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 Feminist Activism at War
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This book describes, compares, explains, and contextualises the position-

ings, i.e. discourses and activities, which feminists in Belgrade, Serbia and
Zagreb, Croatia produced in relation to the (post-)Yugoslav wars of the
1990s. Two types of positionings are analysed: those which the feminists
have produced on the (sexual) war violence and those which they have
produced on each other.
Applying a Bourdieuian framework and using interviews with key feminist
and peace activists in the region alongside a thorough examination of
organisational documents and printed media articles, Ana Miškovska
Kajevska challenges the common suggestion that the outbreak of the war
violence in 1991 led to the same reorganisation of the Belgrade and
Zagreb feminist fields. She corrects the understanding that the activists in
each city, who had up until then worked together without tensions, divided
at the same time and in the same manner into antinationalists and
nationalists and began clashing with each other because of the different
war-related positionings. Miškovska Kajevska explains further that the
terms ‘antinationalist’ and ‘nationalist’ were not completely value-free and
objective, and had different meanings attached to them. These designa-
tions were an essential part not only of the local and international efforts
to stop the (sexual) war violence, but also of the struggle for legitimacy
among the feminists in each city – endeavours in which many Western
(feminist) academics, activists, and funders were involved, too.
In addition to providing insights into the situation in Croatia and
Serbia, this book will also help increase the understanding of intra-feminist
dynamics in other regions of the world which are dominated by nationalism
and war violence, and where the work of the local feminists is closely
intertwined with – and often dependent on – these activists’ contacts with
foreign academic, funding, activist, and/or political entities.

Ana Miškovska Kajevska is a researcher, peaceworker, and activist affiliated

with the Department of Political Science of the University of Amsterdam.
 Gender and Comparative Politics
Edited by Karen Celis (Vrije Universiteit Brussel) and Isabelle Engeli
(University of Bath)
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The comparative research conducted in the field of gender and politics today
is more than ever resulting in innovative theory building, applying novel
research designs and engaging with mainstream political science. Gender &
Politics has moved from the margins of political science to the center. Given
the highly critical and activist roots of the gender and politics scholarship, it
quasi naturally embraces intersectionality. The Routledge Gender and
Comparative Politics Book Series aims to reflect this rich, critical and broad
scholarship covering the main political science sub-disciplines with, for
instance, gender focused research on political economy, civil society, citizen-
ship, political participation and representation, governance and policy
making.

1. Feminist Activism at War

Belgrade and Zagreb Feminists in the 1990s
Ana Miškovska Kajevska

2. Making Gender Equality Happen

Knowledge, Change and Resistance in EU Gender Mainstreaming
Rosalind Cavaghan
 Feminist Activism at War
Belgrade and Zagreb Feminists in
the 1990s
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Ana Miškovska Kajevska

~~o~;J~n~~~up
YORK

LONDON
LONDON
YORK

LONDON

LONDON AND NEW YORK

 First published 2017
by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017
and by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa
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business
© 2017 Taylor & Francis
The right of Ana Miškovska Kajevska to be identified as author of this
work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of
the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or
reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or
other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying
and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system,
without permission in writing from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or
registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and
explanation without intent to infringe.
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Names: Kajevska, Ana Miéskovska, author.
Title: Feminist activism at war : Belgrade and Zagreb feminists in the
1990s / Ana Miéskovska Kajevska.
Description: New York, NY : Routledge, 2017. | Series: Gender and
comparative politics ; 1 | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016058689 | ISBN 9781138697683 (hbk)
Subjects: LCSH: Feminism--Croatia--Zagreb–History--20th century. |
Feminism--Serbia--Belgrade--History--20th century. | Feminism--
Former Yugoslav republics--History--20th century. | Yugoslav War,
1991-1995--Social aspects.
Classification: LCC HQ1715.5.Z9 B4545 2017 | DDC 305.42094972/
0904--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016058689

ISBN: 978-1-138-69768-3 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-1-315-52077-3 (ebk)

Typeset in Times New Roman

by Taylor & Francis Books
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In loving memory of Saskia Poldervaart,

with gratitude for the wisdom and inspiration
Downloaded by [University of California, San Diego] at 20:55 04 June 2017
 Contents
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List of tables viii

