Abstract
This chapter focusses on experiences with and perspectives on cultural and educational exchange at the secondary school level between rival communities in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH). Although 20 years have passed since the country’s 1992–1995 war, the majority of BiH children and youth are still socialised in mono-ethnic schools using ethnically biased curricula that increase their vulnerability to interethnic prejudice and divisive political ideologies. Conceptualising cultural and educational exchange within Novelli, Lopes Cardozo and Smith’s framework known as the ‘4Rs’ of sustainable and just peace (i.e. recognition, redistribution, representation and reconciliation), I examine the strengths and limitations of exchange for improving interethnic relations in this post-conflict society. The chapter draws on empirical data collected in 2014 from 60 semi-structured interviews with international and state education authorities, university and NGO teacher educators, secondary school directors and social science teachers, as well as from focus groups with 60 students aged 16–18 years at five secondary schools, in the cities of Banja Luka, Sarajevo and Mostar. Interviewees identified various positive and negative impacts of cultural and education exchange in the BiH context. The chapter discusses three of the perceived benefits—economic and civic advancement, critical reflexivity and intergroup peacebuilding—as well as three perceived risks—‘brain drain’, peacebuilding elitism and misrepresentation of contemporary conflict drivers. In the BiH context, exchange initiatives are found to address one or another, but rarely all, of the ‘4Rs’. The chapter concludes that in order to contribute more effectively to positive relations between rivals, strategic efforts must be made to incorporate all of the ‘4Rs’ into exchange agendas and practices.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsNotes
- 1.
See also Bolin et al. (2004).
- 2.
The ‘bonding’ variant of these international exchanges included school excursions to cultural and religious ‘mother/fatherlands’ (for Croats, Croatia ; for Serbs, Serbia ; for Bosniaks, Turkey) which provide opportunities for students to deepen their understanding and appreciation and to identify more personally with the cultural and religious traditions of their respective ethnic group.
- 3.
Organisations that have been active supporters of intergroup exchange activities in BiH include the Helsinki Citizens’ Assembly, the Nansen Dialogue Network, the Open Society Institute, Civitas and EFP-International, among others.
- 4.
The annual Mostar Secondary Schools Fair is sponsored by the OSCE and organised each mid-November on the International Day of Tolerance which was declared by UNESCO in November 1995 just as the Dayton Peace Agreement was signed. The official aim of the Fair is ‘to promote cooperation and communication, realisation and presentation to the public of joint activities of professors and students of secondary schools and their joint promotion’.
- 5.
Project Citizen is an international initiative of the Center for Civic Education (Civitas) based in California. Project Citizen has been implemented in BiH since 2000 and is designed to equip students with knowledge, skills and attitudes for competent participation in the political life of their society. A ‘showcase’ is held at the end of each school year in the capital city Sarajevo which brings together delegations from 16 primary and 16 secondary schools from across the country for a ‘friendly’ competition.
- 6.
The annual Vocational Schools Festival is a rare and locally grown initiative for students in professional schools. The festival began nearly 20 years ago with schools from the Croat -Bosniak Federation of BiH only but since 2009 has been joined by Serb-majority schools from Republika Srpska as well. ‘The main objective of the festival is that high school students learn about the cities and municipalities of Bosnia and Herzegovina and to encourage their friendship, the spirit of competition, technical and vocational education, sharing of interests and exchanging views and experiences of young people.’ Accessed 25.06.2017: http://www.opcinazivinice.ba/press/709-osmi-festival-rada-srednjih-tehnickih-i-strucnih-skola-bih-odrzat-ce-se-u-zivinicama
- 7.
One of the annual activities of the annual Mostar Schools Fair is an interschool debate which a school’s website described as ‘not a competition to be won’ but rather ‘an example [of how] to promote coexistence through mutual trust and respect for diversity and as a contribution to the strengthening of civil and intercultural dialogue among young people’. In 2014, the debate offered ‘arguments for the importance of education and…conflicting views between the two sides about what is of primary importance in today’s BiH society’ (Bosniak Vocational School website). Another example was a project on ‘Reconciliation and Integration through Education and Dialogue’ organised in the Jajce and Zvornik municipalities by the NGO Nansen Dialogue Centre which reported that, ‘Through sequences of interethnic training, education, meetings, discussions, and concrete civic actions…selected beneficiaries from the target groups significantly improve their capacities, knowledge and skills for social action…Hitherto mono-ethnic social networks gradually transform into multiethnic ones [that] function as catalysts for further improvement of interethnic relations in the communities’. Accessed 25.06.17: http://www.nansen-dialogue.net/ndcsarajevo/index.php/en/activities
- 8.
