Description
This paper focuses on the conceptualisation of peace as normal life (normalan život), rooted in post-Yugoslav post-socialist lived experiences. In most general terms, while the concept has not been theorised much, it has been commonly used among people in the conflict-affected post-Yugoslav space to describe life that is not excessive, but in which the basic needs are met. It denotes life as it used to be (Jansen, 2015) and life as it should be. In this paper, we engage with the notion, unpack its core components and explore the possibility it opens to doing and imagining peace differently and in plural. Specifically, by looking at most of the times overlooked voices, Serbian former combatants and victims of state-sponsored/state-tolerated violence in Sandžak and rural women in Bosnia and Herzegovina, we outline what they expected peace to be and how they imagine it now. We problematise whether their conceptions of peace as “return to normality/return to normal life” represent attempts towards decolonisation of peace imaginaries. Equally importantly, by drawing on lived experiences of Albanians in Macedonia, we also question who gets to imagine peace as “normal life” and whether different imaginings of peace can exist alongside one another.
