Introduction

Abstract

As the war in the former Yugoslavia ended, one of the imperative needs of the newly created post-Yugoslav states — for quick recovery from war and a search for new beginnings — seems to have been at odds with the western countries’ priorities of the delivery of transitional justice and of bringing these states into compliance with international legal and political norms. In the subsequent processes of negotiation between domestic and international forces of change, the post-Yugoslav nations have been redefining their collective identities. The “Balkans” has been, for a long time, a “symbolic continent” (Bakic-Hayden and Hayden, 1992) against which the regional and the European imaginary and self-imaginary were continuously redefined. The competing histories of wars and violence in the region have became interwoven with simultaneous post-socialist transformations, while social and cultural spaces have been redefined to incorporate issues of justice, democracy and participation beyond newly created state borders, or classical political domains.