It is July 11, 2025, and the world marks the International Day of Remembrance for the Srebrenica Genocide. This year marks the 30th anniversary of the massacre, during which Bosnian Serb forces killed more than 8,000 Bosniak Muslim men and boys between July 11 and 22, 1995.

The Srebrenica genocide has been recognized by both the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) and the International Court of Justice (ICJ). It remains the first genocide in Europe to be legally recognized by international courts since World War II.

Each year, as global leaders solemnly repeat “Never again,” the phrase rings increasingly hollow. To this day, Serbia refuses to recognize the events in Srebrenica as genocide. In Republika Srpska — the entity where the killings took place — not only is the genocide denied, but war criminals are openly glorified, and efforts to erase memory persist. Meanwhile, the world watches, again, in disbelief, as another genocide unfolds in Palestine and Sudan, and as war continues in Ukraine, adding to a continuum of trauma that will shape generations to come.

In Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH), those who lived through the war have certainly not forgotten it. But how do second-generation individuals, born after the war, confront the weight of transgenerational trauma?

Kalina Yordanova, a clinical psychologist and independent researcher, has spent the past 15 years exploring this very question. She holds a PhD in psychoanalysis and anthropology from University College London (UCL), where her doctoral research focused on the intergenerational transmission of war trauma in families of survivors from BiH. Yordanova has worked with Médecins Sans Frontières and various Bulgarian NGOs, offering psychological support to survivors of war, torture, and domestic violence. Her publications examine trauma, memory, and identity in post-conflict contexts.

In 2015, Yordanova published an article titled “Images of War: The Place of the War Past of the Parents in the Second Generation’s Identity.” What stood out in this work was her interdisciplinary approach, combining anthropology and psychoanalysis to explore how the memory of war shapes the identities of those born after it. Drawing on data from 26 families of war survivors in BiH, Yordanova emphasized that “memory plays a central role in the shaping of contemporary identities, as it helps us reconstruct our identity with our past and other people’s past.”

K2.0 spoke with Yordanova to delve deeper into the nuances of her research and to explore how acts of remembering, both individual and collective, can challenge dominant historical narratives.

K2.0: As an anthropologist, your research often focuses on remembrance, memory, and identity formation in relation to war. Could you elaborate on your perspective regarding the relationship between individual memory and official history?

Kalina Yordanova: I see the relationship between individual memory and official history as both intertwined and contested. My research, especially on the intergenerational transmission of war trauma in BiH, shows how individual memory resists incorporation into official narratives. While official history aims for coherence, linearity, and national identity formation (often for political purposes), individual memory, especially when shaped by trauma, is fragmented, manifested as bodily symptoms, and re-enacted; it is frequently silenced or unsymbolized. Survivor parents rarely offer a coherent narrative of their wartime experiences. Instead, they transmit unprocessed material through symptoms, objects, and landscape. 

Their children, the second generation, are left to reconstruct meaning from these fragments to create a familial identity. This reconstructive process, deeply intimate and subjective, comes at odds with the official versions of history imposed by states or political powers. The result is that the complexity and ambiguity of experience are suppressed in favour of simplified and politicized accounts.

The absence of a coherent narrative compels children to reconstruct meaning from bodily symptoms, silences, and displaced speech acts, effectively piecing together a version of the past that helps them locate themselves within familial and historical time. This process not only forms the basis of their personal and collective identity but also reveals the deep psychological burden placed on the second generation to make sense of the incomprehensible and unspoken dimensions of trauma.

The second generation is confronted with some sort of a primal scene, as known in psychoanalysis. This means that when faced with some inconceivable (and disturbing) knowledge, the child identifies with one of the participants in order to see the world from their perspective and make sense of it. Yet, in this process, passion and destructiveness fuse, while gaps of knowledge are filled in with fantasy.

From a methodological perspective, what does the combination of anthropology and psychoanalysis, which you use, offer compared to other disciplinary approaches?

In my understanding, the main strength of psychoanalysis as a research tool is its capacity to explore unconscious processes and the symbolic dimensions of human experience. It offers tools to interpret repressed, dissociated, displaced, or non-verbal material manifested in dreams, slips of the tongue, bodily symptoms, relational patterns, children’s play, etc. Cultural anthropology, on the other hand, provides a contextually grounded, immersive understanding of human experience through methods like participant observation and ethnographic fieldwork. So, the combination of these allows for a profound understanding of individual experiences of trauma as shaped by local beliefs, practices, and social structures.

