Girlhood at War - (Creative Interventions in Global Politics) by Vjosa Musliu (Hardcover)

About the Book

This book tells the true story of a young girl growing up during the Kosovo war and its immediate aftermath following Kosovo's liberation by NATO troops in 1999. Through her embodied experiences, the book exposes the tangible and everyday acts and events of the war, providing brutal insight into the impact of war and the politics of subjugation.

Book Synopsis

This book tells the true story of a young girl growing up during the Kosovo war and its immediate aftermath following Kosovo's liberation by NATO troops in 1999. Through her embodied experiences, the book exposes the tangible and everyday acts and events of the war, providing brutal insight into the impact of war and the politics of subjugation.

At the outset of the book (in 1998), Vjosa's view of the world, as a young child, is organized in clear dichotomies: the good Albanians and the evil Serbs; the brutal Serbian military shelling Albanian civilians and the angelic NATO airplanes bombing Serbian military sites. This Manichean worldview starts to unravel after Vjosa and her family are chased away from their home by the Serbian military and moved to the suburbs. There, surrounded by mostly poor and uneducated fellow Albanians, she gradually discovers the layers of her family's socio-economic privileges. Though unequipped with the language to verbalize it, she is tormented by the idea that her family's comparatively higher socio-economic status is the reason why they are spared by the Serbian military.

When the war ends in 1999, and the NATO tanks fill the narrow streets of her hometown as Serbian military tanks leave, Vjosa believes she received her own 'happily ever after'. She celebrates her thirteenth birthday happily wearing a US military uniform, holding an unbearably heavy unloaded gun as she becomes the favorite interpreter of the American NATO troops. She spends several months after the war occasionally translating between angry Albanians who now seek revenge against Serbs and NATO troops who insist on not picking sides; showcasing the impossibility of (re)building Kosovo with "both-sides-ism" becoming the modus operandi of the international intervening structures.

Review Quotes

"What is it like to become unwanted in your country? And then, after being forcibly expelled, to try and make a home elsewhere? In 1999, as Serb troops ethnically cleanse Kosovo, a precocious fourteen-year-old girl finds herself acting as a translator for deployed American troops who are trying to make sense of this conflict in the heart of Europe. A quarter of a century later, Vjosa Musliu, now an accomplished academic, returns to this painful past. The result is an unflinching portrait of violence but also of survival against the odds, told with humanity, courage, and wit." --Elidor Mëhilli, The City University of New York

"Vjosa Musliu's disturbingly intimate Bildungsroman brilliantly captures the bright Kosovar girl's turbulent passage from childhood to adulthood amid the tragic chaos of Kosovo's struggle for independence from Serbia that was bolstered by NATO's intervention and eventually culminated in the birth of independent Kosovar state. The narrator's unflinching honesty reveals the profound complexities of life, love, and resilience in a land marred by horrific conflict but also filled with enduring hope. This is a captivating story about everyday reality in an environment marked by apartheid and war, family struggles, love, misunderstandings, hatred, tragedy, and just about everything in between." --Vladimir Arsenijevic, writer and President of the Association KROKODIL

"I read Vjosa Musliu's Girlhood at War in one sitting. In this gripping coming of age book, Musliu tells her story with a hindsight of vulnerability and kindness towards her younger self and the people around her during the Kosovo war and its immediate aftermath. Leaving nothing out, she takes the reader on an embodied journey of how children can see through the accommodating assurances of adults during conflict, making their own judgments over what is fair and just, self and other and the violence of 'neutrality.' Girlhood at War consists of 32 vivid vignettes that challenges us to confront the human cost of geopolitical abstractions that reduce life to casualties, dismisses resistance as 'ethnic conflict, ' and sanitizes reparative justice through Western frameworks of 'post-war reconstruction' and 'peace-building.' What emerges is a work of extraordinary courage, wit and clarity that is not just about survival, memory, and who gets to write history but also about love, friendship and family during war." --Dr. Piro Rexhepi, research fellow, school of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London

About the Author

Vjosa Musliu is Associate Professor of International Relations at Free University of Brussels, Belgium. Her research focuses on international and European interventions and statebuilding. Her area of focus is primarily the Balkans and post-Soviet space. She is a co-founder of Yugoslawomen+ Collective, a collective of six academics from the post-Yugoslav space working in 'Global North' academia. She is the author of three books and dozens of journal articles in the field of international relations.