Acknowledgements ix

1 Feminism at War: An Introduction 1

2 Portrayals of Feminist NGOs 27
3 A Time to Examine the Common Scholarly Narrative 61
4 Positioning as a Process: Nine Episodes of Interaction 83
5 Revisiting the 1990s: A View from a Distance? 145
6 A Critical Novel Look at the Old Dynamics and Knowledge 172

Index 184
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Tables

1.1 Main and additional interview respondents

13
 Acknowledgements
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This book is based on my doctoral dissertation titled ‘Taking a Stand in Times

of Violent Societal Changes: Belgrade and Zagreb Feminists’ Positionings on
the (Post-)Yugoslav Wars and Each Other (1991–2000)’, which I defended
at the University of Amsterdam. The thesis received the 2015 Gender and
Politics PhD Prize of the European Consortium for Political Research
which led to its publication in a book format. The main financial support
for the research came from the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific
Research, via its Mosaic funding scheme. This generous grant was sup-
plemented with funds from the Amsterdam Institute for Social Science
Research.
I am thankful to my respondents for their committed participation and
important feminist and/or peace work which I benefit from and build
upon. I was further enormously helped by my mentors and co-mentors:
Annette Freyberg-Inan, Marlies Glasius, Frances Gouda, Maria Koinova,
Saskia Poldervaart, and Francesco Strazzari. I am additionally indebted to
Annette and Marlies for their advice and encouragement even after I
obtained the doctoral degree. It was Annette who suggested that I should
compete for the PhD Prize, whereas Marlies endorsed my affiliation with
the Department of Political Science of the University of Amsterdam. I am
grateful to her, as well as to Marieke de Goede and John Grin – the leaders
of the programme group Transnational Configurations, Conflict, and
Governance – for welcoming me at the University. I consider myself fortunate
also because of the other exceptional scholars who shared their knowledge
and experience with me: Bojan Bilić, Chiara Bonfiglioli, Petra de Vries, Elissa
Helms, Annemarie Mol, Conny Roggeband, Bart van Heerikhuizen, Mieke
Verloo, and, last but absolutely not least, Dubravka Žarkov.
I am obliged to Karen Celis and Isabelle Engeli, the editors of the
Routledge book series Gender and Comparative Politics, for inviting me to
publish my dissertation with them. I gained a lot from their suggestions,
tips, and cheering. I am further thankful to the two peer reviewers for their
comments and appreciation of my work, as well as to the Routledge senior
editor Natalja Mortensen and editorial assistant Lillian Rand for embracing
my book and guiding me through the process.
Downloaded by [University of California, San Diego] at 20:55 04 June 2017
 1 Feminism at War
An Introduction
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Quick Preview
What befalls feminism in times of war? How do the accompanying pro-
found societal changes and existential insecurity influence the interactions
among feminists and their pre-war definitions of perpetrators and victims
of (sexual) violence? What happens when the hitherto collaborators and
friends take different sides? Or when a federation violently dissolves
and the previously promoted idea of one shared space becomes a laden
anachronism?
The first time I heard about the painful and upsetting war-related divi-
sions among the Zagreb feminists I was a student of the Zagreb-based
Centre for Women’s Studies. Back then, in late 1999, that topic did not
resonate much with my interests. Little did I know that it would remain
brewing in the back of my head and that a decade later I would be on a
doctoral fieldwork1 enthusiastically gathering data on it and interviewing
the very same feminist who had mentioned it in her lecture. This book,
however, is not only about feminist activism2 at war. I address, too, the
importance of collecting first-hand information and developing a metho-
dology and rapport which are suitable for engaging with such a silenced
and politically and emotionally laden topic. I aim at expanding our
understanding of the contextual embedment of feminism and the con-
sequences of war which extend beyond the physical ones, such as killed
and harmed living beings, destroyed homes and infrastructure, and creation
of minefields and closed borders.

1 This book is a substantially abridged and modified version of my doctoral

dissertation ‘Taking a Stand in Times of Violent Societal Changes: Belgrade
and Zagreb Feminists’ Positionings on the (Post-)Yugoslav Wars and Each
Other (1991–2000)’. The full text of the dissertation (including the list of
sources) is freely available online from the Digital Academic Repository of the
University of Amsterdam: http://hdl.handle.net/11245/1.410134
2 ‘Activism’ refers here to one’s work in a feminist NGO, regardless of
whether that work was conducted on a fully voluntary basis or for a (small)
remuneration.
 2 Feminism at War
I present here a comparison of the positionings, i.e. discourses and
activities, of the Belgrade and Zagreb feminists which were related to the
wars in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia and Serbia (the NATO bombing of
Serbia3 and the war in Kosovo). Those discourses and activities were not a
result of a singular decision or event, but they came gradually into being.
Hence my use of the word ‘positioning’, which contains as it were the
present participle -ing. Some of the analysed positionings are, in fact, the
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feminists’ answers to the questions of which ethnic group could be a per-

