Inner Zone by Jelena Golubović

Unearths a buried history of retributive violence that unfolded inside besieged Sarajevo

In asymmetrical conflicts, how should we acknowledge suffering on the side of the perpetrators of violence? How can we do so without losing sight of the harm they inflicted, and without relativizing the suffering of their victims? Inner Zone introduces a new approach to telling contentious histories of war and explores the political implications of refusing to extend recognition to those who suffer on the “wrong” side of a conflict.

Bosnian Serb forces held the city of Sarajevo under siege from 1992 until 1995. Inner Zone revisits this emblematic conflict from the perspective of Bosnian Serb women who remained in the city during the siege years. As Serb civilians came to be associated with the ethno-national aggressor, these women became targets of collective punishment and retribution. The war crimes committed against them have been written out of most academic and journalistic accounts of the war, and in Sarajevo, they have become a public secret. Pluralizing the monolithic story of the siege into zones of violence, Jelena Golubović locates an inner zone of retribution within the larger outer zone of besiegement, telling a nested history that reconfigures how we think about victimhood and complicity across both sides of a conflict.

As Bosnian Serb women tell their previously untold stories through ethnographic interviews, Golubović remains attentive to the anxious sense of exclusion that haunts them in the postwar city. While their victimization is erased from the dominant narrative of the war in Sarajevo, the Bosnian Serb ethno-nationalist elite emphasize it to claim exclusive victimhood. Inner Zone takes on the challenge of disentangling lived experiences of violence from the grip of ethno-nationalist misappropriation, arguing that a sense of misrecognition and unacknowledged injury can ultimately lead victims of the inner zone of violence to adopt ethno-nationalist narratives and goals.