Jelena Petrović in conversation with Sami Khatib and Milica Tomić

What Does the Name of War Stand for Today?

War today is not an exception—it is the ruling logic of the world. Concealed behind the language of democracy, freedom, and human rights, it underwrites the neoliberal global order. Contemporary war no longer needs to be declared—it is managed, normalized, and enacted through legal, institutional, and discursive regimes embedded in everyday life. Calibrated to uphold inequality, contemporary war is not waged to be won, but to permanently suppress resistance and normalize intervention in the name of peace.

Structured in two sequences, What Does the Name of War Stand for Today? positions participatory practice as possible acts of political subjectivation, where dominant narratives begin to fracture. It recognizes war not as a past crisis, but as the governing logic of the present—unfolding through the hijacking of memory, surveillance infrastructures, militarized borders, racialized abandonment, neocolonial extractivism, and weaponized domination.

What Does War Stand for Today? is an art-theory project by Grupa Spomenik (2010–12), which was co-founded by Milica Tomić. The project is developed in collaboration with groups in Prishtinë, Tuzla, Zagreb, Ljubljana, Belgrade, Sarajevo, Berlin, Bregenz, and beyond. Based on the translation of Catherine Hass’s thesis of the same name, it articulates the 1990s wars in Yugoslavia not as concluded historical events, but as the emergence of a new mode of waging war that has since taken permanent form and become globally sustained.

Sequence 1: Mathemes of Articulation: Against the Logic of Erasure

The first sequence of the event series draws on Grupa Spomenik’s project Mathemes of Re-association, dealing with genocide, ethnic cleansing, and war crimes of the 1990s. Starting from the Yugoslavian context, the event attempts to map uneven geographies of a present in which peace itself becomes a weapon. Engaging the concept of political subjectivation, it confronts the imperial-fascist continuum embedded in today’s machinery of war and destruction. The event asks whether any form of social or (geo)political subjectivation can still emerge under regimes that render genocide unspeakable and freedom illegible.

This sequence is dedicated to Branimir Stojanović, co-founder and member of the Grupa Spomenik.

Jelena Petrović, *1974 in Svetozarevo, Yugoslavia. Places of Belonging: Ljubljana, Sarajevo, Vienna, Belgrade. Affinities: Grupa Spomenik, Red Min(e)d. Book: Women’s Authorship in Interwar Yugoslavia. The Politics of Love and Struggle, 2018.

Milica Tomić, *1960 in Belgrade, Yugoslavia. Places of belonging: Belgrade, Zenica, Frankfurt am Main, Berlin, Graz, Vienna. Affinities: Grupa Spomenik, Four Faces of Omarska, Annenstrasse 53. Book: Geography of Looking. Matter of Appearance, 2023.

Sami Khatib, Book: ‘Teleology without End’: Walter Benjamin’s Dislocation of the Messianic, 2013.