petrator of (sexual) war violence and which ethnic group could be its
victim. Were some ethnic groups only perpetrators and others only victims
or were all ethnic groups both perpetrators and victims? If the latter was
the case, were all warring parties equally responsible and equally victi-
mised or were there differences in the extent of that responsibility and
victimisation? The other studied positionings are those which the feminists
had on each other. How did they name themselves and the feminists who
similarly answered the above questions? Which terms were used for the
feminists with dissimilar answers? Were there any instances of cooperation
between the activists whose answers did not overlap? What became of the
collaboration between the Belgrade and Zagreb feminists once Serbia and
Croatia turned into bitter enemies?
The analysis focuses on the 1990s – the decade in which the above three
wars took place – but I also examine the feminists’ views at the time of
interviewing (2009 or 2010) on their positionings from the 1990s. To get a
better idea about the settings in which the positionings have come about, it
is necessary to recall the constitutive power of violence: its capability to
construct new contexts and meanings by altering the previous ones. Violence
‘is more than a practice that acts upon the bodies of individual subjects to
inflict harm and injury. It is…also a way of looking at these subjects’
(Mason, 2006: 174). As Van de Port (2008) asserts, in times of war the
whole hitherto self-evident symbolic order in the society is turned upside
down. The destabilisation or even break-up of all stable structures brings
the unsettling understanding that what one has believed to be true was
nothing but a malleable human-made construction. This destruction of
social order and meaning can sometimes exert an even greater impact on
individuals and societies than the annihilation of people and material
property (Nordstrom, 1992). Consequently, the warring 1990s continue to
be regarded in Croatia and Serbia as a continuous threat, which could
become a reality again.
As I show, the positionings in Belgrade and Zagreb were not the same.
Moreover, differences existed between the first and the second half of the

3 NATO bombed the then Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, i.e. Serbia and
Montenegro, but Serbia – by far and large the more affected party – was in the
focus of the Belgrade and Zagreb feminists’ engagement with this intervention.
 Feminism at War 3
1990s. Therefore, despite the similarities, the spatial and temporal context
should by no means be taken out of the equation. By mid-1993 the Zagreb
feminists clearly split based on their positionings on the (sexual) war violence
in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Croatia – a deep fissure which would remain
virtually unchanged throughout the 1990s. Corresponding, but much less
intense and tangible, tensions were present among the Belgrade feminists,
too. The division among them became much more antagonistic and pro-
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minent in 1998–1999, during the war in Serbia, but even then it did not
take the shape of the Zagreb cleavage.4
Particularly astonishing are the findings on the terms ‘antinationalist’
and ‘nationalist’, which are most often used in the relevant scholarship to
classify the feminists’ positionings. These designations did not mean the
same in Belgrade and Zagreb. Furthermore, they were not employed by all
Belgrade and Zagreb feminists, but only by those who explicitly named
themselves ‘antinationalists’. In both cities, ‘antinationalist’ was a self-
ascribed designation, whereas ‘nationalist’ was an ascribed-to one. The
feminists who were called ‘nationalists’ used different classifications, but
their terms, work and voices are almost invisible in the scholarly works. I
argue, therefore, that the terminology and the scholarship (including the
Western one) are not neutral and objective, but ingrained with partisan-
ship and power differences. Although I keep the terms ‘antinationalist’ and
‘nationalist’ in order to have a clearer dialogue with those texts, I put
‘nationalist’ between inverted commas. Thereby I want to attend to the
thus far unreported (power) differences in naming between the anti-
nationalist and ‘nationalist’ feminists, and accentuate the importance of
approaching these designations critically and carefully.
Several other discoveries on the scholarship underline the dire need for
its evaluation. There is an extensive presence of recurring information,
which has been uncritically referenced from the same few older works
without being checked against information from new research. This prac-
tice does not take into account that many of the oft-quoted works were
written in the war period or very soon afterwards, which means that they
were created with no or hardly any time distance and based on limited
information. In addition, the discussions contain many silent places and
(partially) incorrect and imprecise claims. Finally, the intra-feminist
dynamics are somewhat described, but not theorised. I offer, therefore,
several additions to and corrections of the existing knowledge and I pro-
pose to look at those dynamics as being influenced not only by the wars
and the differences in definitions, but also by the feminists’ struggle for
increasing their own legitimacy and that of the like-minded feminists,
while decreasing that of their feminist opponents.

