Description
A generation after the end of the Croatian war of independence, when young people’s entire lives as students, citizens and family members have been lived amid what transitional justice advocates hoped would be Croatia’s transition into a society able to separate individual and organisational responsibility for war crimes from the moral significance of a war of self-defence, the predominance of what Dejan Jović has termed the congratulatory and uncritical ‘myth of the Homeland War’ continues to structure Croatian public discourse instead. One cause of its pervasiveness, this paper argues, is the extent to which narratives grounded in wartime imaginations of ‘defender’ (soldier) masculinities and contentions emerging from the early postwar production of ‘veteran’ masculinities have become embedded in other sociocultural domains that provide important points of identification for young people as well as what is now their parents’ generation who fought the war; moreover, as queer perspectives remind us, the affective entanglements of such identifications are not even limited to boys and men. The idea of ‘transitional’ justice thus implies much deeper transformations in societal relationships to politicised veteran masculinities, beyond what self-described transitional justice initiatives can achieve on their own.
