Recently opened memorial museums and exhibitions in Croatia museumize the “Homeland War” of 1991 to 1995. This article examines the four major institutions, the Museum of the Homeland War in Karlovac as well as three sites in Vukovar: The Memorial Center for the Homeland War, the Memorial Hospital and the Ovčara Memorial Home. This first systematic site analysis compares 1) the overall narratives; 2) how enemy images from World War II are reactivated to demonize “the other”; 3) how women are represented in these war exhibitions; and 4) the topics that are left out. I argue that while there is still no national museum that includes war developments in all of the country, the two big institutions, the Museum in Karlovac and the Center in Vukovar, focus on the “defenders,” as the Croatian fighters are called – while in Karlovac strikingly marginalizing and at the Center completely omitting civilians. War here means (male) soldiers and weapons, while the other two institutions portray individual victims without discussing their biographies. In all sites, Serbs are depicted with reference to World War II: as Chetniks, running “concentration camps” who committed either “urbicide and culturocide” or a “holocaust” against Croats.

We examined a Late Holocene sea-level stillstand using phreatic overgrowths on speleothems (POS) recovered from Medvjeđa Špilja [Bear Cave] (northern Adriatic Sea) from −1.28 ± 0.15 m below present mean sea level. Different mineralogical analyses were performed to characterize the POS and better understand the mechanisms of their formation. Results reveal that the fibrous overgrowth is formed of calcite and that both the supporting soda straw and the overgrowth have very similar trace element compositions. This suggests that the drip-water and groundwater pool from which the POS formed have similar chemical compositions. Four subsamples were dated by means of uranium-series. We found that ca. 2800 years ago, the relative sea level was stable for about 300 years at a depth of approximately −1.28 ± 0.15 m below the current mean sea level. This finding roughly corresponds with the end of a relatively stable sea-level period, between 3250 and 2800 cal yr BP, previously noted in the southern Adriatic. Our research confirms the presence of POS in the Adriatic region and establishes the Medvjeđa Špilja pool as a conducive environment for calcite POS formation, which encourages further investigations at this study site.

Scholars have studied how women’s domestic and transnational civil society activism addresses the gendered nature of transitional justice. In contrast, they have paid scant attention to women’s impact on transitional justice policy-making in institutions. We leverage the feminist institutionalist perspective that makes visible gendered norms, rules, and discourses in institutions. Homing in on women’s influence in parliaments where women are outnumbered by men and marginalised by adversarial discourse, we develop a conceptualisation of women’s discursive agency. Foregrounding discourse in women’s ability to drive change, women’s agency is enacted through their linguistic communication style and substantive normative positions that constitute micro- and macro-level structures of domination. Quantitative and qualitative discourse analysis is applied to a corpus of parliamentary questions about transitional justice in the Croatian parliament from 2004 to 2020. Our results show that women adopt the adversarial style of questioning, which they use to broaden the scope of entitlements and press for reparations for female and male victims. They overcome constraints posed by partisanship and ideology, while constraints of nationalism are less easily broken. The article advances feminist transitional justice by demonstrating how women’s language contributes to dismantling men’s policy domination in institutions, with implications for mixed-sex interactions in non-institutional domains.

The level of women’s parliamentary representation often increases after armed conflict, but do voters in postwar societies actually prefer female electoral candidates? We answer this question by analyzing a unique data set containing information on nearly 7,000 candidates running in three elections with preferential voting in postwar Croatia. Our analysis demonstrates that voters’ gender bias is conditional on the local electorate’s ideology and exposure to war violence, with voters of right-wing parties and voters in areas more affected by war violence being more biased against female candidates. These effects of ideology and exposure to war violence also exhibit a strong interactive relationship, suggesting that bias against women is strongest among right-wing voters in areas exposed to war violence and reversed among left-wing voters in areas exposed to war violence. Our findings highlight the need to better understand the relationship between gender, ideology, and violence in postconflict societies.

Infection with the parasitic nematode Strongyloides stercoralis is characteristic for tropical and subtropical regions of the world, but autochthonous cases have been reported in European countries as well. Here we present the first nation-wide survey of S. stercoralis seroprevalence in Croatian individuals presenting with eosinophilia, and evaluate the fraction of positive microscopy rates in stool specimens of seropositive individuals. In our sample of 1407 patients tested between 2018 and 2021, the overall prevalence of strongyloidiasis was 9.31%, with significantly higher rates in those older than 60 years of age (P = 0.005). Of those, one-quarter (25.95%) were also positive following microscopy examination of faeces after using the merthiolate–iodine–formaldehyde concentration method. Our findings reinforce the notion of endemic strongyloidiasis transmission in Croatia, particularly in older individuals, and highlight the need to consider the presence of S. stercoralis in patients with eosinophilia.