Described as ‘a networking and capacity building project for high schools in Bosnia and Herzegovina’, the Connecting Classrooms project funded student teams at 20 schools from different cities in BiH to work independently and together on ‘issues that are important to their communities while networking and facilitating knowledge sharing ’. Student projects included ‘photography exhibitions, plays, music concerts, charitable activities, talent competitions , environmental projects as well as voluntary work in schools for children with special needs, retirement homes and hospitals’ which all had an interethnic cooperation component. Accessed 24.11.2015: http://www.britishcouncil.ba/en/programmes/education-society/connecting-classrooms.
- 9.
There was virtually no mention among the research participants of ‘national minorities’ like Jews , Roma, other Yugoslavian nationalities in the country, etc., as the perspectives of these small populations and their experiences of the dynamics of rivalry, peacebuilding and development in BiH remain largely ignored.
- 10.
UWC-Mostar endowment website: http://www.mostarendowment.com/backgroundUWC.html
- 11.
UWC-Mostar website: http://uwcmostar.ba/who-we-are/uwc-movement/
- 12.
All UWC schools place also a strong emphasis on student-centred learning, student leadership and ‘glocal’ engagement and service.
- 13.
Religious authorities have also intervened to limit certain forms of educational and cultural exchange in BiH. A key example is the Catholic Church’s intervention to stop Croat-curriculum schools from participating in the secondary school course entitled ‘Culture of Religions’ which was designed to familiarise BiH secondary school students with the country’s main religions through ‘an inclusive, non-denominational approach aimed at tolerance and understanding’ (OSCE-BiH Education Department 2008: 1). Piloting of the course began in selected regions and schools in 2004. The BiH Catholic Church, however, ‘intervened to halt’ Croat cantonal authorities from all participation (OSCE-BiH Education Department 2007: 6–7). No Croat-curriculum schools have since offered the course.
- 14.
Over the 2004–2013 period, 61 BiH students were awarded Erasmus Masters support and 6 received Erasmus Doctoral degree supports in partnership between BiH universities and 2 EU partner universities in Graz, Austria and Ghent, Belgium. Accessed: http://eacea.ec.europa.eu/erasmus_mundus/ecw/funding/documents/2008/selection/karl_franzens_universitat_graz.pdf
- 15.
A remarkable feature of the 2-day Vocational Schools Festival is that student delegates from distant regions stay overnight with host families . Such an arrangement would have been impossible to consider in the early post-war years and is indicative of the intercommunity trust that has been regained over the past 20 years.
- 16.
As does, for example, the Fulbright programme (Füssl 2007).
- 17.
In ‘two-schools-under-one-roof’, students and school staff within a school building are fully segregated by ethnicity, either entering through separate doors or attending classes at different times of day in order to have no contact between ethnic groups. The practice of ‘two-schools-under-one-roof’ was created by the OSCE in 2000 as a temporary measure to facilitate the return of displaced minority populations to ‘ethnically cleansed’ areas but has been retained by domestic ethnonationalist politicians, drawing criticism from the Council of Europe Commissioner for Human Rights. A Cantonal High Court ruled the practice discriminatory in 2012, but steps to reintegrate the schools have been resisted by local authorities.
- 18.
A rare counterexample is the annual Vocational Schools Fair, a home-grown initiative which is organised entirely by the country’s TVET Teachers’ Association and supported by local fundraising.
- 19.
In Mostar, for example, activities connect schools from the East and West sides of the city several times a year, yet only a handful of delegates (5–10 per school of 400+ students) typically get to participate.
- 20.
Izzi (2013) observes that ‘While project documents often state that a ‘catalytic’ or ‘multiplier’ effect is expected, how this is supposed to happen is left unspecified’ (p. 111).
- 21.
The river that divides East and West Mostar and the Bosniak and Croat populations.
References
Adjuković, D. (Ed.). (2003). Socijalna rekonstrukcija zajednice: psiholoski procesi, rjesavanje sukoba I socijalna akcija [Community social reconstruction: Psychological processes, conflict management and social action]. Zagreb: Society for Psychological Assistance.
Adler, E., & Barnett, M. (Eds.). (1998). Security communities (Vol. 62). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Allport, G. (1954). The nature of prejudice. Reading: Addison Wesley.
Basic, G. (2013). Stories after the Bosnian War: Competition for Victimhood. In L. L. Cheng (Ed.), Proceedings of the 1st annual international conference on forensic sciences & criminalities research (pp. 68–77). Lund: Global Science and Technology Forum, Lund University.
