In the field amid the traumas of war: A historian examines how the Balkans confront their post-war past
Associate Professor Ondřej Žíla from the Institute of International Studies at FSV UK has long focused on the modern history of Southeast Europe, particularly Bosnia and Herzegovina. His research explores how local societies deal with the consequences of the 1990s war and how these experiences shape contemporary identity, collective memory and political life in the region. “I try to understand what it means to live in a country where, even thirty years after the war, people still describe it as a ‘post-war’ society,” says the historian and Balkan specialist, who recently completed his habilitation.
Assoc. Prof. Žíla studied a combined teacher-training study programme in geography at the Faculty of Science and history at the Faculty of Arts, Charles University. “It was an interfaculty programme and quite demanding in terms of time — on one side there were exams in mathematics and statistics, on the other, Latin,” he recalls. His interest in Southeast Europe arose when he chose a seminar focused specifically on the Balkans. “We had excellent lecturers, and my friends and I often travelled to the region,” he says. Initially, he was also drawn to Central Asia and Iran, but, as he admits, he did not have the capacity at the time to fully immerse himself in studying the local languages. The Balkans were geographically and linguistically closer — and more accessible for a historian.
Before joining the Faculty of Social Sciences almost ten years ago, he worked as a lecturer at the Faculty of Arts, where he taught South Slavic and Balkan studies, and also as a high school teacher. “I enjoyed the contrast — working with different types of students. But over time I realised I wanted to focus more deeply on teaching and research,” he explains. Today, he works at the Institute of International Studies at FSV UK as both lecturer and researcher, and appreciates the environment that supports interdisciplinary development of Balkan studies in historical, geographical and political science perspectives. “We are essentially the only institution in the Czech Republic that connects these fields within an interdisciplinary study of the Balkans,” he adds.
In his research, Assoc. Prof. Žíla has long focused on post-war transformations in Bosnia and Herzegovina — particularly on how communities coped with the consequences of conflict and forced migration. Already during his doctoral studies, he researched the return of refugees and internally displaced persons attempting to go back to their homes after the war. This eventually led to the topic that became the centre of his habilitation thesis — so-called ethnic engineering in post-war Sarajevo. “At first, it seemed like a marginal issue,” he recalls. “But the more I learned, the more I realised that it was a key element of the post-war settlement.”
After the signing of the Dayton Peace Agreement in 1995, which ended the three-year war in Bosnia and Herzegovina and divided the country into two entities based on ethnicity, Sarajevo — previously split between the warring sides — began to reintegrate. In practice, this meant that residents of the part of the city under the control of the Republika Srpska started to leave — even though they no longer had to. “It was a strange situation. Formally, there was peace, but in reality, the movement of people continued — this time without weapons,” explains Žíla.
His research investigated how political elites on both sides — Serbian and Bosniak — used fear, uncertainty and manipulation to influence people’s decisions to stay or leave. “Within a few weeks, tens of thousands of people were on the move. Serbs left one part of Sarajevo, while Bosniaks from Srebrenica and the Podrinje region arrived from the other,” he describes.
As part of this research, he conducted dozens of in-depth interviews, trying to understand people’s motivations, fears and how they retrospectively interpret the events they lived through. Many of those interviewed now live in peripheral areas, often in much poorer conditions than before the war. “It’s not about relativising the responsibility of nationalist elites who started the war. I am more interested in how ordinary civilians, often labelled as belonging to the ‘aggressor nation’, come to terms with being collectively stigmatised — and how this experience is passed on. What does it do to you when your parents had to leave, were expelled, or even detained and exposed to violence?” he asks.
At the same time, he acknowledges that such an approach requires great sensitivity and caution.
“One must be careful not to be accused of focusing on the suffering of ‘the wrong side’,” he notes. “In Sarajevo, I’m sometimes called a pro-Serb researcher, while in Banja Luka, they see me as pro-Muslim,” he adds. According to him, the key point is that even thirty years after the war, Bosnia and Herzegovina is still described as a ‘post-war’ country. “You have a generation born after 1995, yet they still live in a reality shaped by a past conflict. Ethnicity has become a tool of political mobilisation and a convenient language of populism,” he says. “When, thirty years after the war, politicians and the media constantly remind you of the group you belong to, it’s hard to believe the conflict is a closed chapter.”
Research on “Serbhood”
This line of research continues in his current project titled Negotiating ‘Serbhood’: Layers of memories among the Serbs in the post-Yugoslav and postwar spaces, supported by the Czech Science Foundation. Together with colleagues, including Karin Roginer Hofmeister from the same institute, he examines how the idea of so-called “Serbness” is formed, transformed and transmitted across different environments — specifically in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo and Croatia.
The project is rooted in memory studies and seeks to understand how various layers of collective memory — from official narratives to personal experiences — intersect, overlap or diverge. “I see it as a continuation of my previous research, but I’m trying to expand it into new territories,” he explains. “I’m interested in how the legacy of nationalism or perpetration from the 1990s is reflected in the way people talk about it today — and to what extent these frameworks persist or change in everyday life.”
The first stage of the project focuses on mapping how these topics are communicated in digital spaces — for example on social media or in online media. This will be followed by long-term fieldwork aimed at gaining deeper insight into the lived experiences of people in these communities. The research team plans to conduct interviews directly in the field to observe how, thirty years after the war, both personal and collective perceptions of the past are evolving.
Smoky rooms and rakija
Assoc. Prof. Žíla is no stranger to demanding fieldwork. “In 2016–2017 I carried out extensive field research in Bosnia and Herzegovina. It was a challenging time — I had small children, I was constantly travelling between the Czech Republic and the Balkans, and I didn’t always have enough funding to stay there for longer periods. But I tried to spend as much time in the field as possible,” he recalls.
He visited mostly smaller towns and villages, often in peripheral areas, where the consequences of war can still be seen — not only materially, but also psychologically. He conducted more than eighty in-depth interviews with local residents. “They were very intense encounters. I often spoke with people repeatedly; sometimes it took time before they were ready to talk. In many cases, the interview became a form of release — people felt the need to speak out after years of silence, often for the first time.”
Fieldwork, he says, is demanding in every possible way. “In winter months, in smoke-filled rooms, over endless cups of strong coffee and glasses of rakija, it wasn’t always easy — especially if you don’t drink spirits and you’re not a smoker,” he notes. Although he could not always avoid tense or emotionally charged situations, he considers these experiences extremely valuable. “Sometimes interviews turned into arguments between the participants themselves — people who had once been on the same side began disputing interpretations of the past. On one occasion someone even pulled out a gun at me — but it was more an expression of trauma than actual threat,” he says.
More often, however, he encountered deep mistrust. Again and again, local people accused him of working for the CIA or the KGB. “When I was doing research for my master’s thesis in 2006, the situation was still quite tense. Serbs clearly remembered that the Czech Republic, as a NATO member, had supported the alliance’s intervention, and they often confronted me about it. It wasn’t always simple or pleasant,” he recalls.
And what about the future? He definitely plans to continue his research — another field trip to the Balkans is already approaching. At the same time, he wants to further develop his teaching activities. “I’d like to continue building Balkan studies and, through teaching and supervising doctoral students, help young researchers discover the region from new perspectives. That’s probably what fulfils me the most,” he concludes.
