The Aftermath of War: Experiences and Social Attitudes in the Western Balkans

摘要

The Aftermath of War presents a series of social surveys of war-related distress and social attitudes such as ethnic intolerance, authoritarianism and sexual conservatism in the former Yugoslav countries and Albania. This large survey project was financed by the Norwegian Research Council and conducted by a group of political and social scientists at Norwegian universities and universities in the studied countries. The survey data were collected during the winter of 2003/2004 and involved information from more than 21,000 respondents (xv). The focus of the book is on direct and indirect consequences of war for people in the region. The aims are the following: to examine the long-term psychological well-being of people in countries directly hit by war (Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia and Kosovo); to study the consequences of warfare for changing attitudes towards ethnic relations in the whole region (by comparing the results from 2003/2004 to earlier surveys); and to determine whether the recent war experience has influenced the general values and attitudes of people in the region (1). The latter question could seem rather too obvious. After all, the war in Bosnia cost more than a 100,000 lives, while about 20,000 were killed in Croatia and probably about 10,000 in Kosovo, not to the mention the politics of ethnic cleansing, massive war crimes including rape and the hundreds of thousands of refugees and internally displaced persons. How can war of this kind and scale not have an effect? But still it is extremely important to have these effects surveyed and somehow quantified.