1 From Memory Politics to Slow Memory Processes

In her introductory text Towards Slow Memory Studies (2023), Jenny Wüstenberg suggested that we should learn to recognize slow or uneventful historical processes. Slow memory she argues, means thinking through which “pasts” have a meaningful impact on our present(s). Slow moving transformations accordingly, are most fundamental “pasts”, in terms of their impact on human experience. Slow memory scholarship, she argued, focuses on everyday experiences and practices and aims “to understand remembrance processes that are not shaped by the linear progression of human generation and by the reference to event and place…and the “pastness” of history” (Ibid.: 62). Such slower processes have been studied over the years by memory scholars yet may have been framed differently. As Ann Rigney has argued at the June 2022 COST Action meeting in Portland, UK, “cultural memory studies have always been about slow memory.” This special issue will trace the appearances of slow memory as related to the transformations of conflicts, featuring fresh perspectives from Southeastern Europe, and more specifically from the post-Yugoslav region. Each of the articles, which have emerged from the discussions of the working group devoted to the slow transformations of conflicts in the COST Action on Slow Memory, ¹ explore the legacies of the wars accompanying the breakup of socialist Yugoslavia in the 1990s.

While scholars have studied the processes and the long durée of memorializing conflicts, other mnemonic actors have often been locked into remembering exclusively traumatic or heroic events, which ultimately impacts how post-conflict societies deal with difficult historical periods, and even more so, their legacies in the present. This is definitely the case in the former Yugoslavia, where the memoryscapes, both physical and immaterial, are densely packed with “quick” remembrance practices, nation-building narratives (often conflicting), and a large cast of mnemonic actors intent on producing ever more sites of memory that are selectively chosen to justify current political interests. Ignoring the slow and less glamorous everyday peace in the region threatens the long-term success of stability that has repeated the same quick memorialization mistakes throughout the twentieth century.

Conflicts, especially as they reach the stage of fully fledged wars, are dominated by dramatic events, from battles and heroes, to victims and to the inevitable peace or cease fire agreements – as reflected in the memorialization practices throughout the past few centuries. Monuments, commemorations, museums, and textbooks, to name just a few elements of cultural memory (Assman and Czaplicka 1995), that were created around specific events. While these individual events help construct the narrative mosaic that allows us to make chronological sense of the past, focusing on them may also obscure additional, and at times deeper, meanings and transformations that occur during violent conflicts and in their aftermath. This failure to comprehend fundamental social transformations in post-war societies becomes even more notable within the framework of “slow peace”.

In her insightful work on slow peace, Lederach (2023) beautifully demonstrates how narratives that solely focus on war and suffering may obscure the multigenerational struggle for peace, for example the kind found in the communities she studied in Columbia (p. 4). The focus on armed conflicts and their immediate effects, according to her, often conceal or even erase the ways in which local communities narrate their history and territorial identity. We approach the slow peace framework as a nuanced continuation of the discussions on the local turn in the critical peacebuilding literature, with its focus on everyday peace (Mac Ginty 2014; Mac Ginty and Richmond 2013; Paffenholz 2015; Firchow 2018), as it enables us to turn our gaze to everyday experiences and practices, to local and regional dynamics in peacebuilding processes and memorialization, and to still ongoing numerous initiatives even in times of global crisis, as well as profound changes in the international peace architecture (IPA).

The “local turn” in the critical peacebuilding literature, with its focus on the everyday, called for a shift in emphasis from the state, its institutions, and its elites to local communities and citizens. As such, scrutinizing the level below formal peace agreements has resulted in the analysis of how everyday practices reinforce or transform polarized national identities in the aftermath of conflict (Kostovicova et al. 2020). A similar kind of “slow peace” can be witnessed in the Gorski Kotar region of Croatia, described in detail in the contribution by Valentina Otmačić.

By placing the slow peace framework alongside the slow memory one, we make visible what far too often is lost in depictions of war and peace, as well as its commemoration: the local and regional experiences of war that are beyond events only. The frame of the slow calls for the widening of the temporal lens, in contrast to the “technical times” of peace agreements and their implementation. The turn to the local and to the transformation of entrenched forms of social and economic inequality, as Lederach convincingly shows, requires close attention to the temporal continuities that buttress political violence across times of war and into so-called times of post-conflict (Lederach 2023:156). Perhaps it is only after three decades that scholars in the former Yugoslavia are able to turn their analytical gaze away from the battlefields and mass graves, and focus more critically on the slow memory processes of peace, dialogue, resistance, and the everyday. There were of course important scholarly exceptions, especially in the field of anthropology that was in many ways always focused on the everyday and the slow (see for example Jansen 2018), but the pressures of retributive justice-seeking in the aftermath of Yugoslavia’s bloody dissolution, frequently driven by the international community, swept up the academic community and generated a fact- and event-based framework of understanding the recent past. Due to the internal fragmentation and external involvement, it took decades before the ex-Yugoslav societies could afford a slower peace process as they engaged with restorative, transitional, and symbolic justice mechanisms.

Similarly, while the concept of slow memory of conflict, as well as memory beyond events, can be applied to what is remembered, the way something is remembered is equally worth reflecting upon. As we turn our attention to processes beyond events only, we also consider the difference between the kind of result-dependent projects funded by international actors and the more localized bottom-up processes in peacebuilding (Lederach 1997:158). John Paul Lederach’s work, that signified the first local turn in peacebuilding already in the 1990s, in fact marked the beginning of the shift away from the liberal peacebuilding project and has continued to evolve thereafter. At the heart of his integrated framework for peacebuilding lies the concept of conflict transformation, which ties the success of local processes of reconciliation to the rebuilding of intergroup relations (Lederach 1997: 26). The transformation of conflicts, which we approach in this text as a slow process, according to him must address “the effects of conflict on relational patterns of communication and interaction” (Ibid.: 82). Therefore, turning our focus on the local and to those transformations, we argue that our inquiries as memory scholars engaging with critical peace and conflict studies are enriched and broadened if we go beyond events only. By tracing the slower processes of change towards conflict transformation, we shed light on the analysis of generational shifts, of various bottom-up sites of memory, of graffiti in our cities, and of alternative commemorative events put forward by local actors functioning as memory activists, all of which result in mnemonic contestations with state-sponsored hegemonic remembrance. By turning our analytic lens beyond events, we can also detect the void that has been created in the last three decades in Southeastern Europe, resulting from the lack of engagement with conflict transformation and peacebuilding platforms by the state and other official actors, situating slow memory in the margins and from below. Nevertheless, as Athanasios (2017) and Fridman (2022) have shown, among local and regional actors there have been many examples of joint political action as well as of commemorative solidarities, including those related to environmental activism and justice claims.

