Ideology, war, and genocide – the empirical case of Bosnia and Herzegovina

This article explores the connections among the discursive nature of ideology, identity politics, forced displacement, and symbolic and actual war violence leading to genocide. The general framework of the article is the Bosnian War (1992–1995), waged against the country and its civilians. The analytical basis is a literature review of various studies from the domains of sociology of knowledge, war sociology, and social epistemology. It is based on the perspective of the genocide in Bosnia as a process that began in northwest and east Bosnia in 1992 and terminated in Srebrenica in 1995 (in the municipality Prijedor in northwest Bosnia in 1992, more than 3000 civilians were killed). Mass crimes and the policy of fear mongering were intended to create and recreate the collective belief that coexistence in Bosnia was impossible and that establishing “ethnically pure cultures” and “ethnically pure territories” should be accepted as a deterministic historical necessity. The results of our research indicate that crimes against civilians can be “normalized” only after a “new social order” has been established as a war order with the help of media propaganda. Genocide can be committed only if the perpetrators (and its advocates acting in the name of specific identity politics) believe that committing violence can be justified by a “higher cause.”