War Narratives in Post-Conflict Societies

Michal Mochtak is an excellence fellow at Radboud University and has a PhD in political science from Masaryk University, Czech Republic. He is the author of Electoral Violence in the Western Balkans: From Voting to Fighting and Back (Routledge, 2018).

'How do politicians sustain their preferred ideological narratives, how do they keep them alive, how do these shape post-war politics? In this innovative and ambitious volume, Michal Mochtak uses natural language processing to understand how selective narratives about civil war in former Yugoslavia are kept alive, and by whom. Mochtak shows how war narratives are calibrated and curated by self-serving politicians. These narratives are shaped both by politicians' wartime experiences and by the broader political context in which they operate. The book centers agency without neglecting context, offering valuable empirical, methodological, and theoretical contributions to our understanding of the long-term dynamics of building peace.'Carrie Manning, Georgia State University, USAThe story of victory for some is often a story of bitter grievances for others. But how and why does the legacy of war shaped the peace that follows? In this detailed and impressive account of parliamentary politics in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia and Serbia, Mochtak convincingly demonstrate how diverging war narratives have evolved over time and how it has shaped the political discourses among the countries’ political elites. Drawing on multiple and complementary methods, the author’s approach is innovative, ambitious, and scholarly rigorous. This book is not only a valuable read for those with a keen interest in the post-war legacies of the war in former Yugoslavia in the 1990s, but for everyone interested in better understanding how politicians in post-war societies are struggling to make sense of the past to navigate the future.' Mimmi Söderberg Kovacs, Uppsala University, Sweden 'This is a pioneering work. It is an excellent showcase for the transformative impact of new methods and technological advancements on the study of political discourse. It is also, however, perfect evidence how these new tools can lead to useful insights only in the hands of thoughtful and expert interpreters like Michal Mochtak with in-depth understanding of political context.'Josip Glaurdić, University of Luxembourg, Luxembourg

• Introduction Part I: Setting the scene 1. War and history in the service of politics 2. Communication, content, and discourse of war 3. Political discourse meets natural language processing Part II: Talking war 4. Endless war: Conflicting war legacies in Bosnia-Herzegovina 5. Glorified legacies: The myth of the Homeland War in Croatia 6. War past to be heard: Politics of denial in Serbia Part II Conclusion Part III: Drivers of war discourse 7. Playing the war card 8. War and sentiment Part III Conclusion Conclusion