9.6. Roundtable on the book, The Strongest Link: An Oral History of Wartime Rape Survivors in Kosovo by Anna Di Lellio and Garentina Kraja (Oxford University Press, 2025).
The Strongest Link is an oral history that makes public the memory of the 1998-1999 Kosovo war survivors by giving them a speaking position when they have had none. Seeking to rescue their stories from oblivion and promote social justice by making individual suffering a social experience, it serves as a crucial form of memory activism. The memory of wartime sexual violence is always suppressed, in this case and elsewhere, but never forgotten. It remains subterranean or confined to few safe spaces for multiple reasons that have to do with individual trauma, stigma and collective denial. This suppression is not just painful for individuals; it erases sexual violence as a crucial chapter of the history of the war. In this regard, the memory work of this book centrally addresses a key question: how is collective memory of war and trauma shaped by the silencing of it most vulnerable witnesses?
The roundtable will address several thematic streams at the center of the Conference such as Intersectionality, Race, and Gender, Resilience and Resistance, and Repression, Justice, Human Rights, and Activism.
Patricia Flier, Universidad Nacional de La Plata, will address gender and memory activism; Raffaella Rumiati, International School for Advanced Studies (Trieste, IT), will talk about the impact of trauma on memory; and Jakub Gałęziowski, University of Warsaw, will address postwar narratives and memory. The authors of the book, Anna Di Lellio, New York University, and Garentina Kraja, independent researcher, will respond to the comments
20260731T140020260731T1530America/Argentina/Buenos_Aires9.6. Roundtable on the book, The Strongest Link: An Oral History of Wartime Rape Survivors in Kosovo by Anna Di Lellio and Garentina Kraja (Oxford University Press, 2025).SV102MSA Buenos Aires 2026buenosairesconference@memorystudiesassociation.org
