From Creativity to Conflict: Semantic Innovation in the Bosnian Serb National Movement of the 1990s
Predrag Dojčinović (ed.), Propaganda and International Criminal Law: From Cognition to Criminality. Routledge, 2020
Posted: 7 May 2020
Date Written: April 12, 2020
Abstract
Semantic innovations were an important element in the Bosnian Serb political cultural efflorescence in the 1990s. They reveal activists' unrelenting commitment to forge a new nationalist discourse to replace the class-oriented lexicon of communism. The innovations are vivid evidence of the Serb narod's ever-expanding ambitions. National activists employed many different variants of semantic innovation. They mutated, conflated, and elided signifiers. They revived long-forgotten signifiers as slurs to vilify adversaries and adopted new referents as adversaries change.
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