Joining the war: Masculinity, nationalism and war participation in the Balkans war of secession, 1991-1995

Nationalities Papers

Volumn 34, Issue 3, 2006, Pages 265-287

  Sasha Milićević, Aleksandra ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF NORTH FLORIDA   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

MASCULINIZATION; NATIONALISM; PARTICIPATORY APPROACH;

ASIA; BALKAN; EURASIA; TURKMENISTAN; WEST ASIA;

EID: 33747288716     PISSN: 00905992     EISSN: 14653923     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/00905990600766487     Document Type: Article

References (85)

1. For detailed discussion on the use of snowball sampling in studying populations that are not easily reached see Robert S. Weiss, Learning from strangers: The Art and Method of Qualitative Interview Studies (New York: Free Press, 1994).
2. The numbers of dead on each of the sides are disputed and range from 25,000 to 280,000. Bosnian government sources commonly quote 250,000 as the number killed in the war and three million as uprooted and dispersed See United States Department of State, "Bosnia and Herzegovina Country Report on Human Rights Practices for 1996," (accessed 10 April 2006). The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) yearbooks estimate number of killed Croats, Muslims and Serbs to be between 140,000 and 200,000. The Red Cross confirmed around 20,000 fatalities on all sides, and estimated the total fatalities at 20,000 to 30,000. Scholars analyzing the wars in Yugoslavia have agreed to disagree on this question. The estimates range from 35,000 killed on all sides in all the wars (Kate Hudson, Breaking the South Slav Dream: The Rise and Fall of Yugoslavia [London: Pluto Press, 2003]) to 200,000 killed in Bosnia alone. Lampe agrees with the latter estimate and claims that Bosnian Muslims accounted for about half of the victims, Serbs for 30-35%
3. and Croats the rest (John R. Lampe, Yugoslavia as History: Twice There was a Country, 2nd edn [Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2000]). Similar disagreements are put forward about the number of refugees and displaced persons, as well as about the number of rape victims. For more details on the disputes over war casualties
4. see Vanessa Pupavac, "Disputes over War Casualties in Former Yugoslavia," Radical Statistics, No. 69, 1998, (accessed 9 April 2006),
5. and George Kenney, "The Bosnia Calculation: How Many Have Died?" New York Times Magazine, 23 April 1995, .
6. This approach continues to dominate the popular imagining of the Yugoslav war and peace. For example, Friedman (New York Times, 23 January 2001) argues that democracy is not working in Bosnia because "ethnic identity and hatreds run so deep."
7. Laura Silber and Allan Little, Yugoslavia: Death of a Nation (London: Penguin, 1995), p. 25.
8. Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1983);
9. Eric J. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism Since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1991);
10. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983).
11. Georg Tillner, "The Identity of Dominance: Masculinity and Xenophobia," in Ingeborg Breines, Robert Connel and Ingrid Eide, eds, Male Roles, Masculinities and Violence: A Culture of Peace Perspective (Paris: UNESCO, 2000), p. 54.
12. See Robert W. Connell, "Arms and the Man: Using the New Research on Masculinity to Understand Violence and Promote Peace in the Contemporary World," in Ingeborg Breines, Robert Connel and Ingrid Eide, eds, Male Roles, Masculinities and Violence: A Culture of Peace Perspective (Paris: UNESCO, 2000);
13. Rachel Woodward, "Warrior Heroes and Little Green Men: Soldiers, Military Training, and Construction of Rural Masculinities," Rural Sociology, Vol. 65, No. 4, 2000, pp. 640-657;
14. John Beynon, Masculinities and Culture (Buckingham, England: Open University Press, 2002).
15. See Connell, "Arms and the Man."
16. Also see Robert W Connell, The Men and the Boys (Cambridge, England: Polity Press, 2000).
17. Cynthia Enloe, Maneuvers: The International Politics of Militarizing Women's Lives (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), p. 45.
18. Joane Nagel, "Masculinity and Nationalism: Gender and Sexuality in the Making of Nations," Ethnic and Racial Studies, Vol. 21, No. 2, 1998, p. 243.
19. Ibid.
20. Susan Gal and Gail Kligman, The Politics of Gender after Socialism: A Comparative-Historical Essay (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000).
21. Denich refers to this as the "patrilineal paradox." See Bette Denich,. "Sex and Power in the Balkans," in Michelle Zimbalist Rosaldo and Louise Lamphere, eds, Woman, Culture and Society (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1974). Bringa writes about the vulnerability of the household as a unit that is "literally embodied in the woman who was at once the outsider to and the main reproducer of the unit."