Indeed, while some scholars have already been exploring the slowness of these processes in their writings, our aim is to propose some directions for further developing a framework that can be incorporated into our conflict analysis and conflict transformation inquiries in memory studies. This framework may guide us in our ability to trace the changes within these processes as being shaped over time, with the focus of our studies of post-conflict societies, and their mnemonic shifts. Memory scholars incorporating the lenses of the slow can thus more prominently trace the “historiographies and genealogies” of commemorative practices that reflect the changing socio-political conditions often impalpable to the individuals and groups driving the remembrance activities. We show how some scholarly work tracing memory from below, and particularly the study of generational shifts in the analysis of commemorative rituals and practices, as well as of mnemonic murals, have in fact already been tracing slow processes of change.

More specifically, in this region, conflict transformation processes in societies infected by deep states of denial and on-going silences have for a long time resulted in decades of very slow (and often too slow) changes taking place. That said, as we trace and identify processes of slow memory, we also embrace the slow with some caution. Slow memory is not inherently positive. Slow changes and slow justice were evident after dictatorships through the study of generational shifts, as in the cases of post-dictatorship Spain (Aguilar and Ramirez-Barat 2019), post-dictatorship Chile (Ros 2012), after the emancipation of slaves in the United States (Upton 2015), and after full-scale war and state dissolution in socialist Yugoslavia. The rehabilitation of the Ustaša movement, its symbols, and its wartime salute, Za dom spremni (Ready for the Homeland), was attempted during the Croatian War of Independence and immediately afterwards, but pro-EU governments and international pressure after 2000 meant that a wide range of political and social actors pushed back on the normalization of Croatia’s World War Two collaborators (Damčević 2023). However, the slow processes rooted in the educational system – focused on nation-building and anti-Yugoslav narratives – together with the systematic support of right-wing elements within the Croatian Catholic Church, politically active veteran organizations, and the persistence of nationalist popular culture (epitomized by the singer Marko Perković Thompson), have resulted in a renewed and vigorous public debate about the partial legitimization of Ustaša symbols. This debate has re-emerged thirty years after the war, fueled by socio-economic discontent and an unstable global political climate increasingly conducive to right-wing populism. As mentioned previously, the processes of addressing war crimes and their legacies were on one hand rushed and beholden to international agendas, while on the other hand were (and still are) extremely slow and incomplete. Furthermore, the “dark side” of slow memory processes can be seen in many revisionist projects of the 20th century, which turns back the clock on liberal interpretations of the past and allows for the emergence of extreme nationalist or fascist ideologies that had persisted despite socialist and subsequently democratic historical paradigms. Slow memory in the former Yugoslavia is thus a double-edged sword. It allows us to bring in the everyday into memory studies, to understand the processes of peacebuilding at the local level, and to appreciate the long durée of cooperation on state-building projects such as Yugoslavia. However, it also exposes the weaknesses of waiting too long to address the nationalist myths that underpin armed conflicts, opening public space for the memory politics of (allegedly) defeated ideologies. These processes have impacted the post-Yugoslav generations, which have been force-fed a diet of hyper-remembrance often marked by revisionism and led by self-interested elites. This obsession over selective historical interpretations has paradoxically left the youth across the region oblivious to the complexities of the past, indoctrinated them in narratives of victimization and war crimes denial, and convinced them of the inevitability of nation-building projects (Kolstø 2014; Pavlaković and Pauković 2019).

At the same time, we are able to trace another sort of slowness situated in the margins of those processes, where counter memory as anti-denial work takes place, in civic actions such as alternative commemorations and memory walks, as in the case of Serbia, which along with other successor states of the former Yugoslavia we approach as a region of memory activism (Fridman 2022). In tracing such generational shifts, which occur somewhere in between official state-sponsored memory politics and bottom-up activism, slow methods are in place, and slower data collection over longer periods of time underline the analysis of processes of change.

Admittedly, the claim for slow memory studies seems clearer or sharper in the study of environmental transformations and more specifically in memorializing the Anthropocene ² (Craps et al. 2024), as well as transformations of labor and wellness. The study of conflict and difficult pasts that were at the forefront of the field of memory studies since its inception may generate less immediate evidence of these slow memory processes, however, as we show in our discussion, and throughout this special issue, there are enough examples to make them significant and traceable. In what follows, we will therefore reflect upon slow memory and slow peace in discussions featuring research in the post-Yugoslav space. As we will show, we are able to identify the slow in the margins of memory politics in the region, in the memory of non-violent actions, of anti-war activism, and of peace agreements, mostly as alternatives to hegemonic memory policies as they have been shaped in the past three decades. As such, we search for places where the slow resides, as related to the quality (or depth) of peace and its establishment, as well as in the memoryscapes shaped by legacies of violence and erasure of a shared past.

