The battle against invasive alien species (IAS) rages on, and is being driven by recently articulated global biodiversity agendas. While the current United Nations Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF) seeks to ensure pristine, protected areas comprise 30 percent of the world’s total surface area by 2030, there remains much to be done for the remaining 70 percent, areas dominated by human habitat and industrial activities. Many non-native species have partly or wholly naturalized in these mixed ecosystems, becoming entangled in people’s livelihoods. We therefore argue that initiatives to not only aggressively eradicate such IAS but also to enroll the help of citizens in doing so will likely meet with resistance. Biodiversity dilemmas may arise where the cure may be worse than the disease; animal welfare standards may have to be sacrificed; and socioeconomic utility may have to be set aside. We therefore advocate the need for an alternative perspective on biodiversity justice and the proper place of IAS.

More than 20 years have passed since the Dayton Peace Agreement of 1995 for Bosnia and Hercegovina, which began the end of the four-year-long Siege of Sarajevo. Three-quarters of the pre-war population of Bosnia and Hercegovina, around three million, fled or were driven from their homes, and of these around one million left for ‘third countries’ outside the former Yugoslavia. This brought a complicated and fragile peace for both citizens who stayed in the country and those who found refuge abroad. While some refugees in third countries were obliged to return to Bosnia and Hercegovina after the war (Germany, for instance, had a policy of compulsory return), others, including refugees in Sweden, were left with a choice. Some people returned to their homes; others resettled in territories that were now under the military and administrative control of ‘their’ ethnonational group. The vast majority of refugees in Sweden, however, chose to remain, as they felt that they had better opportunities there than if they were to return to Bosnia and Hercegovina. Chapter 2 provides an anthropological study of the families of people who left Sarajevo for Sweden because of the siege, exploring how living in Sweden shapes the ways the siege is remembered and understood today, and how experiences are transmitted and transformed from one generation to the next.

Experiences of genocide have often an emotionally and intellectually evasive quality which makes them difficult, and sometimes impossible, to share with others. Analyzing documentary films and academic teaching, through psychodynamic concepts of containment, trauma, and memory, two qualitatively different ways of communicating the experience of genocide are found: embodied representation and contained representation. While the first communicates the traumatic or unthinkable content of genocide, the second communicates the non-traumatic or thinkable. The author proposes that any student and scholar of needs to move between the grey opacity of genocide experience, and the clear understanding of embodied and contained representation.

This study builds on recent findings that emotions are crucial to the transmission of experiences of mass political violence between generations. In such work, the familial setting, as distinct from the individual psychological domain or collective sociocultural contexts, has been receiving increasing scholarly attention. Drawing on a larger project on the families formed by Bosnians who moved to Sweden during the 1990s war, this article develops a new method to analyze the interfamilial dynamics of communicating meanings. This method combines analysis of the emotions with which participants characterize certain facts – whether in semi-structured interviews or in children’s drawings – with the dynamic reflexivity common to both participant observation and psychotherapy. The analysis demonstrates how certain facts and feelings may be transmitted unchanged, while others become transformed or are lost in the process of intergenerational transmission.