“War Trauma” and the Politics of PTSD during and after the Wars of Yugoslav Succession

Abstract

AbstractThis article explores how the concept of post-traumatic stress disorder was developed and debated during the wars of Yugoslav succession 1991–1995. It focuses on the rich, wide-ranging, and complex psychiatric and psychotherapeutic discussions of war trauma in the post-Yugoslav space, arguing that arguments about PTSD became a site for expressing political tensions, controversies, and anxieties that could not otherwise be addressed or identified.This research explores how Yugoslav psychiatrists tailored the language of PTSD to their own particular clinical and political needs, infusing it with local assumptions and experiences, often radically changing its original meaning and intentions in the process. Moreover, the article engages with discourses of psychological trauma in Eastern Europe and the socialist world, which remains a neglected topic. It examines how the post-WWII and socialist-era psychiatric discourse and silences were reinterpreted and worked into the psychiatric-political attempts to make sense of the wars of Yugoslav succession.