22. See Tone Bringa, Being Muslim the Bosnian Way: Identity and Community in a Central Bosnian Village (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), p. 91.
23. See also Eugene A. Hammel, Alternative Social Structures and Ritual Relations in the Balkans (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1968);
24. Gail Kligman, The Politics of Duplicity: Controlling Reproduction in Ceausescu's Romania (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998).
25. Women as a symbolic collective and the nation (or motherland) conceptualized as a female are common metaphors for a variety of nationalisms - from the French Marianne, through Mother Russia, to Bharatmata - "Mother India." For more information on India, and on connections between gender, nationalism and colonialism in India and Ireland, see Sikata Banerjee, "Gender and Nationalism: The Masculinization of Hinduism and Female Political Participation in India," Women's Studies International Forum, Vol. 26, 2003, pp. 167-179;
26. Suruchi Thapar-Björkert and Louise Ryan, "Mother India/Mother Ireland: Comparative Gendered Dialogues of Colonialism and Nationalism in the Early 20th Century," Women's Studies International Forum, Vol. 25, No. 3, 2002, pp. 301-313.
27. Agostino recognizes the military and war as sites where hegemonic masculinity is "reproduced and maintained." See Katerina Agostino, "The Making of Warriors: Men, Identity and Military Culture," Journal of Interdisciplinary Gender Studies, Vol. 3, 1998, pp. 58-75.
28. On military masculinities see also Enloe, "Maneuvres,"
29. Paul Higate, Military Masculinities: Identity and the State (London: Praeger, 2003).
30. Gal and Kligman, Politics of Gender after Socialism, p. 26.
31. Martha K. Huggins and Mika Haritos-Fatouros, "Bureaucratizing Masculinities among Brazilian Torturers and Murderers," in Lee H. Bowker, ed., Masculinities and Violence (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1998), p. 30.
32. Kligman, Politics of Duplicity.
33. For more information on war rapes in the former Yugoslavia see Maja Korać, "Representations of Mass Rape in Ethnic Conflicts in What Was Yugoslavia," Sociologija, Vol. 36, No. 4, 1994, pp. 495-514;
34. Obrad Kesić, "Women and Gender Imagery in Bosnia: Amazons, Sluts, Witches, and Wombs," in Sabrina Ramet, ed., Gender Politics in the Western Balkans: Women and Society in Yugoslavia and the Yugoslav Successor States (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999);
35. Alexandra Stiglmayer, ed., Mass Rape: The War against Women in Bosnia-Herzegovina (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994);
36. Maria B. Olujić, "Women, Rape, and War: The Continued Trauma of Refugees and Displaced Persons in Croatia," Anthropology of East Europe Review, Vol. 13, No. 1, 1995 .
37. For information about the sexual abuse of men, see Adam Jones, "Gender and Ethnic Conflict in Ex-Yugoslavia," Ethnic and Racial Studies, Vol. 17, 1994, pp. 115-134;
38. and Dubravka Žarkov "The Body of the Other Man: Sexual Violence and the Construction of Masculinity, Sexuality and Ethnicity in Croatian Media," in Caroline O. N. Moser and Fiona C. Clark, eds, Victims, Perpetrators or Actors? (London: Zed Books, 2001), pp. 69-82.
39. For feminist organizations, see Žarana Papić, "Women in Serbia: Post-communism, War, and Nationalist Mutations," in Sabrina Ramet, ed., Gender Politics in the Western Balkans: Women and Society in Yugoslavia and the Yugoslav Successor States (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999);
40. Zorica Mršević and Donna M. Hughes, SOS Hotline 1990-1993," Violence against Women, Vol. 3, No. 2, 1997, pp. 101-128;
41. Zorica Mršević, "Belgrade's SOS Hotline for Women and Children Victims of Violence: A Report," in Susan Gal and Gail Kligman, eds, Reproducing Gender: Politics, Publics, and Everyday Life after Socialism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000).
42. According to Susan Brownmiller's Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape (New York: Bantam, 1975), p. 31, "The act that is played out upon [the rape victim] is a message passed between men - vivid proof of victory for one and loss and defeat for the other."
43. Ramet, Gender Politics.
44. Epics have a long tradition in Yugoslavia and have functioned as repositories of history (they were/are taught in schools as part of cultural history), which portrayed wars as struggles against invaders.