Bolin, B., Hackett, E. J., Harlan, S. L., Kirby, A., Larsen, L., Nelson, A., et al. (2004). Bonding and bridging: Understanding the relationship between social capital and civic action. Journal of Planning Education and Research, 24, 64–77.
Burg, S. L., & Shoup, P. S. (1999). The war in Bosnia-Herzegovina: Ethnic conflict and international intervention. Armonk: ME Sharpe.
Clarke-Habibi, S. (2005). Transforming worldviews: The case of education for peace in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Journal of Transformative Education, 3(1), 33–56. Retrieved from http://jtd.sagepub.com/content/3/1/33.short.
Clarke-Habibi, S. (2012). Learning to reconcile? An exploratory study of educators’ perspectives on and experiences of peace education in Bosnia and Herzegovina. MPhil thesis, University of Cambridge, Faculty of Education.
Clarke-Habibi, S. (2017). ‘Peacing’ Together a Conflicted Society: Educational values, voices and practices in Bosnia and Herzegovina. PhD dissertation. Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge.
Corkalo Biruški, D., & Ajduković, D. (2015). Young adults’ perspective of social reconstruction in three post-war communities in Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina. In M. Fischer & O. Simic (Eds.), Transitional justice and reconciliation: Lessons from the Balkans (pp. 169–192). Abingdon: Routledge.
Danesh, H. B. (2008). Creating a culture of healing in multiethnic communities: An integrative approach to prevention and amelioration of violence-induced conditions. Journal of Community Psychology, 36(6), 814–832. https://doi.org/10.1002/jcop.
Deutsch, K. W., Burrell, S. A., Kann, R. A., Lee, M., Jr., Lichterman, M., Lindgren, R. E., et al. (1957). Political community and the North Atlantic area. New York: Greenwood Press.
Donais, T. (2012). Peacebuilding and local ownership: Post-conflict consensus-building. New York: Routledge.
Dragovic-Soso, J. (2016). History of a failure: Attempts to create a national truth and reconciliation commission in Bosnia and Herzegovina, 1997–2006. International Journal of Transitional Justice, 10(2), 292–310. https://doi.org/10.1093/ijtj/ijw005.
Festic, A., & Rausche, A. (2004). War by other means: How Bosnia’s clandestine political economies obstruct peace and state building. Problems of Post-Communism, 51(3), 27–34. https://doi.org/10.1080/10758216.2004.11052170.
Fischer, M. (2006). “Finding a balance”: Dealing with past, present and future. In Peacebuilding and civil society in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Ten years after Dayton (pp. 417–440). Münster: Lit Verlag.
Fraser, N. (1995). From redistribution to recognition? Dilemmas of justice in a “post-socialist” age. New Left Review, 1(212), 68–93.
Fraser, N. (2005). Reframing justice in a globalized world. New Left Review, 36, 79–88.
Füssl, K.-H. (2007). Between elitism and educational reform German-American exchange programs, 1945–1970. In P. Gassert, W. Mausbach, D. Morris, & D. Junker (Eds.), The United States and Germany in the era of the cold war, 1945–1990: A handbook (pp. 409–416). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139052436.048.
Galtung, J. (1976). Three approaches to peace: Peacekeeping, peacemaking, and peacebuilding. In Peace, war, and defense: Essays in peace research (Vol. 2, pp. 282–304). Copenhagen: Christian Ejlers.
Galtung, J. (1990). Cultural violence. Journal of Peace Research, 27(3), 291–305. Retrieved from http://jpr.sagepub.com/content/27/3/291.short.
Greenberg, R. D. (2001). Language, nationalism and the Yugoslav successor states. In C. C. O’Reilly (Ed.), Language, ethnicity and the state (Vol. 2): Minority languages in Eastern Europe Post-1989 (pp. 17–43). London: Palgrave Macmillan UK.
Izzi, V. (2013). Just keeping them busy? Youth employment projects as a peacebuilding tool. International Development Planning Review, 35(2), 103–117. https://doi.org/10.3828/idpr.2013.8.
Kapović, M. (2011). Language, ideology and politics in Croatia. Slavia Centralis, 4(2), 45–56. Retrieved from https://kuscholarworks.ku.edu/dspace/handle/1808/8578.
Kappler, S., & Richmond, O. (2011). Peacebuilding and culture in Bosnia and Herzegovina: Resistance or emancipation? Security Dialogue, 42(3), 261–278. https://doi.org/10.1177/0967010611405377.
Kaya, Z., & Keranen, O. (2015). Constructing identity through symbols by groups demanding self-determination: Bosnian Serbs and Iraqi Kurds. Ethnopolitics, 14(5), 505–512. https://doi.org/10.1080/17449057.2015.1051817.
