The Struggle for Redress. Victim Capital in Bosnia and Herzegovina – with Dr. Jessie Barton Hronešová
“The Struggle for Redress. Victim Capital in Bosnia and Herzegovina” a book by Jessie Barton Hronesova explores the varieties of recognition, redress, justice, and victimhood in Bosnia and Herzegovina through a within-country comparative analysis. She asks under which conditions domestic authorities are willing to recognize a particular group of victims, and who is “worthy of redress”. Meticulously researched, insightful at both empirical and analytical level, and skilfully written, the book centers the concept of victim capital through which Jessie analyses the dynamics of redress and asks what is it within the power of the victims and where/when do the limits of structural factors kick in.
In today’s episode, you’ll be hearing about:
- the victim capital and its three key elements: international salience, moral authority, and mobilization resources;
- terminology and agency: victims, survivors, and victims-survivors;
- responsibilities and dilemmas that come with fieldwork in overresearched contexts;
- academic research, international salience, and policy implications of the book;
- and last, but definitely not least, you’ll hear what Jessie’s been reading these days.
Dr. Jessie Barton Hronesova is an ESRC Postdoctoral Fellow, Oxford Department of International Development. In her research projects, she has mostly focused on security, ethnonationalism, post-war reparations, as well as community-building and transitional justice in the former Yugoslavia. She authored several studies on identity politics (including Post-War Ethno-National Identities of Young People in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Peter Lang, 2012), transitional justice in several academic journals (most recent for the Journal of Peacebuilding&Development), and redress (The Struggle for Redress: Victim Capital in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Palgrave Macmillan, 2020). Jessie previously worked at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe in Bosnia and Herzegovina, and the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network in Sarajevo and Belgrade. She holds a DPhil from the University of Oxford (2017) in politics. Jessie had collaborated with a range of research institutions and consultancies, including the Czech Academy of Sciences in Prague and the London School of Economics (where she is still a visiting fellow).
Jessie’s Personal Website, Oxford website, and Twitter handle: @YessinkaH
Podcast host: Sladjana Lazic
Text and edits: Sladjana Lazic