Joining the War, Masculinity, nationalism and war participation英文学习资料.pdfVIP

Nationalities Papers, Vol. 34, No. 3, July 2006 Joining the War: Masculinity, Nationalism and War Participation in the Balkans War of Secession, 1991–1995 ´ ´ Aleksandra Sasha Milicevic Research Question Why do people go to war? My own interest in this question emerged from the context of my dissolving country and Serbia’s increased engagement in a very strident form of ethnonationalism. Although social scientists have sought to understand the roles of ethnonationalism in fostering state-organized violence, few scholars have sought to understand the gendered nature of men’s motivations for participating in war. The case of the inter-ethnic wars in Croatia and Bosnia, following the break-up of Yugoslavia, presents an unparalleled opportunity to understand more about how the processes of ethnonationalization and masculinization operate in everyday life, and about how men from Serbia made sense of their decisions about participation in the wars. In the present paper I explore the ways nationalism and masculinity intersect and overlap, influence and are influenced by war participation, by looking closer into the war volunteers from Serbia who joined the Yugoslav wars of secession, 1991–1995. Methods and Design This study was designed as an ethnography of war participation. During the summer of 2000 and between June 2001 and September 2002, I conducted 40 in-depth semi- ˇ structured interviews with former war volunteers from Pancevo—a small town in Vojvodina, about 15 miles north of Belgrade. I asked similar questions of each respondent to ensure overall comparability, but also encouraged them to elaborate on their answers in ways they found personally relevant. Interviews lasted