In tracing slow memory practices in the region, we will feature two main threads of analysis in the existing literature; the first relating to tracing remembrance beyond the violent breakup of Yugoslavia only, and the second which allows the tracing of mnemonic actions beyond ethnicity only, framed as an alternative challenging the prevailing politics of victimization. We will do so by featuring the slow in the study of activism, protests, and joint social actions, followed by the use of the slow in the analysis of mnemonic murals as an emerging form of commemoration. We will close by reflecting on the other contributions to the special issue and the way they advance how slow memory and slow peace can be researched, offering new approaches and insights for scholars of memory, conflict, and area studies. Our Slow Memory approach encourages new research in the post-Yugoslav region by examining long-term, everyday, and generational practices of remembrance that unfold beyond singular events, revealing both possibilities for peacebuilding and the persistence of nationalist revisionism.

2 Tracing Slow Memory Practices in the Post-Yugoslav Space

As we enter the discussion of our empirical evidence from the post-Yugoslav space, we emphasize the need to incorporate into our analysis the investigation of the question “how do conflicts end?” Did they end with a peace process or a peace agreement allowing the formation of platforms for conflict transformation and peacebuilding processes? Or did they only generate new realities of frozen and unresolved conflicts, which resulted in socio-political environments that are still dominated by the same ethno-national politics that were among the root causes of the conflicts to begin with? Whereas the war in Croatia ended with a definite victory of the Croatian state and the establishment of clear international and domestic borders, the wars in Bosnia and Herzegovina and Kosovo ended with multiple sides claiming “victory”, resulting in oppositional memory politics practiced in the contested spaces. Our research shows that in most cases, rather than its transformation, memory politics in the post-Yugoslav space represent a continuation of war through mnemonic practices both formal and informal, from state-sponsored performative commemorations and sites of memory to the semi-legal muralization of the conflict.

In the aftermath of the break-up of Yugoslavia, the post-war socio-economic realities were defined by externally imposed peacebuilding processes (or a lack thereof) and weak peace treaties such as the Dayton Agreement (see Mlinarević and Porobić 2021). Additionally, the absence of an agreement at the end of the war in Kosovo (Ejdus 2019; Visoka 2017; Fridman 2020) means that memory studies scholars are facing an additional political layer studying frozen conflicts while tracing slower changes as they occur from below. Nuancing our understanding of the types of conflicts we have scrutinized requires additional attention to the question of “how conflicts end?” In that sense, the way conflicts end shape the design of the memory politics and its administration (state sponsored), as well as the viability for civic engagement with memory (from below). The dynamics between the two can also be traced through the lenses of slow memory as it evolves over time.

Scholars of conflicts with still standing peace agreements and of frozen conflicts are witnessing shifts in the new global order, which has created profound changes in the international peace architecture (IPA) over the last three decades, and even more so now. As such, there is no longer a widely agreed formula for social relations, reform, peace agreements, political and economic frameworks, or regional and international arrangements in which “peace” should be nested (Richmond et al. 2024). Similarly, major shifts are also occurring in the architecture of international justice that has governed and institutionalized global memory politics, as well as knowledge production in Southeastern Europe. In light of these global changes, the slow memory and slow peace lenses are even more viable, allowing in-depth analysis of unique empirical data that identifies both continuation and change over time.

3 Commemoration, Activism, Protests and Slow Memory

Research on commemorative practices in Croatia (Pavlaković and Pauković 2019) and Serbia (Đureinović 2020) show how the two Yugoslav states in the 20^th century are primarily remembered through their violent disintegrations. As Pavlaković (2020) and others have noted in research on memory politics in Croatia, the battles of Vukovar (1991) and Operation Storm (1995) represent the powerful emotions of victimization and then victory, the twin pillars that fuel the official narratives of the Croatian War of Independence (known in Croatia as Domovinski rat, or the Homeland War) and political discourse. This approach of remembrance consequently shapes domestic politics, especially regarding the Serb minority in Croatia, and international relations, namely with Serbia and Bosnia and Herzegovina. These two dominant events in memory politics in Croatia overshadow all of the other processes that occurred from the end of socialist Yugoslavia until the Dayton Peace Accords (1995) and the peaceful reintegration in Slavonia (1998), leaving little space for alternate interpretations of the 1990s. The Croatian Serb community, excluded from the main commemorative events for nearly three decades, was finally integrated into the remembrance activities of Operation Storm in 2020. Most importantly, that year representatives of the Croatian government and even the president attended commemorations of Serb civilians killed in the aftermath of military operations, representing a major symbolic step forward in dealing with the past. Nevertheless, these performative moments were tied to specific events from the war that were ignored in subsequent years, essentially turning the clock back to the previous practices of each ethnic group remembering their own victims (and heroes).

The memory of peace initiatives is obscured by militarized battlefield scenes, the victims of the catastrophic economic transformation are hidden by images of atrocities committed by the enemy, and the everyday efforts of survival, interethnic cooperation, and rebuilding are lost in the drama of nationalist flag-waving euphoria (see Banjeglav and Marić in this special issue). Some scholars have sought to challenge the exclusive ethno-nationalist conflict narrative of Yugoslavia’s collapse (Cvek 2016) and more nuanced analysis of socialist Yugoslavia (Archer et al. 2016), but beyond the efforts of the NGO sector the majority of the historiography was dominated for many years by studies that focused on the war narrative and dealing with the legacies of war crimes. However, more recent studies have sought to analyze the slower processes associated with Yugoslavia, its international legacy, and its afterlives in volumes such as Socialist Yugoslavia and the Non-Aligned Movement: Social, Cultural, Political, and Economic Imaginaries (Stubbs 2023), Yugoslavia, Nonalignment and Cold War Globalism: Tito’s International Rise, Celebrity and Fall (Stopić et al 2024), and Utopia of the Uniform: Affective Afterlives of the Yugoslav People’s Army (Petrović 2024). Perhaps the most closely related recent volume to slow memory in this region is Bratstvo i jedinstvo za kuhinjskim stolom: Hrana u socijalističkoj Jugoslaviji (Brotherhood and Unity at the Kitchen Table: Food in Socialist Yugoslavia, Fotiadis et al. 2024), which tackles the role of food, tradition, and identity as the epitome of everyday historical enquiry.

