More Than Blood and Soil? Ethnic and National Discourses of Youth in Bosnia and Herzegovina

Abstract

The attitudes towards B&H abound with conflicting elements of what ‘our country’ is and what it should be. It could be said that such attitudes and discourses cannot be any different, given the rather unusual constitutional frame of the contemporary, post-Dayton B&H, as a state established on a peace agreement, not the wishes of all of its citizens. Furthermore, it is a state which was created violently, through ethnic cleansing and a series of attacks. Eighteen years after the Dayton Agreement the future of B&H and its preservation remain uncertain, which creates a need for the analysis of the attitudes of youth in relation to their current perspectives, representations and justification related to the ethnic, that is, national, identity, and the implications of such identifications in terms of ideologies.