Jelena Subotic

Georgia State University, Political Science, Faculty Member

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Journal of Regional Security

Faculty of Political Sciences Belgrade

Michele F Levy

North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University

Riki Ersanda

John Cox

University of North Carolina at Charlotte

Isabelle Delpla

Université Jean Moulin Lyon 3

David MacDonald

University of Guelph

Lea David

University College Dublin

Carola Lingaas

VID Specialized University

Christian Gudehus

Ruhr-Universität Bochum

Melanie O'Brien

The University of Western Australia

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Books by Jelena Subotic

Hijacked Justice: Dealing with the Past in the Balkans

Otimanje pravde: Suocavanje s prosloscu na Balkanu

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Papers by Jelena Subotic

Constructing victims: Suffering and status in modern world order

Review of International Studies, 2023

What is the basis of status in world order? Status is assumed to come from strength, even if stre... more What is the basis of status in world order? Status is assumed to come from strength, even if strength is reconfigured to be social and normative, not just material. Status, however, can also come from perceived weaknessit is conferred to those recognised as 'victims'. We make four theoretical contributions to the scholarship on status in world affairs. First, we examine how the category of victim is produced. Two, we expand the possible sources of status in world affairs by adding the category of victim. Three, focus on victimhood status further demonstrates that status is independent of material power. Lastly, victimhood as status exhibits the paradox that power depends on perceived powerlessness. We illustrate these arguments with three features of victim status in modern international politics: the changing desirability of victim status in Israel, the gendered construction of ideal victim in the Congo, and the hierarchy of victimhood in Bosnia.

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Russia, NATO and the view from the East

International Politics, 2023

I read Siba Grovogui’s set of short essays with great interest. There is much in these pieces tha... more I read Siba Grovogui’s set of short essays with great interest. There is much in these pieces that I agree with, much that I need to think about more, and some that I think need a bit of challenging. My short intervention will focus on the main sets of challenges to Grovogui—his interpretation of what NATO and Russia are, and how they act in the world.

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Holocaust memory and political legitimacy in contemporary Europe

Holocaust Studies, 2023

This article analyzes how Holocaust memory serves to consolidate political legitimacy in contempo... more This article analyzes how Holocaust memory serves to consolidate
political legitimacy in contemporary Europe. In the aftermath of
communism, post-communist states performatively adopted the
established Western memory canon while rejecting much of its
focus on the uniqueness of Jewish suffering. Instead, they
refocused the gaze on the suffering of non-Jewish national
majorities. This approach provided cover and protection to
Western governments, which have been reluctant to seriously
address national mythologies that emphasize resistance and
downplay complicity and collaboration in the Holocaust.
Holocaust memory became decoupled from the Holocaust and is
better understood through the prism of contemporary European
politics.

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Scholars and the Politics of International Art Restitution

Contemporary European History, 2023

Almost every week brings news of another major European museum agreeing to return looted art. Sin... more Almost every week brings news of another major European museum agreeing to return looted art. Since the 2000s we have grown somewhat accustomed to the headlines describing a ceremonial return to its original owners of a painting looted in the Holocaust, a process that took decades to develop and was initially met with considerable resistance in the art world and in the countries where this art was displayed. 1 In the past few years, however, building in part on the perceived success of Holocaust art restitution but also on the increased visibility and impact of national and global social movements demanding racial justice and institutional decolonisation, major international museums have come under ever stronger pressure to return art looted as part of colonial occupations. Perhaps the most organised of the current campaigns is the campaign to return the so-called 'Benin Bronzes'a vast collection of various artifacts looted from the Kingdom of Benin (in today's Nigeria) and dispersed across major international museums, most prominently the British Museum in London, the Ethnological Museum in Berlin, and the Musée du quai Branly in Paris, among others. Since 2020, a number of museums have pledged to return their holdings of Benin Bronzes and restitute them to Nigeria, where a major new museum is being built to display them in Benin City. All of this activity has also reenergised perhaps the most famous case for restitutionthe movement to return the Parthenon 'Elgin' marbles from the British Museum to the Acropolis in Athens. Much of this new momentum owes to the painstaking work developed by historians and art historians in determining the parameters of provenance and restitution in the context of looted Holocaust art. It is on the back of this work that the Washington (1998) and Terezin (2009) conferences on Holocaust era assets developed a fairly robust international regime that provided a normative and legal template for contemporary colonial-era restitution cases. And while this legal framework exists, the contemporary debates about restitution of colonial art, however, have brought about renewed attention to the resistance that former European colonial powers display in acknowledging the extensive crimes of colonial occupations, including crimes of genocide, as is the case of Germany's atrocities against the Herero and Nama in today's Namibia. The debates about art restitution, then, should be understood as proxy debates about the nature of the European colonial past and its enduring legacy. This short essay deals with only a slice of this important debate. It explores the role scholarshistorians, art historians, museum professionals, as well as genocide scholarshave played and continue to play in the contested field of international art restitution. After briefly outlining some major juncture points in the history of international art restitution after the Second World War and identifying a few (not nearly all or even most) key scholars involved, I conclude with a broader consideration of the role of the scholar and the ethics of international art restitution.