4 I thank Dubravka Žarkov for alerting me in the early stage of the research to
this difference.
 4 Feminism at War
Setting up the Stage and Announcing the Actors
Strictly speaking, this book is not about the wars in Bosnia-Herzegovina,
Croatia and Kosovo, but they are always present in the background. I
begin, therefore, by explaining why I do not name them ‘ethnic’ as many
others in and outside academia do. In the primordial and essentialising
understanding of the (post-)Yugoslav wars (Kaplan, 1993; Owen, 1995),
with which the designation ‘ethnic’ is often associated, they were fought
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because of longue durée ethnic differences and grievances which were both
‘endemic’ (Kaldor, 2006) to the region and inherently accompanied by
interethnic hatreds. This view cannot accommodate the numerous instan-
ces of high-risk solidarity with ethnic Others (Broz, 2005; Tokača, 2010)
and does not offer space for the antiwar initiatives which mobilised people
across ethnic boundaries (Bilić, 2012; Dević, 1997). Moreover, the idea of
unceasing interethnic hatreds ignores the fact that the programme of
creating Yugoslavia has existed since the nineteenth century and that the
pre-World War II predecessor of socialist Yugoslavia was created at the
joint initiative of the Croat, Serb and Slovene political elites (Đokić, 2010).
I do not deny that large masses of people were forced out, harmed and
killed because of being seen as belonging to an inimical ethnic group. The
numerous and dreadful war crimes do not allow to ignore their ethnic
component. However, I argue – together with Gagnon (2004), Kaldor
(2006) and Žarkov (2007) – that the discourse of ethnic differences and
grievances was revived and manipulated by politicians, military leaders,
intellectuals and the media in their struggle for obtaining and maintaining
power. Ethnicity served as a carte blanche to kill, rape, torture, steal and
destroy, i.e. legitimated the satisfaction of one’s (sadistic) needs for power
which would have been much more difficult to realise in a non-war setting.
As Žarkov (2007) asserts, ethnicity was not the reason for the wars, but it
was their result. The simultaneously fought media wars vehemently con-
tributed to the construction of ethnic groups, allies and enemies. Naming the
wars ‘ethnic’ also obscures the changing alliances and trade and military
deals between politicians and (para)militaries from different ethnic groups
(Andreas, 2008; Gagnon, 2004; Mueller, 2000). Such a classification sug-
gests further that multiethnic societies like the Yugoslav one are impossible
to sustain and neglects the impact of contingencies, internal economic
disparities, as well as external economic and political factors, such as the
role of the international financial institutions or the Fall of the Berlin Wall
(Freyberg-Inan, 2006).
The main actors of this book are the Belgrade and Zagreb feminists.
The scholarship typically suggests that the absence of unanimity among
them regarding the definitions of perpetrators and victims in the (post-)
Yugoslav wars led in each city to a split into antinationalist or non-
nationalist and nationalist or patriotic feminists (Batinić, 2001; Benderly,
1997; Duhaček, 1998; Helms, 1998; Kašić, 1994a; Knežević, 1997; Korać,
 Feminism at War 5
2003; Mlađenović & Litričin, 1993; Nikolić-Ristanović, 2000; Obradović-
Dragišić, 2004; Stojsavljević, 1995; Žarkov, 1999). Although the inclusion
of many nuances is more than necessary, my analysis confirms that the
war-related positionings of the Belgrade and Zagreb ‘nationalist’ feminists
stood closer to the positionings of the Serbian and Croatian authorities,
respectively, than those of the corresponding antinationalist feminists.
Compared to the ‘nationalist’ feminists, the antinationalist ones were much
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more critical of their countries’ war politics and much more outspoken
about the ethnic Others whom those politics harmed. The positionings of
the ‘nationalist’ feminists did not contain, though, calls to restrictive
reproductive politics, a religious revival, and violence against enemy
women which has been the case in other parts of the world (Cohn &
Jacobson, 2013; Žarkov, 2007).
The feminists whose positionings I analyse openly named themselves
and their NGOs ‘feminist’. Regardless of one’s level of public criticism of
her state’s politics or those of the other warring parties and the extent of
her openly proclaimed solidarity with ‘enemy’ feminists or war victims, all
these activists wanted to bring the (sexual) war violence to an end, were
concerned with the wellbeing of the (raped) refugee women, and conducted
important work on improving the position of women in general. This finding
is significant not only because of the already mentioned absence of the voices
of the ‘nationalist’ feminists from the scholarship, but also because of the
worldwide debate on the (in)compatibility of feminism and nationalism – a
topic I return to when addressing this book’s contribution. Without trying
to conceal the variations in the risky expressions of dissent and solidarity,
I argue that nobody’s feminism should be negated altogether. Such
acknowledgment and consistent application of one’s self-designation ‘fem-
inist’ is also present in Helms (2003a, 2013), Mlađenović & Litričin (1993),
Stojsavljević (1995) and Žarkov (2002, 2007).
Not all scholars share this approach, though. The designation ‘feminist’
can be used to deny some (post-)Yugoslav activists’ self-asserted feminist
affiliation (Jansen, 2005; Kesić, 2002; Mostov, 1995; Nenadic, 1991, 1996;
Slapšak, 2008). For example, after generally speaking about the Belgrade
and Zagreb feminist NGOs, Borić & Mladineo Desnica (1996) only
describe the positionings of the Belgrade and Zagreb antinationalist feminists.
In a similar manner, MacKinnon (1993) illustrates her statement on the
Zagreb feminists only by mentioning ‘nationalist’ feminist NGOs. In both
cases the feminists whose positionings are not endorsed by the author(s),
by being omitted from the illustrations, become implicitly classified as
‘non-feminists’. On a different note, there are works in which ‘feminist’
and ‘women’s’ are used as synonyms (Batinić, 2001; Blagojević, 1998a;
Jansen, 2005; Korać, 1998, 2003; Milić, 2002; Pavlović, 1999) and those in
which ‘women’s’ broadly denotes everybody, including the declared feminist
activists and NGOs (Borić, 1997; Helms, 2003b, 2013; Irvine, 2007; Mostov,
1995; Kesić, 2002). ‘Women’s’ can also be employed to distinguish the
 6 Feminism at War
activists and NGOs which do not assert themselves as feminists (Helms,
2003a, 2013; Knežević, 1994, 2004).
Many arbitrary classifications and ad hominem criticisms exist in the
utterances of the Belgrade and Zagreb feminists. By juxtaposing, cross-
checking, interpreting, contextualising and theorising their war-related
positionings, I seek to shed new light on them and bring them to a higher
level of abstraction. Inspired by Wright Mills (1978), I strive to link the
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biographical and the structural/historical, i.e. – to borrow from the famous

