Ana Milošević

Across 23 photographs documenting terrorist attacks from 1969 to 2023, the exhibit captures the essence of grief and mourning as love's enduring presence amidst tragedy. It invites the visitor to embrace the profound stories of those affected by terrorism while honouring their loving memory.

This book contributes to the study of collective memory and the sociology of terrorism by analysing the role of memorialization in relation to terrorism, its victims, and the broader society. While various social scientists have extensively theorized and analysed how trauma and memory interact, grow apart, and reinforce each other, this book puts the rights and needs of the victims centre-stage.

Departing from the prescriptive, legal blueprints of memory, this book introduces the concept of ‘memorial needs’ to challenge and complement existing victimological frameworks. It critically assesses the efficacy of public memorialization and its success in assisting those affected by violence by exploring how victims engage with memory and memorialization. It investigates personal and collective responses to urban terrorism in Europe that have taken a wide range of forms including media coverage, spontaneous memorials and public mobilizations, literary and artistic works, trials, and controversial counter-terrorism measures. Making a case against the fetishization of memory as an overarching answer to curing visible and invisible wounds provoked by violence, Victims and Memory After Terrorism sends out a practical invitation to the field to 'repair symbolic reparations' in a way that memorialisation is not just an expression of potential, an aspiration for a more moral and just society and a promise of healing for the victimised.

An accessible and compelling read, this book will appeal to students and scholars of victimology, criminology, sociology, politics and those interested in the relationship between collective memory and terrorism.

This volume explores how the process of European integration has influenced collective memory in the countries of the Western Balkans. In the region, there is still no shared understanding of the causes (and consequences) of the Yugoslav wars. The conflicts of the 1990s but also of WWII and its aftermath have created “ethnically confined” memory cultures. As such, divergent interpretations of history continue to trigger confrontations between neighboring countries and hinder the creation of a joint EU perspective. In this volume, the authors examine how these “memory wars” impact the European dimension - by becoming a tool to either support or oppose Europeanisation. The contributors focus on how and why memory is renegotiated, exhibited, adjusted, or ignored in the Europeanisation process.

This chapter investigates the similarities and differences between national and European commemorations by observing who, how and with what purpose memorialise. It analyses how Croatian political elites since the EU accession of country (2013) have framed and commemorated the main national lieu de mémoire – Vukovar, both on national and European level. This chapter draws evidence from ethnographic observation of Vukovar commemoration in loco and in the European parliament (2013-2017), analysis of commemorative speeches and interviews with political elites. Croatian political elites employ divergent narratives to frame and commemorate Vukovar (trans)nationally. At the EU level, the memory of Vukovar is instrumental in gaining endorsement of Croatia’s ethno-national narrative of the Yugoslav wars. Commemorative initiatives promote one-sided narrative of the Homeland War, that excludes victims of other ethnicities, yet it assigns to Vukovar a pivotal role in reconciliation. As such, the European commemoration is in stark contrast with local/national commemoration and the state of affairs between the Serb minority and ethnic Croats in Vukovar.

The shared memories of the Second World War have played a crucial role in the process of integration of the European Union. After the Enlargement to the East, the EU also sought to accommodate the historical experiences of the former communist countries. The result of this process was an EU memory framework that focused on shared suffering under totalitarian (both fascist and communist) regimes. This article examines the impact of this framework and its equalisation of fascism and communism on Croatia (new member state) and Serbia (in accession talks). We conclude that the framework is used locally as an opportunity structure to renegotiate ideological conflicts.

This paper discusses the way in which a post-conflict European Union (EU) member immediately after accession both shapes and adapts to EU memory politics as a part of its Europeanization process. I will analyze how the country responds to the top-down pressures of Europeanization in the domestic politics of memory by making proactive attempts at exporting its own politics of memory (discourses, policies, and practices) to the EU level. Drawing evidence from Croatian EU accession, I will consider how Croatian members of the European Parliament “upload” domestic memory politics to the EU level, particularly to the European Parliament. Based on the analysis of elite interviews, discourses, parliamentary duties, agenda-setting, and decision-making of Croatian MEPs from 2013 to 2016, I argue that the parliament serves both as a locus for confirmation of European identity through promotion of
countries’ EU memory credentials and as a new forum for affirmation of national identity. The preservation of the “Homeland War” narrative (1991–1995) and of the “sacredness” of Vukovar as a European lieu de mémoire clearly influences the decision-making of Croatian MEPs, motivating inter-group support for policy building and remembrance practices that bridge domestic political differences.