With the focus on the destruction of the common state, there is also less room to remember the slow processes of Yugoslav unification and Yugoslav shared experiences and communities. Contemporary ruling regimes in the successor states through their memory politics have largely sought to erase any sense of continuity with Yugoslavia, or with the shared lives and identities it generated. This is not to suggest that there should be efforts to recreate Yugoslavia or suggest that everything was ideal under socialism, but by including reflections on the reasons why there were desires for a common South Slavic state in memorialization practices (museums, education, sites of memory) it will be possible to foster an interpretation of the region not only as a place of conflict, but also of cooperation, exchange, and tolerance and even of commemorative solidarity (Athanasios 2017; Fridman 2022). An example of memory-making for an international audience is the documentary film series Death of Yugoslavia (1995, BBC), which remains a fundamental component of course syllabuses to this day. While Death of Yugoslavia undoubtedly provides a fascinating insight into the political chess match conducted by Yugoslavia’s political class as the country slid into war, it exclusively portrays the story of opportunistic elites, mostly men, moving their pawns towards a seemingly inevitable military confrontation without revealing the alternative processes from below, which could have minimized the violence if not prevented the dissolution entirely.

The slow memory approach can tease out these overlooked actors and processes that are equally important to the dramatic events of high politics. For example, a slow memory approach to the wars of the 1990s sheds light upon the activities of anti-war peace activists (see Dević 1997; Bilić 2012), local initiatives, army deserters (see Aleksov 2012), draft dodgers (see Milićević 2006), conscientious objectors (see Fridman 2006) political dissidents, and other facets that have been well researched, yet somewhat overlooked until now in regional discussions from the perspective of memory studies. Previous research of these topics from peace and conflict studies scholars, now integrated into memory scholarship, does reveal marginalized local narratives of slow peace, as Lederach (2023) has shown. Beyond Southeastern Europe, memory scholars such as Reading and Katriel (2015) have already advanced our thinking and highlighted the significance of studying cultural memories of non-violent actions and struggles, beyond the legacies of violence and war events. Contributions to this special issue (Otmačič, Banjeglav and Marić) are examples of how the new approaches using the slow memory framework can assist in understanding the recent past beyond the military events dominating the official narratives in the region.

For Croatia-Serbia relations, memory practices based on events inevitably churns up opposing lists of battles, murders, atrocities, expulsions, and other grievances blamed on “the Other”. For Serbian-Albanian relations in Serbia-Kosovo, exclusively ethnicized deep divisions, as in the case of other frozen conflicts, obscure the efforts of social actors on all sides to imagine a shared future that would move beyond an exclusively ethnic dichotomy. Unfortunately, the very violent past and present stalemate, maintained by frequent political provocations, sustains the hegemonic victim narratives at all levels. The situation in Bosnia and Herzegovina is even more complicated due to the intertwined and mutually antagonistic relations of the three main ethno-national groups (Bosniaks, Serbs, and Croats), as described in the article by Mujkanović, Zoletić, and Lebonte in this special issue. The post-Yugoslav memoryscape is filled with monuments, plaques, and memorial parks dedicated to the Second World War, many of them damaged or neglected, and, like a palimpsest, overwritten by the new hyper-production of memory sites. The national, regional, and local authorities that followed both the wars of the 1940s and 1990s focused on memorializing heroes, victims, battlefields, and other key moments, in other words events, that would fit into and support the ideology and narrative of the time. The statues, memory parks, and memorial plaques were by their very nature limited in the stories they told, while history museums only recently have sought to break out of the top-down, nation-building approach to presenting the past, such as the Red History Museum ³ in Dubrovnik, the War Childhood Museum ⁴ in Sarajevo, the Lipa Remembers Memorial Center ⁵ near Rijeka, and the exhibition Labyrinth, which serves as a possible blueprint for the creation of a museum of the 1990s (muzej devedesetih). ⁶ Therefore, we can conclude that the memory politics of the twentieth century was anything but slow, considering both what was being remembered (armed conflict and those directly affected by it, whether perpetrators or victims) and how they were remembered (top-down sites of memory that were ideologically subservient). Marginalized actors, such as activists against war and against nationalism, peacemakers, minorities communities, ⁷ and women and everyday experiences had very little space in the post-Yugoslav memoryscapes, and rarely were decisions about memory sites democratically decided upon by local communities.

Addressing the post-Yugoslav space as a region of memory, and more precisely as a region of memory activism (Fridman 2022), we can identify those marginalized actors if we focus the scholarly analysis on slower processes of change and transformation of conflict, through the production of alternative knowledge about the recent past that is otherwise dominated by historical revisionism (see Škorić and Bešlin 2017; Benčić et al 2018; Subotić 2019; Trajanovski et al. 2021) and the ongoing glorification of war criminals (Hola and Simić 2018). In the search for civic (and not exclusively military) heroes, the shared past is being scrutinized by younger social actors born during or after the wars of the 1990s, and the “memory of activism” has emerged as an important and novel engagement with remembrance practices beyond those related to the battlefields and events only.

