Time is (not) on my side: Remembering victims of slow violence in a post-conflict and post-disaster setting (RESLOVI)

What is happening when nothing is happening? And how can we study events that are ‘uneventful’?

As a research field, memory studies has mostly focused on violent events (wars, conflicts and particularly the Holocaust) and their (public) remembrance.

However, the proposed project (RESLOVI) attempts to move away from studying public remembrance of conflicts and proposes an innovative approach to viewing the aftermath of violent events. RESLOVI focuses on memories and experiences of displacement, caused by a war and a natural disaster.

The project’s main research objective is to rethink memory of suffering and violence in a post-conflict and post-disaster setting by raising awareness of violence that is ‘unspectacular’, happening out of sight, and is not publicly remembered or even acknowledged as violence at all. RESLOVI counters the mainstream theories of memory studies by employing an innovative theory of ‘slow violence’.

The project examines how people from a region in a post-conflict and post-disaster country grapple with and remember the experience of displacement, which is considered as a form of ‘slow violence’.

The project entails 3 key objectives: (1) To contribute to innovative research on ‘slow violence’ by studying its characteristics in a region of post-war Croatia at the example of slow-moving transformations of the built environment that produced new vulnerabilities (displacements); (2) To introduce the ‘slow memory’ theoretical approach into studying how memories of Croatian population’s displacement are triggered and reframed in the context of new displacements happening due to new crisis situations; (3) To analyse the community response (‘mnemonic solidarity’) to suffering and to contribute to research on political significance of citizens’ mobilization and agency in a post-disaster setting and in a post-conflict context.