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6 - Memory, the media and NATO: information intervention in Bosnia-Hercegovina

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 September 2009

Monroe E. Price
Affiliation:
Professor of Law Cardozo Law School in New York; Co-director of the Programme on Comparative Media Law and Policy Centre for Socio-Legal Studies, University of Oxford
Jan-Werner Müller
Affiliation:
All Souls College, Oxford
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Summary

If collective or social memory is power, then those engaged in the contest for control will seek to manage its production. One of the most important ways in which public or national memories have been nourished, shaped and limited in the twentieth century has been through broadcasting and, in the period since the late 1950s, more specifically through television. Television is one of the prime means by which to establish what Timothy Snyder in his chapter calls ‘sovereignty over memory’, and to provide both a national framework for collective memory and to shape individual memories of national events. In this chapter, I want to explore an important episode in the management of memory as an instrument of conflict prevention or resolution, namely the role played, in Bosnia-Hercegovina in the late 1990s, by the US-led NATO Stabilisation Force (Sfor) and the Office of the High Representative (OHR). As Ilana R. Bet-El shows in her chapter, the Bosnian context was one in which, for generations and centuries, memories were articulated, projected and raised as flags of combat. Television gave a whole new force to such articulations.

The narrative of control of information in Bosnia can be linked to the history of efforts by one state, or a group of states, to influence the articulation or suppression of particular narratives within the borders of another state.

Type
Chapter
Information
Memory and Power in Post-War Europe
Studies in the Presence of the Past
, pp. 137 - 154
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2002

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