yugoslavia (1945–1991). It is usually referred to as an ‘East European’ country, which is geographically incorrect and socio-politically misleading because it implies a ‘communist’ label wrapped up in ideologies and power struggles of the day, without any actual qualification of the system it is meant to denote. I mention here the most important characteristics of the Yugoslav socialist state and society. In 1948, the Yugoslav Communist party was expelled from the Soviet/Stalin-led Cominform (Information Bureau of the Communist and Workers’ Parties, founded in 1947 and dissolved in 1957, because of its independently defined international, regional, and national politics. Since then, the country continued to forge its own way (for more, see Banac (1988)). Internationally, it became one of the founding members of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), created in 1961, at the founding conference held in Belgrade. The founding conference had 25 members, the 9th conference, also held in Belgrade, in 1989, a couple of years before Yugoslavia seized to exist, had 103 (Rajan 1989). The UN, at the time, had 159 member states (www.un.org) (accessed on 21 September 2023). The Non-Aligned movement was dedicated to representing and voicing the interests of developing countries without being formally aligned or against any major power bloc (for more on the NAM see Rajak (2017)). Nationally, Yugoslavia introduced the workers’ self-management system, in 1950. This market-based allocation of the social ownership of the means of production, i.e., land, labour, and capital, was intended to separate the management of companies from the state (this is not to say that this intention was fully achieved or that the process was problem-free). Self-management was also meant to represent a third/non-aligned form of Yugoslav economic system—not the US capitalist or the Soviet state-controlled. Socially, socialist Yugoslavia was a society with good education and open cultural systems. My British husband and I are of the same generation, as well as level of education, and we grew up influenced by the same type of literature, art, films, music, and TV series. |
4 | Irrespective of these initial political and ideological barriers, quite a few of the contacts made with people while we were in the US turned into lifelong family friendships. Some of them came to visit us in Belgrade, during their travels in Europe. Others sent their children to stay with us during their vacation. With a daughter of one of the closest friends of my family from that time, my sister and I remain in contact to this day. |
5 | In the interview, I recognised later, I got carried away by the memories of my father as a meticulous planner of our family trips that he, indeed, was. After careful re-reading, I realised that as a result, my father remained in the focus of my story. This led to me omitting to mention an important person in my family story and life—my mother. In actual fact, both of my parents’ lines of work and professional carriers provided them, and all of us as a family, with vital, continuous, and dynamic pan-Yugoslav contacts. Many of these initially professional communications turned into valuable friendships. Throughout my life in Belgrade, our family home was the place of frequent, lively (and delicious!) dinner parties with colleagues/friends from different parts of Yugoslavia who happened to be in Belgrade for work or leisure. Equally, over my childhood and young adult life, my parents hosted numerous home gatherings with my father’s international professional contacts from the US, Europe, Japan, and from the mid-1980s onwards—China. Most of them were academics and were in Belgrade in contact with my father, because they were interested in the self-management system that was the economic mechanism Yugoslavia was pioneering, as mentioned in the footnote no. 4. |
6 | Yugo-slav means South-Slav in the local language/s. It is important to note here that Yugoslavia was not a country inhabited only by South Slavs, but also by a considerable number of minority non-Slav groups. While their rights where secured and guarantied, by Yugoslav post-second WW constitution, there were instances and periods in Yugoslav socialist history of discrimination and racism (for information on the merits and the shortcomings of the post-second WW Yugoslav minority rights constitutional system, see Varady (1993)). However, my South-Slav multicultural identity mentioned here, refers to my flexible and inclusive national identification with all peoples of Yugoslavia. |
7 | In addition to granting women a wide range of rights, socialist Yugoslavia had also quite a significant number of women involved in politics, and in a range of positions of power. They viewed their emancipation through the Marxist, working-class lens, without challenging deeply ingrained patriarchy in the lives of ordinary people and women (for more information see Morokvasic 1983). |
8 | Maja’s Book is based on a one-year ethnographic MPhil research project in a village in Serbia. |
9 | At the time of writing, there was still a state entity called Yugoslavia consisting of Serbia, including its two autonomous provinces: Vojvodina and Kosovo, and Montenegro, while the other four former republics of the federation had already seceded. |
10 | My colleague and friend, the late Cynthia Cockburn whom I first met in Belgrade in the late 1980s, when she was there to do research on feminist anti-nationalist and anti-war organising in the country. |
11 | It was through this interview process that I felt that it was the time for me to publish this account, hence, it is now included. It refers to the start of the NATO-led intervention in Serbia and Kosovo, an aerial bombing campaign that lasted 79 days, from March to June 1999. It aimed to stop armed conflict in Kosovo, which was at the time an Autonomous Province of Serbia. The Province’s Albanian majority population wanted an independent state. As the Serbian government was not willing to negotiate, armed conflict broke out between the Kosovo Liberation Army and the Serbian Army (for more information see Ristić and Satjukow (2022)). |
12 | Patricia McDermott and Wenona Giles were both professors at York University, in Toronto, at the time. |
13 | Cindy has been the single most careful and thoughtful reader of my publications. I am grateful for this open and truly curious engagement with what I have written in the past 30 years. |
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Korac, M.; Horst, C. Life History Research and the Violence of War: Experiencing Binary Thinking on Pain and Privilege, Being and Knowing. Genealogy 2023, 7, 86. https://doi.org/10.3390/genealogy7040086
Korac M, Horst C. Life History Research and the Violence of War: Experiencing Binary Thinking on Pain and Privilege, Being and Knowing. Genealogy. 2023; 7(4):86. https://doi.org/10.3390/genealogy7040086
Chicago/Turabian StyleKorac, Maja, and Cindy Horst. 2023. "Life History Research and the Violence of War: Experiencing Binary Thinking on Pain and Privilege, Being and Knowing" Genealogy 7, no. 4: 86. https://doi.org/10.3390/genealogy7040086