Landscape, Memory, and the Shifting Regional Geographies of Northwest Bosnia-Herzegovina

Writing and arguing with older discourses that have informed the subdiscipline of regional geography and setting them against new ways of conceiving of the region, this article considers the northwest of Bosnia-Herzegovina as a site that calls for a newly animated form of regional study. Of particular concern here is the role that memory and commemorative practices play in such a spatial schema. The monumental landscapes of the Tito regime and its collective commemoration of World War II sit alongside and are troubled by the more recent traumas and spaces of unmarked death associated with the ethnic war in Bosnia during the early 1990s. Read together, northwest Bosnia-Herzegovina functions as a vivid exemplar for understanding traumatic historical mourning as a phenomenological process that is inseparable from the wider geopolitical landscape.