Nena Močnik: Sexuality in the Aftermath of Violence: Lessons from Bosnia on Silence, Social Stigma and the Long-term Impact of War-related Sexual Violence

This project outlines some of the most important achievements but also failures  of different stakeholders – survivors, NGO activists, therapists, artists and academics – to bring just and positive social change to the many women that experienced sexual violence, rape and forced impregnation during the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina in the 1990s. I want to discuss “lessons” from Bosnia-Herzegovina that could potentially be applied in the current and future research and practice in documenting, reporting and helping the survivors of conflict-related sexual violence and rape in Ukraine.

Nena Močnik is a postdoctoral researcher at Turku Institute for Advanced Studies, University of Turku, Finland. Her book, Sexuality after War Rape: From Narrative to Embodied Research (Routledge 2017), was awarded the Bank of Montreal Award in Women’s Studies (University of Ottawa, 2018). She was the recipient of several fellowships including the EnTe Fellowship (New Europe College, Bucharest, 2016-2017), a fellowship from the ICNC Summer Institute for the Advanced Study of Nonviolent Conflict (Tufts University, 2016), a Brown International Advanced Research Institute Fellowship (Brown University, 2015) and a Fulbright Visiting Scholar Fellowship (University of Southern California, 2014). She is the author of several human–rights-related forum theatre performances and her own monodrama “Canned”. She has delivered workshops and training in the field of social justice and anti-discrimination, using mostly approaches from community theatre and applied drama. In 2018, she was invited to be the external expert at EUROCLIO – European Association of History Educators, developing experiential and embodied pedagogical practices in history teaching. With financial support from the European Commission – European Remembrance program, and 7 university and NGO partners, she initiated and is leading the project “#NeverAgain: Teaching Transmission of Trauma and Remembrance through Experiential Learning”. At the moment she is working on her new research and forthcoming book, War-related Sexual Violence and Trauma Transmission: Reconciliation and Peacebuilding in Post-Conflict Settings, Routledge 2020.