This research article traces the process of transition from spontaneous to ‘official’ memorialisation of the 2016 Brussels terrorist attack by questioning which factors trigger the heritagization process of spontaneous memorials and their contents. With a view to critically assess the significance of heritage values in relation to terrorism, this article scrutinises how these values are grasped, narrated and articulated by the local authorities, government and archival institutions in the preservation, conservation and heritagization of spontaneous memorials. There is an emphasis on the two facets of heritagization: how meanings attached to a memorial and its objects are created and expressed by the community of bereavement, and how the transformation of places, practices, objects into diverse forms of ‘heritage’ evolves. This article brings a new perspective on the heritagization of spontaneous memorials, seen as important in determining how a traumatic event such is a terrorist attack will settle in the collective memory on the long term, by becoming historicized.

Whilst the interest of memory scholars in political violence and more specifically in terrorism is not novel, there appears to be a certain urgency to reflect upon memories of terrorist violence in collective, European immaginarium. By questioning how to deal with these memories and how the process of remembrance of the victims of terrorism will pave its way into a European memory culture, this article analyses spontaneous memorialization of the victims of terrorist attacks in Brussels (2016).

In this study I examine the ways in which 'Europe' has been built as a mnemonic community based on a shared past. Numerous academics and practitioners have argued for the emergence of a 'European memory' - i.e. a shared narrative about the past as an instrument to strengthen a sense of common European identity across populations in Europe. Over the last 30 years EU institutions and political elites have been promoting this approach - i.e. the rebuilding of a divisive and dividing past into a shared memory - so extensively that we might speak of the emergence of an 'EU politics of memory'. Mainstream explanations on the transnationalisation of memory discourses and practices, however, do not highlight the role of collective memory in the process of Europeanisation (Assman 2014; Banke 2010; Calligaro 2013; de Cesari & Rigney 2014; Gensburger & Lavabre 2012; Pakier & Stråth 2010; Mälksoo 2009; Mink & Neumayer 2013; Neumayer 2018; Sierp 2014).

Europeanisation literature observes countries as being reactive to the rule transfer that in turn will lead toward the internalisation of new norms and development of new identities following interaction with the EU institutions and representatives (Börzel & Risse 2003). This dissertation, however, proposes an alternative understanding of Europeanisation. This understanding allows to take into account the possibility that countries not only respond to but also manipulate the process of transferring European rules and norms. For their own political gain they align themselves with EU memory politics. Croatia (an EU member state) and Serbia (a candidate member state) with their effectively shared past in post-1945 Yugoslavia and as former warring parties in the 1990s, are selected for in-depth analysis. The key argument is that both countries have exploited the EU's memory framework, albeit to a different extent, using the same tools and methods to affirm their mutually divergent ethno-national narratives of the past at (trans)national level.

In order to substantiate this argument, the thesis elaborates on historical institutionalism and draws from both rational choice and constructivist scholarship to study the relationship between collective memory and Europeanisation. It argues that constructivist models, which theorise a causal link between identity and Europeanisation, cannot fully explain the complexity of this relationship. This thesis develops an interpretive theoretical framework in which memory politics and Europeanisation are conceptualised as mutually constitutive and need to be studied at the level of mnemonic practices. This approach permits us to understand not only who remembers and how, but importantly what are the purposes assigned to political mobilisation of the past at (trans)national level.

The research conducted through this model highlights the normativity of discourses on European memory and shallowness of political 'dealing with the past'. It shows that memory politics is malleable as the meanings assigned to memorialisation bend to the purposes and objectives of a wide variety of memory entrepreneurs on both national and transnational level. This is illustrated in the case studies, which focus on official narratives concerning the Second World war, the Yugoslav wars and their legacies. The empirical analysis shows that Croatia and Serbia gradually, yet selectively converged with the imperatives of EU memory politics in the pre-accession period, using salient EU identity and memory markers to reformulate and reframe their domestic narratives of the past in order to support their EU bid. In the post-accession period, countries (Croatia) have been more intensively projecting domestic discourses by employing mnemonic practices and dominant memory canons onto the transnational level in order to pursue symbolic and political gains. Finally, through the comparison of national discourses in the EU discursive arena, the dissertation asserts that European memory, nevertheless, proves to be a highly contested and elusive concept.