Memorialisation, Gender, and War Narratives in Kosovo

Memorialisation in Kosovo is a gendered and contested process through which different actors compete to shape public narratives of the war and its legacies. This thesis traces how women have been positioned within this process over time. It shows that dominant memorials have centred on the heroic male fighter and an ethnonationalist “us vs them” framing, leaving women largely absent from public memory. Women have later been symbolically included through memorials to conflict-related sexual violence, but in ways that draw on gendered and nationalist tropes and leave underlying hierarchies intact. Feminist artists and activists respond by developing alternative memorial practices that disrupt these limits and re-orient war memory towards accountability, solidarity, and feminist peace.