Join us for Uncomfortable Evidence: On the Challenge of Telling New Stories about Srebrenica, a lecture by Dr. Max Bergholz, Associate Professor of History at Concordia University. 

This lecture is part of the Burds Memorial Series on Eurasian Studies, held in honor of Professor Jeffrey Burds (1956-2024). It is co-sponsored by the Brudnick Center on Violence and Conflict, the Department of History, the Department of Sociology and Anthropology, the Department of Cultures, Societies, and Global Studies, the Politics, Philosophy, and Economics Program, and the International Affairs Program. 

Thursday, February 27, 2025

3–5 PM

RP 909 (1135 Tremont Street, 9th floor)

Refreshments provided!

Please RSVP at this link: https://forms.gle/f9gXDYhJCxK6TcSw5

Abstract:

The International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) has sculpted the story of July 1995 in Srebrenica.  In working to hold accountable the perpetrators of the crime of genocide, among other crimes against humanity, the ICTY’s prosecutors gathered an immense amount of evidence, presented cases in the courtroom, and obtained numerous convictions.  These legal proceedings have engendered bitter, ongoing disputes among various actors in Bosnia-Herzegovina over their validity.  All these dynamics have affected how historians approach this history.  In general, they have not posed questions that stray far from the objectives that are firmly tied to the ICTY’s genocide narrative, with its clear categories of perpetrators and victims, and objective of establishing the guilt of the former and the victimization of the latter.  Nearly thirty years since July 1995, perhaps the time has come to ask: what can we learn from this approach that is new?  Rather than retelling what we already know about these events, we might consider turning our analytical gaze toward what can be called, “uncomfortable evidence.”  This is a shorthand for stories about July 1995 that resist our desire to domesticate them into binary categories of black and white, which are more relevant for legal proceedings, and those who seek to use history to affirm or deny their results.  Instead, stories based on uncomfortable evidence – several of which will be discussed in this talk – invite us to enter a grey zone where we embrace the complexity of human behavior and take up the challenge of accounting for it.  In so doing, historians of Srebrenica can more effectively return to a primary challenge of their discipline: to explain this violent past, while resisting the urge to make sense of it with rigid categories based on their contemporary moral and political positions.