War changes people and their communities. It creates refugees, veterans, orphans, profiteers, victims, perpetrators. It destroys polities’ social, economic, and physical fabrics. It profoundly alters social gender and class structures. “ELWar – Electoral Legacies of War: Political Competition in Postwar Southeast Europe” aimed to improve our understanding of the long-term political legacies of war by focusing on the evolution of political competition over the period of three decades – from the early 1990s until the present – in six postwar states of Southeast Europe: Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Kosovo, Macedonia, Montenegro, and Serbia. Postwar elections have garnered tremendous interest from researchers in a variety of fields. However, this interest has most often been limited to establishing the relationship between electoral democratization and the incidence and intensity of conflict. With a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods as well as a radically interdisciplinary, multi-method and innovative approach, ELWar aimed at filling the gap in understanding the real extent of political legacies of war.
Over the course of the project’s five years, ELWar team members focused their efforts on tackling three larger sets of research questions. First, how did experiences and views of war violence affect voter choice in post-conflict societies? Second, how did war histories feature in post-conflict parties’ and politicians’ strategies? And third, how did war histories become embedded in the social and political realities of the present? In order to answer those questions, the ELWar team collected and organized extensive data from a variety of sources. The team ran six rounds of public opinion and expert surveys in Southeast Europe with a total of more than 38 thousand respondents. Team members also created and analyzed datasets consisting of massive corpora of political discourse and the biographical information on its authors spanning more than two decades. They also created and analyzed large datasets with geocoded information on the tens of thousands of (changes in) street names, as well as construction and destruction of monuments. Using a broad spectrum of methodological approaches and techniques – from the newest developments in natural language processing to survey-embedded experiments – ELWar has made a number of significant advancements in the study of electoral competition in Southeast Europe and of post-conflict politics in general.