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Antisemitism in the global populist international

British Journal of Politics and International Relations, 2022

This article explores the relationship between antisemitism and international politics, specifica... more This article explores the relationship between antisemitism and international politics, specifically the potent role that antisemitism plays in the development and maintenance of the global populist international. After briefly sketching the history of modern transnational antisemitism, I make two principal arguments for why antisemitism should be of more direct concern for the scholarship of International Relations. First, antisemitism serves as a powerful interpretive framework for contemporary far-right populist movements that are challenging the current international order. Second, antisemitism is shaping the formation of new international alliances. The strategic use of antisemitism in far-right populist foreign policy has changed, as evidenced in the increasing decoupling of attitudes towards Israel from antisemitism against diaspora Jews and a rise in pro-Israel policies of far-right antisemitic parties and movements. I conclude by reasserting that International Relations should understand antisemitism as one of the interpretive foundations of the global illiberal resurgence.

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Holocaust and the Meaning of the Srebrenica Genocide: A Reflection on a Controversy

Journal of Genocide Research, 2022

Over the past year, a series of controversies have erupted regarding the role of Holocaust schola... more Over the past year, a series of controversies have erupted regarding the role of Holocaust scholars in determining whether other, more recent mass atrocities (in China, Myanmar, Syria, and elsewhere) amount to the category of genocide. In this Reflection, I turn to one such controversy: the attempt by Bosnian Serb political elites to use international Holocaust experts to determine that the most internationally visible mass crime of the Bosnian warthe genocide in Srebrenica in 1995did not, in fact, constitute genocide. I first provide the background to the controversy. I then explain why the finding of genocide for Srebrenica is so resisted in Republika Srpska (as well as in Serbia), by linking genocide denial to the way in which the Holocaust has been instrumentalized in the region. I conclude by considering the role international scholars of the Holocaust play in this epistemic contestation.

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Cultural heritage as status seeking: The international politics of Turkey's restoration wave

Conflict and Cooperation, 2020

This article explores the relationship between cultural heritage politics and international statu... more This article explores the relationship between cultural heritage politics and international status-seeking. We advance a twofold typology of status-seeking that explains why states engage in cultural heritage restoration practices at home and abroad. First, cultural heritage restoration can be an easy way to signal state respect of its multicultural past while providing cover for continuing anti-multicultural policies of the present. States with uncertain, challenged, or liminal international status use cultural heritage projects as a 'standard of civilization' of democracy, displaying themselves on the international stage as worthy of status and respect. Cultural heritage here is used as a strategy for international status affirmation. Second, states may engage in cultural heritage restoration beyond their borders, supporting or directly managing renovation of these sites in order to expand their imagined national cultural, political, and economic domain. Cultural heritage restoration projects here serve as a backdrop for powerful international economic alliances that can be used for status substitution-replacing one status-generating benchmark of 'standard of civilization' with another-economic prosperity. We illustrate these arguments with two recent cases of cultural heritage restoration that involve Turkey: the 'Akdamar' Church in Van, Turkey and the Tomb of Gül Baba in Budapest, Hungary.

