BOSNIAN IDENTITY AFTER THE WAR : The Importance of How the War Is Described in Media for Contemporary Bosnian Identity

Abstract: After World War II, Europe has only experienced two wars, in the 1990s when Yugoslavia dissolved and now in 2022 when Russia went to war with Ukraine. Regardless of the outcomes of wars, it is clear that wars continue to recur in a continent that prides itself on its peaceful aspirations. During the breakup of Yugoslavia, the war in Bosnia was, in terms of scale,  the most terrible of all wars in the Balkans. In addition, it was the war that received extensive media coverage. This affordance has not been fully utilized. After the war ended, the Bosnians went a long way in rebuilding their devastated community. Based on a semiotic analysis of media representation of war-torn reality in this community, it was found that community subjectivity built up at a similar rate to the media's representation of their reality. The results show the five most commonly used terms to describe Bosnians in connection with the Bosnian War. These terms are 1. Genocide 2. Crime 3. Tragedy 4. Invaders 5. Victims. And,  results show that realistic depictions of war presented in the media reduce victim identification in war-devastated communities.