This survey was undertaken to assess the attitudes of Croatian veterinary students regarding farm animal welfare issues. The study included students of all undergraduate years at the only Faculty of Veterinary Medicine in Croatia. First-year students were surveyed twice, ie before and after attending the course on animal welfare, using a written questionnaire containing statements with a five-point Likert scale for choice of answers. Students consider good animal welfare necessary for sustainability of farming systems and food quality and safety, ranking particular issues in the following order, biological functioning > natural living > emotional states. Students also believe that cattle and pigs have greater cognitive abilities and that their welfare is less compromised in comparison with poultry, whereas standard management procedures performed in pig production are perceived as more humane than beak-trimming in poultry. In addtion, students tend to consider pain in farm animals caused by management procedures only when these procedures involved the affliction of significant pain. There were no differences between attitude scores on most of the statements from first-year students before and after the course. Furthermore, for the majority of statements, the mean responses were lower in final-year students, suggesting a lower level of empathy toward farm animals. Although similar results have also been recorded elsewhere in the world, these results raise concerns as to the ability of these future veterinarians to promote good farm animal welfare in the country and abroad. The results also suggest a need to modify veterinary student education in Croatia in the field of farm animal welfare.

In this paper we present dating of archaeological samples from Croatia only performed since our last reports (Obelić et al. 2011; Horvatinčić et al. 2012). Liquid scintillation radiometric measurement technique with benzene synthesis (LSC-B) and accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS) technique were applied.

Only a few studies have been conducted so far on the long-term impact of war. We investigated whether a life-long impact of the war experiences could be detected in advanced-agers who have successfully overcome all life's challenges. The participants in this study were oldest-old (80+ years) residents of retirement homes in Zagreb (Croatia), who were divided into two groups – ‘war-exposed’ and ‘not-exposed’ – according to their direct war experience (First World War, Second World War, Croatian Homeland War). Within this 1906–1928 birth cohort, a higher percentage of participants with war experiences reached extreme longevity (95+ years). We found no significant difference (p < 0.01) between the two groups concerning demographic and socio-economic characteristics, their life satisfaction, their self-rated current health and functional ability status. Despite numerous similarities, several traits related to life-history, current quality of life, attitudes and reflections distinguish the group of participants with direct war experience. The kind of war involvement – active military service, imprisonment in concentration camps or prisons, forced migration due to war and war-related death of close family members – stretched through various aspects of the life-history features, quality of life and attitudes. It differed for men and women, so it is no wonder that the significance pattern in the two genders mostly seems mutually exclusive. Socio-economic situations strongly differed by gender and according to the kind of war exposure, amplifying the differences within the ‘war-exposed’ group in terms of the life-long impact of wars on their lives. Therefore, we could claim that the war experiences were not the same for everybody, and that they had lasting consequences on the lifecourse of persons who directly faced war-related events. The results also point to the high resilience capacity as a common feature among persons who survived direct exposure to at least two wars and yet survived to exceptionally old age.

Karst environments preserve some of the best archives of past climate, vegetation, hydrology, anthropogenic impact, and landscape evolution providing that a reliable chronology can be established. Here we present an example of the system of the Plitvice Lakes (Dinaric karst, Croatia), which is characterized by intensive tufa and lake sediment formations. The radiocarbon dating method, combined with some other dating methods and various geochemical and isotope analyses, showed that the Plitvice Lakes system in the present form has existed for about 8000 years. Older tufa deposits were dated to warm interglacial periods. A long-term comprehensive multi-proxy study showed that all environmental compartments (atmosphere, various water bodies, soil, bedrock, DIC, terrestrial and aquatic biota, and of course various secondary carbonates) must be included in order to obtain trustworthy results.

How do politicians in post-war societies talk about the past war? How do they discursively represent vulnerable social groups created by the conflict? Does the nature of this representation depend on the politicians’ ideology or their record of combat service? We answer these questions by pairing natural language processing tools and a large corpus of parliamentary debates with an extensive data set of biographical information including detailed records of war service for all members of parliament during two recent terms in Croatia. We demonstrate not only that veteran politicians talk about war differently from their non-veteran counterparts, but also that the sentiment of war-related political discourse is highly dependent on the speaker's exposure to combat and ideological orientation. These results improve our understanding of the representational role played by combat veterans, as well as of the link between descriptive and substantive representation of vulnerable groups in post-war societies.