The Memory We Are Not Told: A Social History of Post-Conflict Silence in Post-Yugoslavia, 1995–2025

 This 150,000-word longitudinal oral history project analyzes the informal practices of memory suppression—what the author terms “institutional forgetting”—in four post-Yugoslav successor states (Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Serbia, and Kosovo). Based on 310 recorded interviews with war survivors, former combatants, archivists, and secondary school teachers, the document reconstructs how official narratives of the 1990s wars have been selectively silenced not through censorship, but through bureaucratic, economic, and pedagogical mechanisms. The abstract outlines three core contributions: first, a typology of “silence-work” (redaction by curriculum revision, pension dependence altering testimony, architectural demolition of memorial sites); second, a quantitative analysis of history textbooks showing declining narrative complexity over three decades; third, a comparative analysis of how different states instrumentalize the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) records. The document is organized as a non-linear, thematic archive rather than a chronological history, with chapters on: forced displacement and naming practices, the political economy of veteran benefits, and intergenerational transmission of trauma through kitchen-table narratives. The author argues that the region’s current democratic backsliding is directly correlated with the managed scarcity of shared factual memory. A final chapter offers a methodology for “counter-archival” grassroots documentation.