Kolind, T. (2007). In search of “decent people”: Resistance to the Ethnicization of everyday life among the Muslims of Stolac. In X. Bougarel, E. Helms, & G. Duijzings (Eds.), The new Bosnian mosaic (pp. 123–138). Aldershot: Ashgate.
Kuhn, T. (2012). Why educational exchange programmes miss their mark: Cross-border mobility, education and European identity. Journal of Common Market Studies, 50(6), 994–1010. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-5965.2012.02286.x.
Lederach, J. P. (1995). Conflict transformation in protracted internal conflicts: The case for a comprehensive framework. In K. Rupesinghe (Ed.), Conflict transformation (pp. 201–222). New York: St. Martin’s Press.
Lederach, J. P. (1997). Building peace: Sustainable reconciliation in divided societies. Washington, DC: United States Institute of Peace.
Messick, D. M., & Mackie, D. M. (1989). Intergroup relations. Annual Review of Psychology, 40, 45–81. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.ps.40.020189.000401.
Moll, N. (2013). Fragmented memories in a fragmented country: Memory competition and political identity-building in today’s Bosnia and Herzegovina. Nationalities Papers, 41(March 2015), 910–935. https://doi.org/10.1080/00905992.2013.768220.
NDC, & Saferworld. (2012). Leaving the past behind: The perceptions of youth in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Sarajevo: Nansen Dialogue Centre (Sarajevo) & Saferworld.
Norwegian Helsinki Committee. (2015). Strengthening the role of universities in peacebuilding in the western Balkans. Oslo.
Novelli, M., Lopes Cardozo, M., & Smith, A. (2015). A theoretical framework for analysing the contribution of education to sustainable peacebuilding: 4Rs in conflict-affected contexts. University of Amsterdam, UNICEF Consortium on Education and Peacebuilding.
OSCE-BiH Education Department. (2007). Towards inter-religious understanding in Bosnia and Herzegovina: A status report on the pilot course culture of religions. Sarajevo.
OSCE-BiH Education Department. (2008). The OSCE mission to BiH and education reform: Towards post-war Statebuilding, respect for diversity and civic citizenship. Sarajevo.
OSCE-BiH Education Department. (2014). Education overview. Retrieved May 20, 2013, from http://www.oscebih.org/Default.aspx?id=3&lang=EN
Perry, V. (2009). At cross purposes? Democratization and peace implementation strategies in Bosnia and Herzegovina’s frozen conflict. Human Rights Review, 10(1), 35–54. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12142-008-0090-2.
Perry, V. (2013). Classroom battlegrounds for hearts and minds: Efforts to reform and transform education in post-war Bosnia and Herzegovina. In O. Listhaug & S. P. Ramet (Eds.), Bosnia-Herzegovina since Dayton: Civic and uncivic values (pp. 225–246). Ravenna: Longo Editore.
Perry, V. (2015). Wartime division in peacetime schools. Forced Migration Review, 50(September), 26–27.
Putnam, R. D. (2001). Bowling alone: The collapse and revival of American community. New York: Simon and Schuster.
Ronen, D. (2013). The challenge of ethnic conflict, democracy and self-determination in Central Europe. London: Routledge.
Sarajlic, E. (2010). Bosnian elections and recurring Ethnonationalisms: The ghost of the nation state. Journal on Ethnopolitics and Minority Issues in Europe, 2(2), 66–88.
Scott-Smith, G. (2006). Building a community around the Pax Americana: The US government and exchange programs in the 1950s. In H. Wilford & H. Laville (Eds.), The US government, private citizens, and the cold war: The state-private network (pp. 83–99). Abingdon: Routledge.
UNESCO. (1996). Learning, the Treasure Within. Report of the International Commission on Education for the Twenty-first Century. Paris: UNESCO.
UNESCO. (2011). The hidden crisis: Armed conflict and education. EFA Global Monitoring Report. http://doi.org/ISBN978–92–3–104191–4
Volčič, Z. (2009). Neither “east” nor “west”: The past and present life of Yugoslav identity (CAS Working Paper Series No. 2). Sofia: Centre for Advanced Study. Retrieved from http://www.cas.bg/uploads/files/ZalaVolcic.pdf
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2018 Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Clarke-Habibi, S. (2018). Cultural and Educational Exchange in Post-war Bosnia and Herzegovina. In: Chou, C., Spangler, J. (eds) Cultural and Educational Exchanges between Rival Societies. Education Innovation Series. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-1547-3_4
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-1547-3_4
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Singapore
Print ISBN: 978-981-13-1546-6
Online ISBN: 978-981-13-1547-3
eBook Packages: EducationEducation (R0)