The empire strikes back? Transnational commemoration of the Srebrenica genocide online
How do former colonists engage with commemoration of mass atrocities suffered by their subjects?
Building on the scholarship on transnational memory activism and autocratic strategic narratives, we analyse the multilingual Twitter/X conversations about the 1995 Srebrenica genocide, with particular attention to the prominence of Turkish-language participation. Using over 300,000 posts related to #Srebrenica (2006--2024), we conduct the analysis of interaction networks, compare engagement types (retweets, quote tweets, mentions, replies), identify thematic patterns in the multilingual data and examine the actors
We find sharp, anniversary-driven mobilisation-especially among Turkish-language accounts-without a corresponding rise in exchange: interaction remains highly segmented, and engagement is dominated by retweets and quote tweets rather than replies, consistent with amplification of the narratives more than dialogue. We also find that commemoration carries different meanings across publics: Turkish-language discourse more often connects Srebrenica to broader identity, security, and geopolitical narratives, while Balkan publics more frequently foreground mourning, justice, and locally grounded remembrance.
Together, the findings show how transnational digital commemoration can be wide-reaching but inward-faced and weakly dialogic, preserving boundaries between former colonists and their subjects even around a shared commemorative focal point. Taking a postcolonial perspective, these findings contribute to research on transnational memory politics and the internationalisation of commemoration, and to work on autocratic strategic narratives.
Meet our speakers
Lanabi La Lova is a computational political scientist and Advanced Quantitative Fellow (Department of Methodology), Guest Lecturer (International Relations), and Faculty Affiliate at the Data Science Institute, LSE. She studies non-free regimes, political communication, transitional justice, and gender, with a regional focus on Eastern Europe and the Balkans. Her work combines has been published in The International Journal of Press/Politics, Political Communication, and the Journal of Peace Research.
Denisa Kostovicova is Professor of Global Politics at the European Institute, Lead of the LSEE Research on South-East Europe Programme at the Hellenic Observatory Centre, and Co-Chair of the Conflict, Justice and Peace (CJP) platform, all at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). She is a leading scholar of post-conflict justice and reconstruction. Her award-winning academic research has been supported by a number of prestigious grants, including from the European Research Council (ERC). Professor Kostovicova contributes regularly to policy discussions at the EU, the UN, and in the UK.
Ivor Sokolić is a Lecturer in Politics and International Relations at the University of Hertfordshire and a Visiting Fellow at the European Institute at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He holds a PhD from UCL and an MSc and BSc from the University of Wales, Aberystwyth. In 2019, Ivor published a book based on his research on Croatia, titled International Courts and Mass Atrocity: Narratives of War and Justice in Croatia (Palgrave MacMillan). He has published articles in the Journal of Peace Research, Cooperation & Conflict, Nations & Nationalism and Nationalities Papers, among others.
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