The purpose of this paper is to examine the role women have played in the Balkan conflicts since 1914. While World War I marks their entrance into military operations, women’s heroic mass military engagement during World War II has been long celebrated, well documented, and has been central to their emancipation in post-war socialist Yugoslavia. Yet, despite the progress, some fifty years later, women emerged in much of the literature and media as victims and not victors of the 1990s nationalist wars fought on the same soil by the same people. Most explanations of this change focus on the gendered nature of the Balkan ethnic wars and the rise of masculine nationalist ideologies that have portrayed women as the wombs of the nation, and mere tools of war. This paper will demonstrate that it is necessary to critically assess such a portrayal by problematizing such a simplistic depiction of gender relations at a time of war and ignores women’s roles as fighters, war criminals, anti-war protesters, and survivors.