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There once was a country: Political reconciliation in the historical idea of Yugoslavia

Reconciliation after War: Historical Perspectives on Transitional Justice, 2020

It is difficult to attempt and reconstruct a counterfactual history of Yugoslavia, and this is no... more It is difficult to attempt and reconstruct a counterfactual history of Yugoslavia, and this is not the intention behind this chapter. Instead, I want to offer a different reading of the Yugoslav idea, one that takes the possibil- ity of Yugoslav reconciliation seriously, does not look at it retrospectively from the vantage point of its failure, but considers it in its own time, as an idea in search of a political arrangement. The chapter presents a different view of historical possibilities of reconciliation in Yugoslavia, one that does not see Yugoslav destruction as inevitable, but instead a result of politi- cal, and not national, problems. I take a long historical view, looking at the intellectual history of the Yugoslav project in the aftermath of World War I, various pro-Yugoslav movements at the time, and their transforma- tion into the communist Yugoslav idea after World War II. I discuss the lived experience of Yugoslav reconciliation as manifested in the local pop- ular commitment to the Yugoslav idea throughout the communist period. I then evaluate nationalist challenges to the Yugoslav project and their suc- cess in destroying the state in the early 1990s. The chapter concludes with a reassessment of what the history of Yugoslavia means as a concept of reconciliation to argue that deliberations about what Yugoslavia was, should or could be involve a form of reconciliatory dialogue in themselves. As such, the chapter offers not only a re-reading of the history of Yugoslavia, but also an alternative and novel conception of reconciliation.

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The Appropriation of Holocaust Memory in Post-Communist Eastern Europe

Modern Languages Open, 2020

This short essay explores the ways in which the visual and symbolic repertoire of cosmopolitan Ho... more This short essay explores the ways in which the visual and symbolic repertoire of cosmopolitan Holocaust memory has become appropriated to represent other types of historical crimes. Specifically, I examine to what extent has this instrumentalization of Holocaust memory fed into a crisis in cosmopolitan memory and the rise of its nationalized, particularized and populist variants. Focusing on post-communist Eastern Europe, I demonstrate how the familiar narratives and images of the Holocaust have been repurposed for two main goals: firstly, to normatively elevate the suffering of non-Jewish national majorities and equate it with the Holocaust; and secondly, to reposition the crimes of communism as the dominant criminal legacy of the twentieth century on a par with, and sometimes overtaking, the legacy of the Holocaust. I illustrate these arguments with brief examples of revisionist museum and commemorative practices in Poland, Hungary, Lithuania and Serbia. I conclude by thinking through some methodological and ethical dimensions of this research.

Ethics of archival research on political violence

Journal of Peace Research, 2020

While archival research most often does not include direct interaction with living subjects, ethi... more While archival research most often does not include direct interaction with living subjects, ethical issues surrounding this method are no less acute. These issues are even more profound in studies of violence, where the likely questions are often about life, death, murder, culpability, responsibility, punishment, or remorse. Identifying answers to such questions is a process rife with ethical minefields, including possibility of unfair affiliation of individuals with violent groups, or tendentious interpretation of past documents, or even avoidance of specific archival material if it causes direct and irreversible reputational harm. While other disciplines have begun a more thorough evaluation of the ethics of archival research, political science has so far remained largely silent on this issue. To bring these conversations to political science, I discuss three main ethical challenges in conducting archival research on political violence: the role of researcher in interpretation; harms and benefits to subjects of research; and the politics of archives and politicization of research. I illustrate the arguments with my own archival research on Holocaust remembrance in post-communist Europe. I discuss archives-public and private-as sites of my own research and present ethical challenges I encountered while working with these archival materials. I then provide a possible path toward more ethical archival research on political violence and link this path to the ongoing discussion about data and research transparency in qualitative work.

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Moral accountability and implicated subjects from Yugoslavia to Trump

The Disorder of Things, 2020

The Promise of Linguistic Ethnography in IR

International Studies Review, 2020

Part of the forum "Interlingual Relations: Approaches, Conflicts, and Lessons in the Translation ... more Part of the forum "Interlingual Relations: Approaches, Conflicts, and Lessons in the Translation Of Global Politics"
At stake in this forum are the politics of translation in the study of global politics. More specifically, the following interventions aim to consider the ways that scholars can recenter the utility of language toward more flexible conceptions of relationality. As each contribution reveals, translation is indispensable to individual theorizations of international politics; yet taken together, the forum aims to mitigate the alleged necessity of a lingua franca in IR scholarship. We go beyond the linguistic demands of conventional conceptual history in that each intervention employs a reflexive disposition to consider both their subject position and normative aspirations in the experience of translation. The forum's overall goal is to illustrate the ethical imperative to acknowledge the contextual specificity of linguistic encounters-past, present, and future-and in the process breathe life into the prose of world politics.