feminist slogan – the personal and the political, in the lives of these acti-
vists. Although they do not always convey an understanding of this inter-
connectedness,5 I do not want to suggest that they are incapable of
arriving at those insights by themselves. I am profoundly aware, though,
that my privileged location at the University of Amsterdam, which pro-
vided me with information, money, time and a physical distance from the
post-Yugoslav region, markedly benefitted my production of such complex
knowledge.
My main theoretical lens is informed by the work of Bourdieu (1990,
1991, 1993; Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992). I tell a story of Belgrade and
Zagreb feminists who, besides advocating an end to the wars and war
rapes, providing assistance to the victims and demanding persecution of
the perpetrators, vigorously articulated their war-related positionings in
the feminist field in their respective city and in those abroad. Already
during Yugoslavia’s existence there were differences in cultural, economic
and social capital among these agents. In addition, disagreements occurred
regarding the correct feminist positioning on certain societal practices.
Each feminist aimed at increasing her symbolic feminist capital: the per-
ception that she accurately understood the gender-based power disparities
and knew the right ways to correct them. These efforts to be recognised
and supported as a legitimate feminist agent gained strength once the
feminists were faced with the extremity of the (sexual) war violence.
Within the feminist field in each city, the initial positioning on (sexual)
war violence fully subordinated ethnicity to gender. Men, regardless of
ethnicity, were seen as perpetrators, whereas women, regardless of ethnicity,
were perceived as victims. Some feminists contested this established or
orthodox positioning by adding ethnicity, i.e. by starting to distinguish
between ethnically specific perpetrators and victims. Their heretical posi-
tioning was a newcomer in the respective feminist field, but not a new-
comers’ positioning: It was not only employed by those who had entered
that field at a later point. This indication of the field in question is very
important. If the political field in each city and the there occurring

