Böcker av Elissa Helms

Borders of Desire is a collection of studies from the eastern borders of Europe, particularly the Baltics and the Balkans, that take a novel approach to borders and the work they do. Instead of viewing borders only as obstructions to the fulfillment of desire, this book shows how borders produce desire, particularly gendered and sexualized desire.

The 1992-95 war in Bosnia-Herzegovina following the dissolution of socialist Yugoslavia became notorious for "ethnic cleansing" and mass rapes targeting the Bosniac (Bosnian Muslim) population. Postwar social and political processes have continued to be dominated by competing nationalisms representing Bosniacs, Serbs, and Croats, as well as those supporting a multiethnic Bosnian state, in which narratives of victimhood take center stage, often in gendered form. Elissa Helms shows that in the aftermath of the war, initiatives by and for Bosnian women perpetuated and complicated dominant images of women as victims and peacemakers in a conflict and political system led by men. In a sober corrective to such accounts, she offers a critical look at the politics of women's activism and gendered nationalism in a postwar and postsocialist society. Drawing on ethnographic research spanning fifteen years, Innocence and Victimhood demonstrates how women's activists and NGOs responded to, challenged, and often reinforced essentialist images in affirmative ways, utilizing the moral purity associated with the position of victimhood to bolster social claims, shape political visions, pursue foreign funding, and wage campaigns for postwar justice. Deeply sensitive to the suffering at the heart of Bosnian women's (and men's) wartime experiences, this book also reveals the limitations to strategies that emphasize innocence and victimhood.

Argues that while the realities of post-war Bosnia are indeed strongly influenced by Dayton and the way it has been implemented, they can in no way be reduced to it. This book examines the Bosnian case and gathers together political scientists and social anthropologists, some of whom began working on Bosnia - Herzegovina in the 1980s, and others.