In both academic discourse and public culture, our understanding of conflict is far too often reduced to a chronological mosaic of spectacular events—turning points, declarations of war, peace agreements, and highly visible state commemorations.

To challenge this event-centric limitation, a new special issue of the journal Southeastern Europe (Vol. 49, No. 3) proposes a certain widening of our temporal lens. Fully available as an open-access resource, this volume introduces an intersection of “slow peace” and “slow memory.”

Co-edited by our Principal Investigator, Vjeran Pavlaković (University of Rijeka), and Orli Fridman (Singidunum University), this issue emerged directly from the critical discussions within the COST Action “Slow Memory” (CA20105) working group, which is specifically devoted to the slow transformations of conflicts. Learn more about the wider European research network at slowmemory.eu.

Before diving into the individual case studies, we highly recommend starting with the volume’s opening text. Co-authored by Fridman and Pavlaković, this introductory article serves as the theoretical compass for the entire special issue:

Slowing Down: Alternative Approaches to Remembrance and Peace Activism in the Yugoslav Successor States [click here to download]

This article introduces the framework of “slow memory” into the context of the Yugoslav successor states, proposing new directions for conflict analysis and conflict transformation within memory studies. By placing slow memory alongside the concept of “slow peace,” the editors make visible what far too often is lost in top-down depictions of war, peace, and official commemoration: the local and regional experiences of war that go beyond single historical events.

📚 Table of Contents

• Slowing Down: Alternative Approaches to Remembrance and Peace Activism in the Yugoslav Successor States
  • Authors: Orli Fridman (Faculty of Media and Communications) and Vjeran Pavlaković (University of Rijeka)
• Everyday Peace and Memory in a Multiethnic Local Community
  • Author: Valentina Otmačić (University of Rijeka)
• Forget About It: Slow Peace in Collective Memory of the 1990s War in Croatia
  • Authors: Tamara Banjeglav (ZRC SAZU) and Dea Marić (University of Zagreb)
• Memoryscapes, Tourism, and the Environment in Croatia: Slow Memory and Sites of Conflict and Slow Violence
  • Authors: Josef Djordjevski (UC San Diego) and Taylor McConnell (Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz)
• Yugoslav after Yugoslavia: Socialist Monuments and Slow Memory in Eastern Slavonia
  • Author: Blaze Joel (University of Texas at Austin)
• Slow Peacebuilding in Bosnia and Herzegovina: Deploying accumulated memory to shift out of postwar liminality
  • Authors: Dijana Mujkanović (University of Pittsburgh), Emina Zoletić (University of Warsaw), and Véronique Labonté (Université Laval)
• The walled-up ethnic domains: Ethnic spatialisation and slow memory in pre- and post-2001 Macedonia
  • Authors: Naum Trajanovski (University of Warsaw) and Elena Stavrevska (University of Bristol)