The Aftermath Open Access
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Published:March 2024
This chapter follows the ways in which narratives about and archives of military service in the Yugoslav People’s Army have been accommodated to the logic of life in the aftermath of the Yugoslav wars. This logic dictates flattening and remaking biographies, squeezing people into narrow boxes of ethnic identity, dismantling known worlds, and eradicating once imaginable futures. It insists on the causal relationship between the experience of serving in the Yugoslav People’s Army and the violence in which Yugoslavia disintegrated. Such a view normalizes a particular narrative of the end of Yugoslavia in which the Yugoslav People’s Army as an institution and its soldiers and officers have a distinctly negative role, silencing and erasing stories, destinies, and memories that do not fit this narrative.