Abstract
This chapter reflects upon our feminist approach to narrative ethnographic research and how we explore the production and circulation of gendered stories in post-war societies. The illustrative case is wartime rape in Bosnia-Herzegovina during the 1992–1995 war. For ethical reasons we rely on women survivors’ accounts of their experiences in order to study how they narratively construct their social worlds and their positions within them. We discuss the practice of “enquiry-as-bricolage” and how narratives produced at diverse sites and by various agents can be put in dialogue with each other—courtroom narratives produced at the ICTY, published life stories, narratives produced at the Women’s Court, interviews with “gatekeepers”, and narratives collected through “being-in-place”—and reflected upon from the positionality of “the vulnerable observer”.
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Notes
- 1.
An overview is available on the ICTY website: http://www.icty.org/en/in-focus/crimes-sexual-violence
- 2.
Balija—a derogatory term for a Bosnian person of Muslim faith.
- 3.
It is a regional civil society initiative from the successor states of SFR Yugoslavia. According to its statue, it is not to be institutionalised nor merged with any state institution.
- 4.
While the long-term, lasting impact that the Women’s Court may have on societal discourses remains to be seen, it seems clear that this initiative helped individual women survivors express their agency as narrators of their own life story. The politics of the Women’s Court is about women survivors , not about women victims. It opposes the meta-narrative of women as victims because when such narrative is thought and applied it reduces women’s agency.
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Björkdahl, A., Mannergren Selimovic, J. (2018). Feminist Ethnographic Research: Excavating Narratives of Wartime Rape. In: Millar, G. (eds) Ethnographic Peace Research. Rethinking Peace and Conflict Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-65563-5_3
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