5 Blagojević (1998b: 35) observes the same in her analysis of the Belgrade
women’s NGOs in the 1990s: ‘[T]he activists perceive the conflicts foremostly
as “personal disagreements”’.
 Feminism at War 7
struggle for legitimacy are analysed instead, not only the participating
agents would be different, but also the orthodox and heretical positionings.
The names which the feminists gave to their own positionings and those
of other feminists (e.g., ‘antinationalist’, ‘patriotic’, ‘neutral’ and ‘radical
antinationalist’) served to situate the concrete feminists and their posi-
tionings in the feminist field and legitimise or delegitimise them. Those
designations were, thus, by no means impartial. They also provided a
Downloaded by [University of California, San Diego] at 20:55 04 June 2017

coping mechanism (Janoff-Bulman & Hanson Frieze, 1983) by creating

some order in the physical, psychological and discursive insecurity caused
by the proximity of war violence, the disintegration of Yugoslavia, and the
hard to grasp divergent positionings of the hitherto like-minded feminists
and friends. Wherever the shared affiliation was disbanded, the naming
made it easier to cope with one’s dissenting choices and strengthened the
ties between the feminists with the same or very similar positionings.
I view all Belgrade and Zagreb feminists as concurrently autonomous
and free, as well as manipulated and constrained. This perception stands in
contrast with the denial of (feminist) agency of one’s opponents which is
articulated by a number of feminists regardless of city and cluster. Their
delegitimisation strategy usually manifests in negation of autonomy and
accusation of only pursuing personal gains. By portraying somebody as
not autonomous, the speaker implicitly presents herself as particularly
autonomous: She is capable of both establishing herself as an independent
agent and disclosing others’ dependence. The accusation of self-interest
helps the speaker to describe herself as solely advocating a collective, higher,
cause and being disinterested in obtaining any individual benefits – a strategy
which Bourdieu calls ‘misrecognition’. A contradiction exists, thus, in the
utterances of some feminists. While being outspokenly committed to the
emancipation of women and their establishment as agents, these feminists
simultaneously negate the emancipation of the not like-minded feminists
and their ability to position themselves.
The individual differences in degree of autonomy and pursuit of self-
interest notwithstanding, I argue against any a priori classifications which
are only based on one’s war-related positionings (cf. the criticism by Žarkov,
2006). My conceptualisation of all feminists as agents is additionally
inspired by Mahmood (2001, 2005) and McNay (2000), who uphold that
agency is not only formed in resistance to domination, subversion and
resignification, but also in acceptance, accommodation and adaptation to
norms and normative behaviour. For example, the Zagreb ‘nationalist’
feminists challenged the up to then orthodox (post-)Yugoslav feminist
positioning on war violence by underlining the latter’s ethnic component.
The Zagreb antinationalist feminists partially maintained the primacy of
gender over ethnicity, albeit slightly differently than the Belgrade ‘nationalist’
feminists. The other Belgrade cluster accentuated the ethnic dimension to
the (sexual) war crimes, but did not discard the gender one. Thus, all
feminist clusters resisted and subverted some norms, while accepting and
 8 Feminism at War
accommodating others. There was, however, a disagreement between the
clusters as to which norms were to be rejected and which were to be
embraced – a struggle for the legitimate definition of the situation.
Besides naming, the Belgrade and Zagreb feminists employed myths to
establish themselves as legitimate agents with unambiguous and consistent
positionings. According to Yanow (2000: 80), ‘[w]e create myths as an act
of mediating contradictions, such as those that arise when we are faced with
Downloaded by [University of California, San Diego] at 20:55 04 June 2017

