Postwar memory generations - contested memory, historical narratives and history education in Bosnia and Serbia

This project investigates the role of history education and history schoolbooks in shaping cultural memory, understood as shared narratives about the past, in war-torn regions. We will study how youth in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Serbia remember the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s. In an innovative collaboration between history, memory studies and social psychology, we will explore how history education transmits war memories, how narratives in history education and schoolbooks relate to other forms of cultural memory, including political discourse, social media family narratives and commemoration practices, and how memory influences young peoples’ perception of their own and other cultural groups in the region. The project will contribute to developing interdisciplinary methods to study how war memory is transmitted across generations in post-conflict societies and the roles of history education in these processes.