Remembering activism of the 1990s in Serbia features a variety of actors from the Women in Black, the Humanitarian Law Center (HLC), the Helsinki Committee, the Yugoslav Lawyers for Human Rights (YUCOM) as well as the Center for Cultural Decontamination (CZKD), the Documentation Center for the Wars of 1991–1999, and Dah Theatre. While the numerous initiatives led by the anti-war civil society in Serbia were well documented (see Ćurgus 2001; Torov 2000; Šušak 2000; Rosandić et al 2005) and studied, the actions and legacies of anti-war activists were quickly erased from not only collective memories but also from urban public spaces (such as the names of streets, schools, and state/city institutions, etc.). Their slow emergence through the “memory of activism” (Rigney 2018) goes well beyond events, gives space for the political positions of feminist, anti-militarist, and anti-nationalist struggles (Papić 2002), and encourages ideas of alternate futures. In the aftermath of the wars, the Women in Black continued to be active in the streets as the first generation of memory activists in Serbia, and they continued to commemorate certain ideas and events, in the process creating annual rituals that were marked on their alternative calendar. Creating and participating in alternative commemorative events, which deconstruct dominant narratives of victimization and exclusive ethnic belonging, they opened up spaces for commemorative solidarity in the region and enable the search for hope (see Athanasios 2017; Duhaček 2015). Tracing the fast shift from peace to war that led to the end of Yugoslavia, followed by slower transformations from war mongering and violence to the end of the bloodshed (yet still dominated by nationalism), encourages us to examine the processes (rather than the events) of the creation of anti-war groups and activists, who are now, three decades after the end of the wars, engaged in memory activism as political action. The memory activism nexus, as articulated by Rigney (2018), reveals the nuanced interplay between memory activism (how activists struggle to produce cultural memory and steer future remembrance); the memory of activism (how earlier activism is culturally relocated); and memory in activism (how memory informs contemporary activism). In Serbia, the analysis of the nexus through generational belonging of actors such as memory activists, artists, film makers or educators (see Fridman 2022), reveals on one hand great creativity, but on the other hand, also the slow rhythms of change, and inability to shape official memory discourses, which we can situate in our discussion above, of the dark side of slow memory. Yet, tracing this generational interplay, of continuity and change, requires slower methods and research over longer time periods, to address both peace and memory studies as a means towards transformative ends.

An example of counter-commemoration and searching for civic heroes is the effort to build a monument to Yugoslav Army general Vladimir (Vlado) Trifunović, who negotiated with Croatian authorities in the city of Varaždin in 1991 in order to save the lives of his soldiers. Although he was accused by the Serbian authorities of treason and by Croatian state prosecutors of war crimes, his efforts to prevent unnecessary deaths by surrendering the barracks under his command are considered by the new generation of peace activists as the embodiment of honesty and human dignity (YIHR 2018). The Youth Initiative for Human Rights in Serbia (and across the former Yugoslavia), represents the next generation of memory activists, and is one of the most active and vocal anti-war networks. One of their goals was to engage with stories of the unknown heroes of Yugoslavia’s bloody disintegration. In addition to Vlado Trifunović, the YIHR seeks the public recognition of anti-war figures such as Miroslav Milenković, Vladimir Živković, ⁸ and countless others who have been marginalized in Serbian and regional collective memory of the wars of the 1990s (Fridman 2022). Such remembrance is slow, it requires attention to be able to trace bottom-up actions, and allows connections and solidarities to be formed, defying not only victimization narratives but also narrow concepts of ethnic belonging. This approach ultimately allows actions that channel political imagination towards local memories of peace in a region otherwise still governed by deep tensions and divisions. This echoes with what Lederach has discovered in her study of slow peace in Colombia, which we see as situated in the margins of the post-Yugoslav states today. The task of the new mnemonic actors is to generate narratives that no longer focus solely on war and suffering, but instead reveal the multigenerational and multinational or even transnational struggle against war.

In addition to studies focusing on works of memory activists, waves of protests demanding social justice and change, as were seen in Bosnia and Herzegovina in 2014, or in Serbia from 2023 until the present (February 2025), have also revealed slow processes of change, not only in the appearance of a new generation and its new claims, but from the point of view of memory and the afterlives of protests (Merrill and Rigney 2024). In Serbia in the 1990s, it has been argued that ​​an entire generation of activists was part of a process of learning to engage in civil resistance (Blagojević 2006), but in the current protests the reappearance of the masses in the streets, including familiar actions and insignia, exemplifies how memory in protest can function as both a mobilizing force with symbols of hope, yet at the same time function as a source of political paralysis and disappointment (Fridman 2024). The memory of student protests in Serbia over the past three decades, which can be traced slowly utilizing the memory-activism nexus, is also a reminder of the rich and lively legacies available to young people claiming yet again that “Belgrade is the World” (see Figures 1 and 2), of nonviolent struggles, of creativity in civic engagement, and of processes of democratic change. Tracing the visual and discursive memory in protests (Rigney and Smits 2023), and more specifically the repertoires of protests in cultural memory in Serbia, reveals the slow processes of continuation yet change, which can only be analyzed by applying slow methodologies.

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Belgrade is the World: the slogan of the 1997–97 anti-regime protests. photo by draŠko gagoviĆ / vrme

Citation: Southeastern Europe 2026; 10.30965/18763332-20262003

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Belgrade is the world again: the reappearing of the slongan in the 2024–25 student protests in Serbia.

Citation: Southeastern Europe 2026; 10.30965/18763332-20262003

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Current acts of regional solidarity based on civic claims for justice against corruption, which is perceived as a prevailing and a common issue across the region, are much stronger than ever seen before. This kind of commemorative solidarity has the potential to create additional civic spaces for regional reconnection and transformations of past conflicts in the future. Although hate speech and violent rhetoric has governed political and social lives in Serbia for decades, as can be traced in graffiti struggles on urban spaces and city walls, the symbol of hearts suddenly began to appear in Belgrade, visually confronting the ubiquitous murals of military men and war criminals. The controversial mural of Ratko Mladić was covered by a big heart following two mass shootings in Serbia, including one in a nearby school, in 2023 (see Figure 3), while other hate messages on the walls have been re-designated as spots for hugs or love (see Figure 4). While the hearts are not necessarily new, their reappearance indicates the slow change which can be traced in public space confirmed by conversations with citizens attending the protests in support of the students. Participants have explicitly referred to the sense of love and support they felt among citizens from various communities, especially outside of big cities, which has not been seen nor experienced for a long time.

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Controversial mural: a big heart covering the mural to Ratko Mladić in central Belgrade, after months of contestation. photo by orli fridman, may 2023.

Citation: Southeastern Europe 2026; 10.30965/18763332-20262003

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Controversial mural, instead of hate on the walls of the city: a heart covering hate graffiti, claiming the place as a spot for hugs. photo by orli fridman, may 2023.