45. The corpus of Serbian epic poetry is divided into cycles: The Pre-Kosovo cycle (songs about events that pre-date the Battle of Kosovo, in 1389), the Kosovo cycle (songs about events that happened just before and after the Battle of Kosovo) and the Post-Kosovo cycle (songs about more recent events). The first systematic collections of Serbian epic songs (as well as tales, riddles and proverbs) were gathered and published in the first half of the nineteenth century by Vuk Stefanović Karadžić. The epics were translated into German as soon as they were published in Serbian (and reportedly highly praised by Jacob Grimm and Goethe), but it was really Albert B. Lord's The Singer of Tales (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960) that made them famous outside of Yugoslavia. For a more detailed discussion of Serbo-Croatian heroic epic songs,
46. in addition to Lord see also Milman Parry, Albert B. Lord and David E. Bynum, eds, Serbo-Croatian Heroic Songs, Vols 3-4, 14 (Cambridge: Center for the Study of Oral Literature, 1974).
47. Predictably, this particular poem, and its motif of a heroic mother, was most commonly invoked in the 1990s to elicit war support by the mass media controlled by the Serbian regime. The poem is printed in Milne Holton and Vasa D. Mihailovich, Serbian Poetry from the Beginnings to the Present (New Haven: Slavica/Yale Centre for International and Area Studies, 1988), pp. 98-102.
48. Andrei Simić, "Machismo and Cryptomatriarchy: Power, Affect and Authority in the Traditional Yugoslav Family," in Sabrina Ramet, ed., Gender Politics in the Western Balkans: Women and Society in Yugoslavia and the Yugoslav Successor States (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999), p. 26.
49. The gendered images from the epics are also transferred into imagining the nation itself. Although the Serbian word for a homeland is otadžbina, which means "fatherland," it is a female noun. Similarly, Srbija (Serbia) is a female noun, understood both as a nation and as a land. For some nationalists Serbia is symbolically just another female to be protected, as is seen from their evocation of the notion of Majka Srbija (Mother Serbia). Yet, "Serb" (Srbin) is always understood to be male. The national motto - "Only unity saves Serbs" (Samo sloga Srbina spasava) - doesn't mention Serbian women (Srpkinje).
50. Changes in the rates of reproduction followed the patterns associated with modernization throughout the rest of Europe. In the case of Yugoslavia, birthrates declined from 36.7 per thousand in 1921 to 15.3 per thousand in 1987. The average family size fell from 5.1 persons per household in 1921 to 3.62 in 1981. For more detail, see John B. Allcock, Explaining Yugoslavia (London: C. Hurst, 2000).
51. For in-depth analysis of Yugoslav socialism, see Harold Lydall, Yugoslav Socialism: Theory and Practice (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984)
52. and Allcock, Explaining Yugoslavia.
53. Source: Statistical Yearbook of Serbia 1994-2002.
54. For a detailed analysis of earning inequalities see Andelka Milić, Žene, Politika, Porodica (Belgrade: Institut za političke studije, 1994).
55. One can assume that men whose sense of identity was more informed by the patriarchal notion of masculinity felt more powerless when their families faced financial hardship, although the economic crises affected both men and women. However, Kimmel reminds us that "their sense that they are powerless is real, as they experience it, but it may not be true that it is an accurate analysis of their situation." Michael Kimmel, "Reducing Men's Violence: The Personal Meets the Political," in Ingeborg Breines, Robert Connel and Ingrid Eide, eds, Male Roles, Masculinities and Violence: A Culture of Peace Perspective (Paris: UNESCO, 2000).
56. Svetlana Slapšak, "Hunting, Ruling, Sacrificing: TraditionalMale Practices in Contemporary Balkan Cultures," in Ingeborg Breines, Robert Connel and Ingrid Eide, eds, Male Roles, Masculinities and Violence: A Culture of Peace Perspective (Paris: UNESCO, 2000), p. 133.
57. The Serbian parliament after the 1990 elections consisted of 246 men and four women. The striking decrease in women's representation gives evidence for the positive contribution of the socialist "affirmative action" during the previous period.
58. Milka Puzigaća, "Status and Gender Equality in Yugoslavia: The Position of Women in FR Yugoslavia," Agency for Research and Development, 2002, (accessed 15 May 2004).
59. The birthrate for Serbs from Kosovo in 1990 was 11.7 per 1,000, while for Albanian Kosovars the rate was 27.8 per 1,000. Carol S. Lilly and Jill A. Irvine, "Negotiating Interests: Women and Nationalism in Serbia and Croatia, 1990-1997," East European Politics and Societies, Vol. 16, No. 1, 2002, pp. 109-144.
60. Marko Mladenović, Budenje spskog naroda (Belgrade: Sfairos, 1989), pp. 87-88.
61. For similar discussions on differential birthrates in Israel see Ruth Landau, "Religiosity, Nationalism and Human Reproduction: The Case of Israel," International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy, Vol. 23, No. 12, 2003, pp. 64-80
62. and Jeffrey Goldberg, "Among the Settlers: Will They Destroy Israel?" New Yorker, 31 May 2004 .
