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25 /////////////~~~~~~~~~~~~~ 1 Identifying Srebrenica’s Missing The “Shaky Balance” of Universalism and Particularism SAR AH WAGNER Return, reconstruction, recognition, reparation. The language of postwar Bosnia and Herzegovina is saturated with a sense of what once was—or what was imagined to be—and the need to bring it back into existence. In these words, Bosnia’s recent past serves as the referent for verbs of restoration and rehabilitation as those who employ them attempt to bridge the gap between a pre-genocide, pre-rape, and pre-flight place and an envisioned harmoniously multiethnic and functional society. Such a time-compressing impulse to render order and re-right wrongs is not unique to Bosnia. Rather, as the essays in this volume demonstrate, attempts at redress are part of a larger discourse of international interventionism in postconflict societies that has emerged over the past half century and whose key concepts include reparation politics and transitional justice.1 This chapter examines an unusual form of such intervention, a newly fashioned tool of the international postconflict tool kit: the DNA-based technology used to identify mortal remains of persons missing as a consequence of the 1992–1995 war in Bosnia and Herzegovina, specifically the victims of the Srebrenica genocide.2 Juxtaposing the results of this forensic technology with those of another key international intervention in Bosnia, the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), this discussion maps important tensions and challenges within the project of identifying missing persons. Responses to mass atrocities, including uncovering mass graves, reassembling bodies, and prosecuting war criminals, belong to an ideological framework of justice and reconciliation that emerged from the post–World War II era of international human rights (Teitel 2000, 2003, 2006; Sanford 2003; Fletcher and Weinstein 2002; Joyce and Stover 1991; Pouligny 2005). As such, they fit within contemporary modes of addressing injustices against individual victims as much, if not more, than against 26 SA R A H WAGNER states. They are also part of an international grammar of reparation, a term with broad connotations, encompassing “a variety of types of redress, including restitution, compensation, rehabilitation, satisfaction, and guarantees of nonrepetition” (Hayner 2001, 171).3 Finally, within this general rubric of reparation, efforts undertaken to identify Bosnia’s missing, including the missing of the July 1995 Srebrenica massacre, also entail the specific aim of social reconstruction (Stover and Weinstein 2004; Wagner 2008)—that is, recovering, identifying, and commemorating victims to effect social repair.4 How has this technoscientific form of international interventionism fared in postwar Bosnia and Herzegovina, whose population, territory, and governmental structure continue to be divided according to ethnonational identity (e.g., the two entities of the Bosniak and Croat-controlled Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina and the Bosnian Serb-controlled Republika Srpska, and a presidency that rotates among the three ethnonational political constituencies of Bosnian Serbs, Bosnian Croats, and Bosniaks [Bosnian Muslims ])? In answering this question, I use postmortem identification technology to venture comment on moments of engagement between the particularities of a postwar state and the international concepts of order and rights that have given rise to pursuits such as truth and reconciliation commissions and memorial centers. The specific example of Srebrenica’s missing illustrates that, beyond the invaluable humanitarian achievement of returning remains to surviving families, the DNA science applied toward postconflict social repair exposes tension—a friction (Tsing 2005) between the ideological prescriptions of modern liberal democracy and the complex circumstances of a society defined both externally and internally along oppositional ethnonational lines. The results of the biotechnology invite us to examine how internationally accepted universals intersect with particular circumstances: “According to Habermas, modern collective identity has involved a shaky balance between two products of modernization: universalism and particularism . Universalism refers to ideas of freedom and democracy that are central features of Enlightenment thinking, but these ideas have been pursued, for the most part, through the particularism of nation-states—structures that have also developed during modernization” (italics added; Olick and Coughlin 2003, 50–51). As a postconflict society, Bosnia and Herzegovina is by definition a country in transition, a nation-state still under repair where intersections of universalism and particularism are particularly fraught. Since the end of the war in November 1995, Bosnia’s political course has been dominated not only by an awkward division of power among state and local governments but also by an international protectorate presence (the Office of the High Representative...

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