Citation: Southeastern Europe 2026; 10.30965/18763332-20262003

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As marginal as some of these claims and actions may have been, and still are today, they allow us to raise questions and reflect on the future of conflict transformation, regionally and globally, as other wars are being waged in Europe and in the Middle East today. The post-Yugoslav experiences then begs the question: in which way, if at all, will the Russo-Ukrainian war resisters be remembered? If so, by whom? Will the memory of anti-war claims and positions in Russia since 2022, as well as those in political exile, be able to be recovered, or will they slowly fall into oblivion? Additionally, on-going joint political actions of Israelis and Palestinians against the occupation, before as well as during the 2023–2025 war in Gaza, are taking place in the margins of those societies and are almost completely ignored in the international media as well as in local news coverage, which again raises the question will the memory of such anti-militarist and anti-war action be remembered, particularly in a political environment where the word peace has been completely erased from the political discourse?

While the slow memory framework enables us to reevaluate the legacy of anti-war activism in the former Yugoslavia as an overlooked aspect of understanding the recent past, this approach can also catalyze society to engage with other inequalities and with calls for social change in the region. Those can include environmental issues, socio-economic inequalities, the decline of democracy, and the rise of populism. These social changes, as well as the mnemonic demands, cannot take be tackled on the local or national levels only, and therefore are well-positioned to operate in the broader post-Yugoslav space as a region of memory activism. The following section shifts our analytical attention to sites of memory, and how the framework of the slow can engage with the past with new approaches that challenge the dominant ethnonationalist narrative.

4 Mnemonic Murals and Slow Memory

The Yugoslav successor states do not exist in a geographically neutral space, and are thus subject to the trends, memorialization traditions, and mnemonic paradigms of post-socialist Europe, the European Union, and broader monument-making legacies of Western civilization. Even the authors of the apparently radical spomeniks of socialist Yugoslavia that have been globally embraced for their otherworldly appearance drew upon modernist traditions and were a part of contemporary architectural trends (Horvatinčić and Žerovc 2023). So, is there a way to detect, and perhaps more proactively, bring the slow into our analysis of post-Yugoslav memorialization and memoryscapes? Based on comparative research in the United States, Latin America, and across Europe, a rapidly expanding medium for memorialization offers exciting opportunities for slow memory: the mnemonic mural. Although it seems counterintuitive that the genre of often ephemeral, and seemingly spontaneous, commemorative street art and murals would fit the concept of slow memory, the reality is that murals are just as politicized, long-lasting, and carefully planned as any traditional site of memory. The most elaborate theoretical analysis of “monumental graffiti” is a new study by Shacter (2024), who approaches graffiti as an urban artifact through the categories of form, message, and trace. Moreover, the visual language of mnemonic murals allows a depiction of the past beyond events, and are much cheaper to produce than the grandiose monument-building projects of regimes throughout history. Murals also tend to be digitally disseminated (and thus preserved) to a greater degree than traditional monuments, even if they are created out of inherently less durable materials. Street art, along with political graffiti, is the ultimate voice of the street, enabling marginalized groups to intervene in public space, and when combined with a memory-making agenda, can be harnessed to break the monopoly of dominant narratives. Yet, in the post-Yugoslav states, political graffiti can also function as official sites of memory, marking the broader presence of the state, state institutions, and religious communities in their production as well as ability to survive longer periods of time on the walls without being erased, interrupted, or painted over.

Graffiti, and political graffiti particularly, are often illegal, subversive, and treated as vandalism by the law. However, political graffiti are not only the opinions of marginalized segments of society, but rather expressions of broader issues present in the public sphere, especially in turbulent periods such as war, pandemics, or economic depressions, at which point the writings on the wall become “a multidimensional mirror of society in crisis” (Zaimakis 2015: 393). Whereas some scholars consider street art to fall under the broad category of graffiti, we approach it separately due to its primarily figurative visual language that can be accompanied by texts, but not necessarily. Both graffiti and street art tend to be 2D interventions in public space, although new technology allows innovative forms to develop, while an increasing number of museums and galleries have taken “street art” off the streets and into the high-end art world, such as the internationally famous postmodernist provocateur, Banksy. Modern graffiti emerged from New York City in the 1960s, and eventually spread around the world. While initially dismissed as vandalism and visual pollution, researchers beyond urban studies or art history have taken graffiti and street art more seriously because they can speak “volumes about history, identity, cultural memory, desire, nostalgia, and erasure” (Myllylä 2018: 31).

Since the early 2000s, the creation and dissemination of graffiti and street art has exploded, in part due to the ability of social media to easily share images to millions of global followers. And while political commemorative street art in the United States (featuring victims of police brutality such as George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, support for Ukraine against Russian aggression, or a humanitarian approach to migration policies) could be categorized as rapid responses to contemporary events, there are numerous case studies that show the potential for slow memory.

Contemporary commemorative muralization owes its trajectory to the cultural politics of revolutionary Mexico, which engaged in expansive public art interventions in the 1920s and exported some of its most renown muralists – Diego Rivera, Jose Clemente Orozco, and David Alfaro Siqueiros (Los Tres Grandes) – to the United States in the 1930s (Indych-Lopez 2016). Siqueiros in particular was significant not only because of his use of new technologies available from the Hollywood movie industry, but also “through his role as an organizer of mural teams and workshops that put into practice theories of collectivity and experimentation” (Ibid., p. 345). This spirit of community action in mural creation was continued by activist Judy Baca almost fifty years later, when she began her work on a mnemonic mural in 1978 that would eventually be known as the Great Wall of Los Angeles (see Figure 5). Mobilizing over 400 community youths and artists, this nearly kilometer-long depiction of an alternative history of Los Angeles, California, and the United States epitomizes not only the resilience of the Hispanic community, but also boldly shows the struggles of other minority groups, women, victims of anti-communist hysteria, the LGBT community, and other marginalized segments of society who undoubtedly played, and still play, an important historical role (Ontiveros 2017). However, as shown in the book ¡Murales rebeldes! about Chicano murals in Los Angeles, the ability of this community to portray their history in public space – including immigration, deportations, discrimination, and violence, but also achievements and success – has frequently been obstructed by political actors in power who reproduce the dominant narrative (Curtis et al. 2017).