In your paper, you interpret children’s drawings to explore their imagery of the war and their parents’ roles in it. What struggles or difficulties did these children face when trying to construct narratives about events they did not experience themselves?

As children felt a strong loyalty to their parents, they were at first hesitant to reveal details about them. Yet, at the same time, they were curious about the more traumatic or forbidden aspects of their parents’ past. One such aspect was whether their fathers, if veterans, had killed during the war. Younger children, in particular, struggled to grasp the reality of loss and often tried to depict some form of healing or restoration in their drawings. I remember a five-year-old girl who, after imagining her city’s devastation, drew an image and explained it as “all cars being washed in a car wash after the war,” with her father coming home and bringing a flower. I thought of this as an image of hope and renewal, but also as a mechanism of denial, if the truth was too harsh to accept.

What images of the war in BiH do children reconstruct to make sense of it? How do they imagine the war their parents experienced?

I have published on this a lot. It will be difficult for me to sum up the main findings of my research in a paragraph. Briefly, children imagined scenes of ruined buildings devoid of people, which I interpret as their difficulty in symbolizing the extreme human experience of war. They also frequently depicted attacks on the family home, symbolizing a deep fear of losing safety and continuity. Another common image was that of faceless horror – executions of anonymous figures by anonymous perpetrators – which I see as representing an omnipresent, nameless terror. Finally, many children describe the war as “a dirty job,” highlighting the painful and contradictory roles that their parents, especially their fathers, were forced to assume. 

In interpreting one of the children’s drawings, you use the phrase “the war as a dirty job assigned to heroes.” Why did you choose this phrasing, and what led you to this interpretation?

I chose this phrase because children’s understanding of war is ambivalent. Through watching TV, observing their parents’ behaviour, hearing stories about “a game with no rules,” “dirty jobs,” “warlords,” and chaotic recruitments, children grasp that their parents, especially fathers, were both heroic and deeply affected by violence. The “dirty job assigned to heroes” reflects how children see war heroes as individuals who sacrificed a lot and showed courage, but also experienced moral transgressions, vulnerability, and trauma. 

You interviewed 40 children (18 girls and 22 boys). Did you observe any gender differences in how they form memories and interpret the past?

Gender was not the focus of my research, so my observations on gender as a factor in memory transmission were rather a byproduct. Yet, some conclusions still emerged. For example, girls tended to avoid the topic of war violence, describing it as scary and unpleasant, often shifting to more “pleasant subjects,” pleasant here being an exact quote. They would incorporate flowers or decorations in their drawings, explaining this as an aesthetic concern. Boys, in contrast, showed greater interest and excitement about the war, readily discussing its violent and heroic aspects, especially when their fathers had participated. 

We can argue that transgenerational identifications are reinforced by patriarchal structures. This difference, however, relates to the real gendered war experiences of the parents: girls identify with their mothers’ more consistent, protective roles at home, while boys adopt their fathers’ ambiguous, emotional stance that blends heroism with horror. Some boys saw the war as a kind of competition where courage was demonstrated. Girls’ avoidance, on the other hand, may reflect the exclusion of women from the military and spheres of power, confining them instead to roles associated with objectification, sexual violence, and submission. Although this issue is much more complex because sexual violence and submission were also inflicted upon men, these experiences were more suppressed due to shame.

In your paper, you use the term “ambivalent identity” to describe the identity formed by post-war generations. Could you explain what you mean by this term, and in what ways have you observed this ambivalence being manifested?

I use the term “ambivalent identity” as it captures the contradictory and complex ways post-war generations relate to their parents and their shared past. On one hand, there is deep loyalty and sympathy toward parents who have endured immense trauma; on the other, there is frustration and a sense of loss for a peaceful domestic world (often an idealized Yugoslavia) that was taken away. This ambivalence is fuelled by the broader context, too. In contemporary BiH, private, nuanced narratives about the war are often suppressed in favour of official, one-sided discourses, preventing the coexistence of conflicting memories and emotions. 

As a result, the past, marked by sadness, loss, and trauma, dominates the collective consciousness. This shapes a culture I term “postness,” where identity is anchored in the memory of violence and a nostalgic longing for a lost era of safety and goodness, while the present is perceived as inadequate or insufficient. Finally, there is a tension within individuals and society, as the second generation both inherits and struggles with these unresolved, contested images of the past, the homeland, and themselves.

This article has been edited for length and clarity.

Feature image: Courtesy of Kalina Yordanova.

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