Introduction

Dealing with change and conflicting identities has become a central element in our increasingly complex, globalized world. Many books have been written about ethnic groups in conflict, addressing questions of motivations for becoming violent or setting out to find the right recipe for peaceful cohabitation of people from different ethnic or national groups. However, we still lack in understanding how processes of social change, such as ethno-national conflict and conflict settlement processes interact with identity change and in what way shifts in different identity categories, such as ethnicity, nationality, race, gender, class, and the like are interconnected. In particular, listening to women who have experienced ethno-national conflict and its aftermath raises many questions about our understanding of what happens with individuals in situations of social change.