As we are faced again with images of war coming from Ukraine, the five-year project ELWar (Electoral Legacies of War) ends with significant findings on how war past becomes embedded into post-war politics and on the importance of the European Union accession process.
Wars change everything. They destroy human and physical capital and alter the social structures of communities. They create refugees, veterans, orphans and victims, as well as perpetrators, murderers, criminals and silent bystanders.
Why are some societies able to leave their war pasts behind while others struggle to move forward? To what extent is the answer to that question dependent on the nature of the conflict, post-conflict economic performance, or the ability of political entrepreneurs to use the war past for present electoral gain?
To answer those questions, the ELWar team – led by Josip Glaurdić from the Faculty of Humanities, Education and Social Sciences at the University of Luxembourg – conducted extensive research, analysed mountains of social network data, collected hundreds of thousands of political speeches and media sources and used the newest advances in natural language processing and machine learning. The five-year project focused on the evolution of political competition over three decades – from the early 1990s until the present day – in six postwar states of southeast Europe: Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Kosovo, Montenegro, North Macedonia, and Serbia. With their common Yugoslav pasts, exposure to different types of conflicts, different war outcomes (victories, stalemates, and defeats), and the diversity of postwar political competition, these countries offer the perfect laboratory for testing a variety of theoretical propositions.
The ELWar team made big strides in explaining how the politicisation of history, as well as real, lived experiences of war, affect people’s political loyalties and actions. Research has shown that people’s war identities become a part of the social fabric. They have also shown that these identities can get passed on even to generations born after the wars. There is, however, one silver lining in this story: a country’s clear European path can change the minds of voters.