63. In 1989, Miloš Macura, a leading Serbian demographer, warned the public about the plan to extinguish the Serbian population in Kosovo: The [Albanian] birth rate must be limited for the benefit of women, the family, and the local community in Kosovo, and the interests of relations with Serbia and Yugoslavia. I say this because, unfortunately, the contrast between high and low birth rates is beginning to have an impact concerning political and ethnic levels, not only because of the emigration of Serbs and Montenegrins from Kosovo, but also because great demographic pressures are beginning to extinguish the Serbian and Montenegrin population [there]. (Politika, 27 January 1989)
64. For a detailed analysis of the rhetoric concerning the varying ways in which Serbian nationalists defined the notion of women's responsibility to the nation, see Wendy Bracewell, "Women, Motherhood, and Contemporary Serbian Nationalism," Women's Studies International Forum, Vol. 19, 1996, pp. 25-33
65. and Staša Zajović, Birth, Nationalism and War (Belgrade: Women in Black, 1995), (accessed 9 April 2006).
66. For an analysis of the political use of the alleged rapes in Kosovo see Bracewell, op. cit.
67. Additionally, see Silva Mežnarić, "Gender as an Ethno-marker: Rape, War, and Identity Politics in the Former Yugoslavia," in Valentine M. Moghadam, ed., Identity Politics and Women: Cultural Reassertions and Feminisms in International Perspective (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1994)
68. and S. A. Sofos, "Inter-ethnic Violence and Gendered Constructions of Ethnicity in Former Yugoslavia," Social Identities, Vol. 2, No. 1, 1996, pp. 73-92.
69. Vreme, 19 April 1993.
70. Milan Vojnović, Kobno osipanje srpskog naroda (Belgrade: Prometej, 1995), pp. 50-51.
71. Rada Trajković, the Kosovo Serb politician (a staunch supporter of Seselj's Radical Party, who was eventually appointed minister of family and child care in 1998), made the appeal to Serbian women even more explicit when she stated, "For each Serbian soldier who fell in Slovenia, Serbian mothers must give birth to a hundred new soldiers" (Vreme, 6 January 1992).
72. For examples of similar rhetoric in other Eastern European countries, see Gal and Kligman, Politics of Gender after Socialism and Reproducing Gender.
73. Paid maternity leave for the first two children was (and still is) one year, among the longest in Europe.
74. Politika, 7 January 1995.
75. See Lilly and Irvine's "Negotiating Interests" for the impact of the Croatian Catholic Church on abortion debate.
76. See Vesna Nikčevć, ed., Svetinja života i čedomorstvo (Cetinje, Montenegro: Svetigora, 1995).
77. Cited in Zajović, "Birth, Nationalism and War." Like other conservative churches, the SPC also prohibits any form of birth control. In 1998, Patriarch Pavle wrote that when contraceptives are used during the sexual relations in a marriage this amounts to "mutual masturbation, or debauchery" during which "a husband becomes a libertine with his wife, and a wife becomes a prostitute to her husband." Quoted in "Oštrije prema licima koje vrše abortus" (Harsher Measures for Persons that Perform Abortions), (accessed 10 April 2006).
78. The term ocilo can best be translated into English as "fire-steel", usually in the form of a cup or plate used for holding fire in a religious service, or most usually beneath icons, providing fragrant smoke. This symbol is also often interpreted as a cross with four Cyrillic letters "S" that stand for Samo Sloga Srbina Spasava (Only Unity Saves the Serbs). Both symbols are part of the traditional Serbian coat of arms.
79. Duga, 16-30 August 1992.
80. Duga, 30 August to 13 September 1992.
81. Svet, 29 April 1996.
82. Unfortunately, their data are not very detailed and do not specify whether the volunteers were married when they joined the war. Similarly, their data do not distinguish between the types of military units that volunteers joined, or between the reserve forces and the regular soldiers with the JNA.
83. After the withdrawal from Bosnia, the JNA was transformed and changed its name to the Yugoslav Army.
84. To safeguard my subjects I have decided to use the codes that I developed during the fieldwork (instead of using initials or nicknames). This will make it easier for a reader to follow their stories, but it will also protect subjects' privacy and confidentiality. The first letter of the code "V" stands for "volunteer," while the number indicates the position in the sequence in which the subjects were interviewed. Hence "V24" in this case represents the twenty-fourth volunteer whom I interviewed.
85. For more information on alternative notions of masculinity that developed among draft-dodgers and deserters see Aleksandra Milicevic, "Joining Serbia's Wars: Volunteers and Draft-Dodgers, 1991-1995," Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, Los Angeles, Department of Sociology, 2004.