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Judy Baca, The Great Wall of Los Angeles (1978). photo by vjeran pavlaković 2024.

Citation: Southeastern Europe 2026; 10.30965/18763332-20262003

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The contemporary US graffitiscape features an incredible growth of activist street art, commemorative murals, and political graffiti, and can perhaps serve as a blueprint for detecting, and possibly cultivating, a slow mnemonic mural approach in the post-Yugoslav space. As Judy Baca has demonstrated, local communities can be mobilized for work on mural projects, which many cities (for example Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Washington, DC) have recognized and subsequently offer funding to create commemorative street art and support minority artists. Paradoxically, this funding often comes with ulterior motives from advertisers, developers, and politicians who see the muralization of neighborhoods as a part of gentrification or purely profit-making tourism for the Instagram crowd. Murals that celebrate diversity and local history in neighborhoods such as Pilsen in Chicago, raise awareness about immigration and border policy in the Mission District of San Francisco, or honor the struggle of Black women for equality and justice in the U Street Corridor of Washington DC are just a few examples of how commemorative street art reflects the complex fabric of US society often ignored in traditional forms of memorialization and official histories. The beginning of Donald Trump’s second mandate as president in 2025, with promises of mass deportations of immigrants and an assault on programs promoting diversity seem to thrust these murals into roles not of celebration but of resistance and resilience.

Returning to the post-Yugoslav memoryscape, we can see that global street art trends are well represented throughout the successor states. While political graffiti has covered city walls since at least the 1980s (Velikonja 2019), in the last decade large murals and graffiti art are common sights in urban spaces, and cities such as Belgrade, Mostar, Sisak, and Vukovar, among others, host international street art festivals. However, whereas mnemonic murals in the US and in other Western countries often remain subversive, in the Yugoslav successor states the overwhelming majority replicate dominant post-war narratives that not only echo the official monumental landscape, but often project an even more aggressive ethno-nationalist message. As noted above, the official narratives of the war in each state emphasize one’s own heroes and victims while minimizing or outright denying one’s perpetrators of war crimes. In Croatia there are numerous murals to Operation Storm and Flash from 1995, various military units and their symbols, and portraits of individual commanders and soldiers (Blago Zadro, Ante Gotovina, Damir Tomljanović Gavran, and many others), while murals in Serbia celebrate generals commanding the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina and soldiers that fought in Kosovo. Sites of national victimization are also common mnemonic mural motifs, such as Vukovar (Croatia), Srebrenica (Bosnia and Herzegovina), and sites targeted by NATO bombs in 1999 (Serbia). Most problematic are murals celebrating convicted war criminals from the 1990s, including Ratko Mladić, Slobodan Praljak, and Mihajlo Hrastov, or even the Second World War, such as Četnik leader Dragoljub “Draža” Mihailović. The fact that the majority of these murals are sophisticated artistic endeavors (sometimes taking days to complete) and are located in central public locations (main squares, major streets, on the walls of schools or other public buildings) indicates that in the former Yugoslavia, the governments in power tolerate the creation of these militarized mnemonic murals, despite the fact that many of them are created by football hooligan groups (ultras) who engage in criminal activities (unauthorized graffiti, drug dealing, violence, etc.). ⁹ In Croatia, and possibly in other parts of the post-Yugoslav space, the mnemonic murals have begun to function as other official sites of memory: they are blessed by Catholic clergy, they feature the names and dates of fallen soldiers, community members place candles next to them on anniversaries, and they serve as meeting points during commemorative events, most notably the annual memorial day for Vukovar (see Figure 6).

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A mural commemorating the siege of Vukovar with an image of war criminal Slobodan Praljak in Novi Zagreb. An earlier mural of Praljak was painted over (part of the word “hero” is still visible) along with Vukovar, which local ultras quickly repainted to return Praljak, adding the words “honor and pride”. photo by vjeran pavlaković, 2021.

Citation: Southeastern Europe 2026; 10.30965/18763332-20262003

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What is to be done, therefore, with the potential of commemorative street art to emphasize slow memory? Northern Ireland, which has the world’s most famous commemorative political street art, has a history of militarized murals that have served to mobilize and perpetuate the sectarian violence that peaked during the Troubles (1960s–1998) (Rolston 2010). While there have been many initiatives to commodify the mnemonic murals through tourism, fund depoliticized street art (such as the homage to the stars of the hit show Derry Girls), and to whitewash the most militant images off the walls, many murals remain that glorify paramilitaries carrying weapons or demonize opponents through graphic depictions of civilian victims. Although the mnemonic murals in the former Yugoslavia seem to follow in the footsteps of the militarized walls of Belfast and Derry, traces of the slow can be detected that perhaps signal a potential of new initiatives with possibilities for transformations of conflict.

Boris Bare and Vedran Štimac, muralists who have worked extensively in Pula, Zagreb, and across the region, use the language of street art to draw attention to contemporary socio-economic issues, marginalized historical figures, and topics that challenge the dominant narrative. While the Croatian coastal town of Pula has a thriving tourist economy, the Uljanik shipyard, which employed thousands of workers and was a symbol of the city, was allowed to go bankrupt in 2020. Bare’s massive mural on the walls of the Rojc cultural center, featuring the iconic logo of Uljanik under a uniform of a shipyard worker but missing an actual person, sends a clear message to every citizen of Pula, just like the inert cranes in the city harbor (see Figure 7). A mural by Štimac, also located in Pula, of the communist journalist and politician Rossana Rossanda (1924–2020) is powerful not only because of the rare ideological challenge to the otherwise ethno-nationalist graffitiscape, but because it features a woman in the male-dominated world of Balkan commemorative street art (see Figure 8). ¹⁰ Stripped of the obvious ethno-nationalist symbols and event-based motifs, these mnemonic murals transcend the constrained temporal boundaries of traditional memory sites and national identities, reflecting Pula’s own complex, multinational, and working class past.

