Politics & Power Quote by Jasmila Žbanić

Coercion and fear don’t just fill trenches; they rewrite the social map. Žbanić’s line isolates the most quietly devastating mechanism of nationalist violence: it doesn’t merely recruit bodies, it recruits relationships. “Forced or scared enough” is blunt, almost procedural language, the way people talk when the moral universe has been reduced to survival math. The real punch lands in the pivot from “their own nation” to “their own national armies”, a doubling that exposes how identity gets industrialized. Nation becomes something you “join”, like a club you never asked for, then it hands you a uniform and a target.

The subtext is that the war is not an external event but an intimate invasion. By specifying “neighbors and teachers”, Žbanić refuses the comforting fiction that conflict is fought between strangers or abstract sides. Neighbors are the everyday test of coexistence; teachers are the stewards of a shared future. Turning against them signals a society where trust has been systematically weaponized. It’s also an indictment of how quickly communal life can be re-coded into suspicion: the person who once graded your essays becomes, in the new script, a threat to your “side”.

As a director shaped by the Bosnian War’s aftermath, Žbanić is attuned to how propaganda and institutions don’t just command violence; they make it feel inevitable. The sentence’s grim clarity performs that inevitability, showing how nationalism doesn’t persuade so much as corner people until betrayal looks like self-defense.