ABSTRACT
A generation after the end of the Croatian War of Independence, transitional justice advocates had hoped Croatian society would be able to separate individual and organizational responsibility for war crimes from the moral significance of a war of self-defense. Instead, young people’s entire lives as students, citizens, and family members have been lived amid the continued predominance of what Dejan Jović has termed a congratulatory and uncritical “myth of the Homeland War” and amid extended economic precarity. The much-mythologized generation of wartime soldiers, or “branitelji” (“defenders”), has meanwhile become middle-aged veterans with material vulnerabilities of their own. The media’s ongoing production of “veteran” masculinities, made meaningful to youth in domains including sport and popular music, as well as official commemoration, affirms the dominant public narrative of the Homeland War in Croatia. The phenomenon also suggests that, where transitional justice processes are still salient a generation after conflict, understanding the relationship between masculinities and transitional justice requires attention to how age- and conflict-related masculinities interact.
