Telling Histories Of Violence Without Borders

It might seem curious that the 2019 Laura Shannon Prize, for the "best book that transcends a focus on any one country, state, or people to stimulate new ways of thinking about contemporary Europe as a whole" was awarded to Max Bergholz's "Violence as a Generative Force" (Cornell University Press), which focuses on Kulen Vakuf, a region in Croatia, over a few months in 1941, when neighbors who had generally lived peacefully in multi-ethnic communities suddenly perpetrated a series of horrific massacres and reprisals, claiming the lives of hundreds of men, women, and children. Readers quickly discover, however, the profound implications of this study for how we understand, even how we talk about, instances of mass violence against civilians, both in Europe and globally. By deftly analyzing the escalating cycle of violence in Kulen Vakuf, Bergholz arrives at an unsettling but important conclusion. He demonstrates that ideological indoctrination, deep ethnic cleavages, and long-nurtured hatreds often played little role in motivating those who perpetrated killing locally. Instead, violence itself recast social relations among neighbors in Kulen Vakuf, shearing multi-ethnic communities and steeling previously malleable ethnic identities. This book, "Telling Histories of Violence without Borders," examines the more portable findings of "Violence as a Generative Force," including its methodological orientations, which can be useful to historians and other scholars who study violence in very different contexts, and not only in Europe. This book reflects on three issues that arose during Berholz's research and writing, all of which are rooted in the notion of crossing borders: first, the need to surmount disciplinary provincialism when studying violence; second, the importance of establishing a sense of place when writing about violence; and third, the challenge of practicing historical empathy when telling histories of violence. This book emerged from the 2019 Laura Shannon Prize Lecture at the Nanovic Institute for European Studies (Keough School of Global Affairs, University of Notre Dame).