This thesis represents an attempt to challenge power hierarchies infusing white Western European academic and political fields. It constitutes a project, built on decolonial critique of privileges of research, that aims at attending to local and marginalised feminist perspectives in order to reach a deeper understanding for a complex and ambivalent Serbian post-socialist reality. A critical scrutiny of previous research conducted within the field of Comparative Politics and post-socialist feminist critique of academic knowledge, has led to the identification of problematic results of unequal distributions of power within politics and the academia. Moreover, through a historical overview of the geopolitical context and the feminist legacy of the region, the importance of contextualisation and the necessity of an epistemological and ontological shift within knowledge production has further been emphasised. Lastly, with a combining approach of qualitative interviews and autoethnography, lived experiences of postsocialism and its intersections with feminism have been sought and analysed. By highlighting women’s activism in democratisation processes and the severe socio-political problems facing contemporary Serbia, these experiences problematize the hegemonic Western projections of a post-socialist transition as an elite project towards ‘progress’ and Europeanisation.

The following study seeks to explore the theme of what has become known as a serious security problem within the genderfield as well as the peace and development field, strategic rape as a weapon in war. More specifically, the essay analyses women's experiences of rape in the Bosnian war, in order to explore how big of a space is dedicated for these experiences to be expressed in the aftermath of war and in the process of building a nation. The empirical findings consist of stories told by women who have experienced rape during the war, available for the general public to find. With a theoretical framework consisting of a combination of feminist theories surrounding the gender order, the analysis seeks to focus on what power relations and different types of silences can be found in the stories told by war rape victims. The conclusion states that all of the power relations are based on the unequal relationship between the male and female, which influences the relationship between war rapevictims and war criminals, politicians and the victims surrounding. The silence brought to life by stigma transforms into various forms, the main ones referring to the war rapevictims and witih the politicial sphere.