accommodating in daily life the mandates of two (or more) irreconcilable

values. Myths direct our attention away from such incommensurables.’
One myth was widely used already before the wars. Although there were
inequalities and disagreements among the Yugoslav feminists, they advo-
cated sisterhood – i.e. commonality, cooperation and solidarity – among
women due to their collective underprivileged gender-based position in
the society. The myth of sisterhood had to superficially reconcile the
simultaneous existence of similarities and differences.
After the beginning of the wars, the Belgrade and Zagreb antinationalist
feminists reaffirmed the idea of sisterhood, but adapted it to the changed
reality. By speaking of ‘transgression of boundaries’ or ‘crossing the lines’,
they accentuated their markedly daring continuation of cooperation across the
newly established ethnic and state demarcation lines. At the same time, the
metaphor obscured the parallel creation of a boundary by the same feminists:
one which separated them from the feminists who did not want to cooperate
anymore. Equally concealed were the misunderstandings and conflicts
between the Belgrade and Zagreb antinationalist feminists (e.g., Kašić,
1994b). The Belgrade and Zagreb ‘nationalist’ feminists stopped using the
myth of sisterhood. The former presented themselves as the sole impartial
feminists regarding the war violence (i.e. created a myth of objectivity),
whereas the latter constructed a myth of advocacy by portraying them-
selves as the only righteous advocates of the cause of raped Bosniak and
Croat women.
Although I speak of four feminist clusters – one antinationalist and one
‘nationalist’ in each city – the Belgrade ‘nationalist’ cluster is quite different
from the other three. Despite the existence of shared war-related position-
ings among those Belgrade feminists and the cooperation between some of
them, they have never formed one joint NGO and/or publicly used a ‘we’
positioning. In the interviews, too, each of them expressed her positioning
using the ‘I’ form. Therefore, the aggregation of the Belgrade ‘nationalist’
feminists, which was necessary for analytical purposes, imposes to them a
greater degree of affiliation than the actually existing one. A word of caution
is required also regarding the Belgrade antinationalist cluster. These feminists
had divergent positionings on the Serb responsibility for and victimisation
by the war in Serbia. The positioning of some of them even overlapped with
the corresponding one of the Belgrade ‘nationalist’ feminists. Nonetheless,
for the sake of not complicating the analysis further, I maintain the division
which had come into existence during the wars in Bosnia-Herzegovina and
 Feminism at War 9
Croatia, and take the later fragmentation of the Belgrade antinationalist
cluster into account only when discussing the war in Serbia.

Methodological Strategies, Tools, and Experiences

I did not set out to verify a theory. I aimed instead at collecting a lot of
diverse empirical material on a topic which many had mentioned or briefly
Downloaded by [University of California, San Diego] at 20:55 04 June 2017

analysed, but not systematically explored and theorised. My final goal was
to re-examine and supplement the common narrative on the Belgrade and
Zagreb feminists’ war-related positionings and propose an explanation for
their development and contents. I was interested in the war-time activists
who had known and cooperated with each other – as feminists – already
before the wars. The Yugoslav feminist activism developed in Ljubljana,
too, but in light of the great contextual differences from the second half of
1991 onward between Slovenia, on the one hand, and Croatia and Serbia,
on the other, as well as between the work of the Ljubljana feminists and
that of the Belgrade and Zagreb ones, I left out Ljubljana from the
comparison.
The choice for a shorter time span (the 1990s) and a more detailed
exploration – as opposed to obtaining less detailed data on two decades
(the 1990s and the 2000s) – was prompted by the many silent places and
biased claims on the topic in question. Their existence required extensive
interviews and a repetitive thorough search for clues in all data sources.
This would have been impossible to conduct in a satisfactory manner in
the earmarked fieldwork time, had the analysed period extended over two
decades. A longer time span would have proven unfeasible also because
Croatia and Serbia experienced great political changes in 2000. The political
parties of the respective presidents Tuđman and Milošević, which had been
in power throughout the 1990s, lost that year’s parliamentary elections.
These internal political changes and the preceding end of the wars were
followed by new NGO funding policies of the foreign donors. The hitherto
largely informal emergency donations gave way to official project-based
grant procedures, which led to organisational changes in the NGOs, such as
the creation of more formal hierarchical structures and less fluid member-
ship. Since the beginning of the 2000s the feminist fields in Croatia and
Serbia additionally changed due to the establishment of state and munici-
pality gender equality bodies wherein some feminist activists have found
employment (Bagić, 2004; Bilić, 2012; Kesić, 2007; Potkonjak et al., 2008).
By accentuating the narrow scope of my research, I follow Haraway’s
call (1988: 589) for ‘politics and epistemologies of location…where partiality
and not universality is the condition of being heard to make rational
knowledge claims’. I also second her assertion that all knowledge is situated,
which means that the context in which it is generated and the location of
its producer are ontologically and epistemologically relevant. Therefore,
‘being reflexive about one’s own positionality is [not] to self-indulge but to
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