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Slow memory mural: Boris Bare, Uljanik. photo by vjeran pavlaković, 2024.

Citation: Southeastern Europe 2026; 10.30965/18763332-20262003

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Slow memory mural: Vedran Štimac, Rossana Rossanda. photo by vjeran pavlaković, 2021.

Citation: Southeastern Europe 2026; 10.30965/18763332-20262003

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The very ethnically divided memoryscape in Bosnia and Herzegovina has been challenged by Sarajevo muralist and activist Benjamin Čengić. In addition to painting murals supporting universal causes such as breast cancer prevention, he has created a well-known mural depicting socialist era monuments, many of which were destroyed or damaged in the 1990s, thus creating a kind of meta-memory intervention in a city that is filled with new memorials and national symbols. In the spirit of LA’s Judy Baca, who often worked with troubled youth, Čengić has made an effort to use murals as a tool of community-building, which is desperately needed in the atmosphere of hopelessness that often pervades contemporary BiH, especially among younger generations. In Serbia, the Youth Initiative for Human Rights (YIHR) for years monitored and tried to remove graffiti and murals celebrating war criminals or promoting hate speech or violence in Belgrade and throughout Serbia. ¹¹ Simultaneously, the NGO Krokodil attempted to whitewash a big mural threatening the return of the Serbian army to Kosovo that ultras had placed on the wall of the Institute of Chemistry, Technology, and Metallurgy in the center of Belgrade in February 2023 (see Figure 9). Shortly after it was covered, the authorities allowed it to be repainted, followed by its appearance in hundreds of locations all over the city and other towns in Serbia, a clear indication that the nationalist regime tacitly supported such militant murals. Seemingly losing the battle in public space against the paramilitary muralists, the activists creatively turned to the laws on communal services which required public institutions to maintain their facades, and fought militant murals with slow memory murals. Instead of a call for violence in Kosovo, the Institute of Chemistry, Technology, and Metallurgy painted their wall in July 2023 with a large mural featuring Serbian scientists (Milutin Stefanović, Paula Putanov, and Pavle Savić) (see Figure 10).

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Militant murals and transformation: mural on the side of the Institute of Chemistry, Technology, and Metallurgy: “When the army returns to Kosovo…”. photo by vjeran pavlaković, 2022.

Citation: Southeastern Europe 2026; 10.30965/18763332-20262003

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Militant murals and transformation: a new mural portraying Serbian scientists on the side of the Institute of Chemistry, Technology, and Metallurgy. photo by vjeran pavlaković, 2024.

Citation: Southeastern Europe 2026; 10.30965/18763332-20262003

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These examples demonstrate that alternative forms of memorialization are possible, that a turn to the slow can enable patriotic sites of memory that are not based exclusively on violence, victimization, and traumatic events from the past. Moreover, mnemonic murals are a tool that activists and political actors can use to intervene in public space without directly confronting nationalist mnemonic agents who currently have the support of authorities uninterested to truly engage in regional dialogue, peacebuilding, conflict transformation or reconciliation.

The other contributions to this special issue reflect upon peace initiatives, contested memoryscapes, traumatized communities, and neglected tourism potential in former war zones, all of which form a more complex historical narrative than is currently offered by the post-war governments in power. Mnemonic murals cannot validate the slow memory approach alone, but they do offer the potential for bottom-up, community initiatives that challenge the narrative that armed conflict and ethnic hatred is the singular interpretation of post-Yugoslav history.

5 The Structure of the Special Issue

In line with the themes introduced in our article, bringing together our interest in slow memory and slow peace, the texts featured in this special issue continue to explore dynamics of continuity and change, of marginal remembrance, and beyond events only. In her analysis of slow memory in the community of Gorski Kotar in Croatia, Otmačić reveals the characteristics of everyday positive peace and endeavors to identify links between positive peace practices and memories of peace in a community where ethnic Croats and Serbs did not resort to inter-ethnic violence during the 1991–1995 war. In a broader analysis of the legacies of the war in Croatia, Banjeglav and Marić situate their text in the slow memory of a peaceful process in the aftermath of violence rather than on the memory of violent events during conflict. They do so by showing how public remembrance of the war in Croatia includes only violent episodes from the war and marginalizes public memory of peace. Mujkanović, Zoletić and Labonté employ the slow memory lenses to examine the role of accumulated memories in memory activism, intergenerational transmission of family memory, and interpersonal cross-ethnic relationships in Bosnia and Herzegovina, as well as its diaspora. As such they argue for the innovative approach of slow memory to unlock further analysis of polarized mnemonic communities. Trajanovski and Stavrevska examine another deeply ethnically divided country, North Macedonia, showing how the memory of the late socialist period continues to impact relations today despite a political system that was established to create equality among all communities. The last two texts utilize slow memory for the study of monuments. Djordjevski and McConnell trace the slow transformation of violence in three regions in Croatia, showing how the slow memory paradigm thus enables a deeper analysis of how time and environment mediate Croatia’s contested national narrative in studying memoryscapes, tourism, and natural heritage. Although all of the contributors have engaged with the concepts of slow memory, we end with bringing forward Ann Rigney’s words of caution from the June 2022 COST Action meeting in Portland, which may be further discussed as our explorations of the transformation of conflicts go on. Firstly, let’s not think of slow memory as a single thing, rather we can think of different paces (and there are many). And secondly, let’s not always think that slowness is good (colonialism and patriarchy always go a long way). This may also help us avoid the dichotomy of the conventional and unconventional ways of studying memory in the aftermath of violence, yet deepen our discussions on the possible contribution of slow memory studies to our inquiries of peace and transformation of conflicts.