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How Holocaust Memory was Hijacked in Post-Communist States

Balkan Insight, 2019

Many East European countries are wary of beginning an honest conversation about the crimes commit... more

Foreign Policy and Physical Sites of Memory: Competing Foreign Policies at the Jasenovac Memorial Site

International Politics, 2019

This article contributes to the growing scholarship on the relationship between political memory ... more This article contributes to the growing scholarship on the relationship between political memory and foreign policy by analyzing how physical sites of traumatic memory serve as locations of foreign policy construction. Specifically, I explore how physical sites (such as concentration camps, killing sites, or memorials) serve to construct foreign policy through the enduring meaning they have as material reminders of collective trauma. I illustrate the argument with a case study of Jasenovac, the commemorative site of the largest concentration camp administered by the Independent State of Croatia during World War II. The Jasenovac site is a particularly useful case for my argument because it is a site of contested memory and conflicting national narratives. Most significantly, it is the site of production of three distinct foreign policies – of Serbia, Croatia, and Bosnia’s Republika Srpska– which all use the Jasenovac site to pursue different and mutually exclusive foreign policy claims.

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The Church, the Nation, and the State: The Serbian Orthodox Church After Communism

Orthodox Churches and Politics in Southeastern Europe (ed by Sabrina Ramet), Palgrave, 2019

My chapter focuses on the role the Serbian Orthodox Church has played in Serbian politics since 1... more My chapter focuses on the role the Serbian Orthodox Church has played in Serbian politics since 1989, but especially since 2000, with the end of the authoritarian rule of Slobodan Milošević. Centering the discussion on four principal dimensions that capture the Serbian Church's influence in this period-nationalism, conservatism, homopho-bia, and religious intolerance-this chapter pays special attention to two main social and political fault lines in post-2000 Serbia and the Church's central role in them: the status of its LGBTQ community and the continuing contention over Kosovo's secession. The chapter concludes that the SOC continues to serve as a political force in Serbian society-a foundational source of Serbian national identity and an organization deeply immersed in contemporary Serbian politics. It is a Church that is deeply conservative, opposed to change, and primarily interested in preserving its status and privilege in Serbian society.

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Narrative analysis as a tactical bridge

Tactical constructivism, method, and international relations

In this short essay, I reflect on my use of constructivist method by focusing on three issues. Fi... more In this short essay, I reflect on my use of constructivist method by focusing on three issues. First, I provide a short semi auto-ethnographic discussion that situations my training as an International Relations (IR) constructivist and my consequent positioning as a constructivist scholar on the long spectrum of today’s “constructivism.” Second, I briefly outline my interest in narrative analysis and discuss how it can move constructivism forward. I also discuss whether narrative can be bridge-building in the current methodological environment in US political science which attempts to discipline interpretive work. In the final section, I offer thoughts on ethical responsibility of constructivist scholars to the method itself (methodological consistency), to the scholarly profession (representation and advancement of alternative methodological approaches), and to our students (transparent guidance). I conclude by discussing possible tactical alliances with other approaches in pursuit of greater methodological diversity and respect.

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Political memory after state death: the abandoned Yugoslav national pavilion at Auschwitz

Cambridge Review of International Affairs, 2019

This article explores the relationship between political memory, state ontological security, and ... more This article explores the relationship between political memory, state ontological security, and populist movements after state death. When a state dies, ideological space opens up for new state agents to narrate a different version of the past, one that delegitimizes the ideological underpinning of the old state order and creates ontological insecurity in the new polity. Populism becomes an especially attractive ideology, as it feeds on a sense of insecurity at home and abroad. The argument is illustrated with the case study of transformed Holocaust remembrance after the death of Yugoslavia. Tracing the history of the Yugoslav memorial exhibition at Auschwitz, the article demonstrates ways in which post-Yugoslav Holocaust remembrance has focused on delegitimizing Yugoslavia’s communist past, especially its antifascism. Once antifascism is removed from state political memory, political space opens up for a revival and ideological normalization of populist—and at its most extreme—fascist ideological movements in the present.

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Radovan Karadzic Leaves a Legacy of Cruelty

Balkan Insight, 2019

Radovan Karadzic has been sentenced to spend the rest of his life in prison - but in the Balkans,... more

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