From the stadium to the funeral: dark events as infrastructures of political memory

Rajko Mitić Stadium, Belgrade, photographed on 20 July 2013. Contextual photograph, not the September 2026 match. Photo: Isimic / Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 3.0. Display may be cropped to fit. Image source · Reuse licence

Written 8 September 2026, following the funeral of Ratko Mladić in Belgrade.

On 7 September 2026, thousands gathered in Belgrade for the funeral of Ratko Mladić, the former commander of the Main Staff of the Army of Republika Srpska (VRS). Mladić had died on 27 August while hospitalised in The Hague, where he was detained under the authority of the UN Mechanism while serving a life sentence. His convictions for genocide, crimes against humanity and violations of the laws or customs of war had been upheld on appeal in 2021. At his funeral, uniformed soldiers carried his coffin, a gun salute was fired and a military orchestra played. Several serving Serbian government ministers attended.

The funeral formed part of a wider sequence of public commemoration. The previous evening, at the Eternal Derby between Red Star Belgrade and Partizan, supporters displayed a giant image of Mladić accompanied by an explicit reference to Potočari. Across two very different event settings, the same contested past was assembled and performed in public.

Dark events can be understood as temporary infrastructures of political memory. The concentration of people, symbols, places, rituals and media attention makes particular interpretations of the past visible and collectively experienceable. Events also create channels through which those interpretations move between different arenas of public life. In post-conflict societies, they connect memories of past violence with identities and political questions in the present.

When mourning becomes commemoration

Dark events are organised events linked to death, disaster and suffering. Funerals sit comfortably within that definition, although classification alone tells us little about their wider significance. Analysis depends on how memories of death and violence are given public form: who participates, which symbols are assembled, which narratives become visible, and how those narratives relate to contemporary politics.

Commemorative events are embedded in social and political contexts. Events associated with war and violent death can become focal points for arguments about national identity, political legitimacy and the interpretation of history. Controversies surrounding them form part of their social meaning. Research into Remembrance Sunday in the UK, for example, has shown how disputes about participation, protest, politics and national identity reveal wider struggles over the meaning of an established commemorative ritual.

Mladić’s funeral brought together military participation, national symbols, religious ceremony, political attendance and a large crowd. For many of those attending, the funeral may have represented mourning, loyalty, military comradeship or national identification. For survivors and families of victims of the crimes for which Mladić was convicted, his public honouring carries radically different meanings. These competing readings form part of the event’s political significance.

The previous evening had seen another highly visible act of commemoration involving the same figure.

‘Pravac Potočari’

On 6 September, Red Star Belgrade played Partizan in the 180th Eternal Derby at the Rajko Mitić Stadium. Before the match, Red Star supporters unveiled an enormous tifo depicting Mladić, accompanied by the words ‘Pravac Potočari’ — approximately, ‘Direction Potočari’. A minute’s silence was also observed in Mladić’s memory.

‘Pravac Potočari’ repeated words used by Mladić as Bosnian Serb forces entered Srebrenica on 11 July 1995. Potočari was the location of the UN base where thousands of Bosniak civilians sought protection. In the days that followed, more than 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys were systematically murdered in the Srebrenica genocide. Mladić was subsequently convicted of genocide for his role in those events.

The tifo connected Mladić, Srebrenica and Potočari within a contemporary sporting event. The combination of his image and those words established a narrative relationship between a military commander, a particular place and an episode of mass violence.

Football matches are not ordinarily classified as commemorative events. Research on sport and commemoration in the Western Balkans has shown that sport and commemoration can occupy the same post-conflict environment, draw on the same dissonant heritage and provide spaces in which ethno-national identities and memories of violence are expressed. Sporting events can acquire characteristics associated with dark events even when commemoration is absent from their original purpose.

At the Eternal Derby, the stadium became a temporary infrastructure for memory. A historical figure, a place associated with mass violence and a contemporary collective identity were brought together before the stadium crowd and circulated much further through media coverage. The following day, the commemoration of Mladić took a different institutional form in the funeral.

Events tell stories — and allow stories to travel

Commemorative events construct narratives from combinations of people, places, images, words, music, ritual and symbolism. Previous research on dark events has described this process as a form of storytelling, through which event design and performance contribute to wider narratives of national identity and collective memory.

