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Revolution and reform in Russia and Iran: modernisation and politics in revolutionary states

role of external actors such as NATO (202–206). The most valuable analysis in Obradović-Wochnik’s account, however, must surely be that of the central issue of denial presented in Chapter 6. Well supported by insights from her ethnography, Obradović-Wochnik argues that “denial frequently coexists with acknowledgment of atrocities” (130) and that “denial discourses are an intersection of a large number of problems, such as personal loss, trauma, inability to talk, a wish to distance oneself from atrocities and a general inability to comprehend the scale of the brutalities which occurred” (131). It is on the basis of such analysis that the book’s conclusions about the failure of existing transitional justice programmes in Serbia, which have tended to portray the public as passive recipients of knowledge who are in denial about the events of the 1990s (68), should be taken seriously. ObradovićWochnik effectively demonstrates that acknowledgement of atrocities features in private discourses even when it is absent from public discourse, and that public silence is sometimes an important coping mechanism for those who remain shocked and confused about past events, and – as is outlined in Chapter 7 – have often themselves suffered extreme stress and the loss of family members and friends as a result of them. Obradović-Wochnik makes very clear that her study is not intended to be representative of Serbian society as a whole. Her interviewees are drawn from what appears to be quite a closeknit community, with overlapping circles of both friendship and family amongst the group (69). Furthermore, she notes that the respondents’ attitudes to Slobodan Milošević were, at most, ambivalent, and that even amongst those who initially supported him, this support was quickly withdrawn during the 1990s (67). So, while the narratives presented in Ethnic Conflict and War Crimes in the Balkans go a long way towards addressing problematic and overly simplistic claims that the Serbian public has singularly failed to come to terms with the past, there is clearly more left to be researched here. What Jelena Obradović-Wochnik has succeeded in doing, though, is opening up a space in which more nuanced understandings of what “coming to terms with the past” might mean at the popular level, both in the Serbian context and elsewhere.