The fifth Peacebuilding Training for students from Bosnia and Herzegovina was held from 22 to 28 July 2023 on Mount Vlašić. Since 2015, more than a hundred students from all parts of Bosnia and Herzegovina, from different social, economic and ethnic communities, have attended this form of non-formal peace education aimed at university students who will become the nucleus of social and political life in the future.
Following a selection process, the fifth Peace Building Training for Students from BiH brought together twenty participants from different communities and with different profiles. The number of applications for the training was lower than in the previous iterations, and there was a noticeable drop in the number of applications from majority Serb and Croat communities in BiH. We still got a group of students who exhibited a high level of motivation for working on peacebuilding, a readiness to build bridges and cross imaginary ethnic borders that are pervasive in Bosnian-Herzegovinian society.
Focus on the Goal
In the initial phase of the training, geared at getting to know each other and working on some basic mechanisms such as communication and teamwork, the group was strongly focused on achieving the goal, and was resistant to experiential learning, which is the foundation of this type of peacebuilding training. This kind of group dynamics and the sole focus on the goal and on results are nothing new. They are part of a large number of strong social mechanisms currently ruling our society, based on the paradigm that “if you work enough and put in enough effort, you are bound to succeed,” where everyone is responsible only for their own success or failure, while group responsibility is relegated to the background. This leads to a way of thinking and acting that completely ignores processes taking place while trying to reach the goal and there is a constant need for instant results and gratification and praise.
The previously mentioned Machiavellian social dynamics is highly pronounced in mechanisms employed by nationalism where the goal and needs of one’s own group are placed above everything that happens during the process of reaching that goal, and this is particularly manifested in the many violent patterns inherent to nationalism, which operates, as the saying goes, by walking over dead bodies. Therefore, bringing awareness to the processes taking place behind mere mechanical and targeted meeting of one’s own needs and the needs of one’s own group is one of the key mechanisms for peacebuilding.
Although initially there was resistance to experiential learning and lack of understanding for the concept of this kind of work, during the training most of the participants started thinking outside the box of merely achieving the goal, and during the evaluation, they discussed the processes that were taking place in the course of the exercises. This became especially apparent during workshops on prejudice, discrimination and violence, where it became clear that these young people were prepared to take a good look at themselves and the communities they came from.
Other People’s Shoes
Apart from the topics mentioned above, the participants also showed readiness to put themselves in the shoes of other people, communities and groups, and to take on different perspectives to engage with key relationships that in our context mostly amount to patterns of violence, because they are the relationships of victim and perpetrator, or majority and minority. This proved to be particularly important when discussing sex/gender relations in society in general and gender-based violence. There was a lot of potential in the group for working on these topics, and the need also seems to be quite high, because the current media and influencer scene is dominated by various “gurus” shaping young people’s attitudes without there being room to discuss these issues. This is why working on these topics turned out to be very much needed and very demanding.
Heroes
The central part of the training was reserved for working on peacebuilding topics directly related to our wartime legacies and the ways our society remembers the war.
Even though these concrete young people are of a generation born after the war and have no direct memories of the war and wartime events, the war’s consequences have a decisive impact on their lives. This became clear when discussing persons and figures represented in our societies as heroes who should serve as examples in all spheres of our lives.
The complete militarisation of society means that heroes are directly related to war legacies so that the generation born after the war has had wartime leaders, fighters, and what is worse, convicted war criminals imposed on it as heroes. The group showed an awareness of the need to work on this social mechanism and, what is more, individual participants made a step towards facing up to what happened during the 1990s.
Former Enemies
The high point of the training was the workshop with three war veterans, former enemies. Đoko Pupčević, Mirko Zečević Tadić and Adnan Hasanbegović talked with the students about their life experiences and their peace activism. For most, this was the first time they had met someone from the other side who had participated actively in the war, as a fighter, and their perspective and life story, and especially their role in the war, provided invaluable insight into the stories of ordinary people on all sides during the war. Đoko, Mirko and Adnan have been working for many years together, and with other veterans, on bringing our communities back together again, and they engage in difficult but sorely needed activities in peacebuilding. These war veterans and former enemies also demonstrated by their own example how despite differences and different opinions on individual issues, it is still possible to come together and work together, especially on issues that are common to all of us.
This workshop had a strong emotional impact on everyone and gave the students ample incentive for further activism in peacebuilding and an understanding that on the other side are just people, and that there are still social patterns going on around us that could lead to new escalations of violence.
We finished the training with a joint discussion about what we as individuals can do in our communities as a step towards a happier future. We particularly worked on bringing awareness to negative social patterns in our communities that detract from peacebuilding.
Opening up perspectives of others and those who are different, and raising awareness about our own role and responsibility in society is the essence of future positive change that can pull Bosnia and Herzegovina out of the abyss of constant tensions that it is currently stuck in. These twenty young people are certainly another generation, the fifth one to attend the training, that will contribute to better understanding inside BiH and the region.