Choices about who is honoured, which symbols are displayed, which places are invoked and who occupies prominent positions connect selected elements of history into narratives about sacrifice, victimhood, heroism, belonging and national identity. Mladić’s portrait and the words ‘Pravac Potočari’ created a specific relationship between a person, a place and an episode of violence.

The funeral on the following day assembled a different range of narrative elements: military participation, political figures, religious ceremony, national symbols and thousands of participants. The commemoration of the same figure moved into a setting governed by different conventions and carrying different sources of social and institutional authority.

Collective memory remains contested within these processes. The same person, symbol or historical episode can carry profoundly different meanings for different communities, and participants do not need to share a single interpretation. Events provide spaces in which these meanings are assembled, performed, encountered and circulated.

The stadium and funeral can be read as an event sequence through which contested memory travelled across public space. The form of the events changed, while the figure at their centre and the political associations surrounding him remained connected.

The past is part of the politics of the present

At the time of writing, Bosnia and Herzegovina was less than a month from its general elections, scheduled for 4 October 2026, amid continuing disputes over state authority and the constitutional position of Republika Srpska. The Office of the High Representative had described the overall security situation as ‘stable but fragile’. Its most recent report also stated that the territorial integrity of Bosnia and Herzegovina continued to be questioned by the Republika Srpska leadership and identified a return to more explicit secessionist rhetoric from SNSD leader Milorad Dodik.

The football display and funeral occurred within this political environment. They cannot be read as a measure of wider public opinion or as a cause of these political tensions. Their significance lies in the concentration of political narratives that already circulate through society and in the temporary material form that events give to them.

Political speeches, family histories, monuments, television programmes and social media all carry interpretations of the past. Events add physical assembly to this process. Images are enlarged, words become chants, rituals structure participation and collective presence becomes visible. Media coverage extends these performances beyond the immediate event space.

The reference to Potočari gave the stadium commemoration a direct historical connection with Srebrenica. The funeral then placed Mladić within a public ritual involving military, religious and political symbolism. In a region where the constitutional and political consequences of the Bosnian war remain contested, these performances of memory also belong to contemporary politics.

What events do in conflict-affected societies

Research on events during the war in Ukraine has approached organised events as more than leisure activities or visitor attractions. Events are situated practices of assembly, ritual, communication, fundraising, commemoration and collective identity-making that can continue, and in some cases intensify, under conditions in which tourism flows collapse.

Ukraine and Bosnia and Herzegovina represent very different conflict contexts. In September 2026, Ukraine remained at war following Russia’s full-scale invasion, while Bosnia and Herzegovina was dealing with the long aftermath of conflict and the political settlement that followed it. Across these different contexts, events provide structures for organising collective activity around shared meanings.

That capacity can sustain cultural identity, social cohesion and resilience, and can sometimes contribute to reconciliation. The same capacity for collective identity-making can also reinforce exclusion, political mobilisation and division. Research into dark commemorative and sporting events in the Western Balkans has shown how divisive politics at commemorations and ethno-national behaviour at sporting events can impede peaceful coexistence.

The idea of events as infrastructures of memory helps to account for these different outcomes. Infrastructure creates the conditions through which meanings can be assembled and circulated without determining their content. Events can support solidarities associated with resilience and reconciliation, while also sustaining memories and identities that deepen division.

The political work of dark events

The funeral of Ratko Mladić and the preceding football match reveal how political memory can move through different event forms. Within roughly twenty-four hours, Mladić’s commemoration moved from a football stadium to a funeral, taking different symbolic forms in each setting while remaining connected to questions of war, national identity and Srebrenica.

Both events provided temporary infrastructures through which existing memories could be assembled, performed and made collectively visible. The stadium used spectacle, collective participation and sporting space. The funeral used ritual, military participation, religion and political presence. The movement between the two shows how contested memory can circulate through institutions that would usually be analysed separately.

This opens a wider line of enquiry for dark events research. Events can be studied as mechanisms through which difficult and violent pasts become politically usable in the present. This involves examining how people, symbols and places are connected; how meanings move between different event forms; and how temporary gatherings contribute to longer-lasting narratives of identity, grievance, victimhood and legitimacy.

More than thirty years after Srebrenica and the end of the Bosnian war, memories of the conflict remain present through memorials, courts, political institutions, media and everyday public life. Events form part of this landscape. The stadium and the funeral demonstrate their capacity to assemble memory, give it public form and carry it into contemporary political life.