Policing Memory in Bosnia: Ontological Security and International Administration of Memorialization Policies

Using a case from Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH), this article seeks to uncover how structural division along ethnic lines and external pressures to adopt memorialization policies relate to ontological security seeking. To provide securitization of memory, external memorialization policies, understood as the offsprings of the growing organizational power of human rights ideology, are constantly clashing with the nationalist understanding and usage of memory because, through particular pretext of victim-perpetrator-bystanders, they displace deeply contextualized historical memory from its national setting. The securitization of memory is understood here as the part of ontological security which refers to the need of a political elite governing a sovereign polity to have a secure identity by maintaining distinctiveness and through routinizing their relationships with other polities. The main claims of this paper are twofold. Firstly: external attempts to secure memory are actually designed to secure the moral boundaries of those who impose and mandate the memorialization policies, meaning the international community, and not the Bosnians. Secondly, and closely interlinked with the previous claim: the attempt to enforce one set of memories may backfirethat is, fail to secure against the repetition of violence while also cementing divisions along ethnic lines. These ethnic divisions, thus continually mobilized, may then contribute to further conflict. Those claims are illustrated with three different realms of memorialization policies securitization in the case of BiH.