Missing people, missing stories in the aftermath of genocide and “ethnic cleansing” in Srebrenica and Prijedor

By looking at the phenomenological, socially intimate efforts to remember, memorialize and narrate the “ambiguous loss” caused by the absence of the victims’ bodies, this thesis investigates the problem of the missing persons (presumably killed) in the aftermath of “ethnic cleansing” and genocide in Srebrenica and Prijedor, Bosnia and Herzegovina. Designed as a qualitative study involving multi-sited ethnography and participatory action research, the thesis seeks to understand how the affected communities, families and individuals cope with the missing persons problem in their everyday life and how it impacts on their memories, commemorative practices and identities. The thesis also investigates how these practices have been shaped by the work of experts and professionals engaged in recovering and reclaiming identities of the missing. It examines the research problem looking at Prijedor and Srebrenica both as separate geographic locations and in comparison to one another. The thesis looks at the problem through the survivors’ individual experiences as well as through the shared experience of the affected communities seeking to expose the survivors’ shared narrative across space and time. Thus, in addition to describing the individual experiences of my research participants, the thesis seeks to demonstrate how the survivors’ shared narrative encapsulates their lived experiences and combines individual destinies with series of historical events, making one collective experience and narrative.