Winning the peace: Youth, identity and peacebuilding in Bosnia and Herzegovina

Abstract

While peacebuilding at a grassroots, non‐governmental level is increasingly expected to play an important role in postwar peace settlements, the effectiveness of such projects can be inhibited by the lack of a sound theoretical basis. Conflict Resolution theory advocates particular theoretical understandings of the relationship between identity and conflict as informing peacebuilding, yet these are shown to be in disjunction with empirical observation: a case study of young people living in wartime Bosnia and Herzegovina. However, analysis of the qualities of experience and identification described by those young people is suggestive of alternative understandings of the identity/conflict relationship: that identifications are negotiated and renegotiated, intersubjectively, as people interact. That interviewees were also involved with a youth and reconciliation project — Mladi Most ‐ was informative of the impact of such a project on identity, in a context of intercommunal conflict. These insights provide an alternative possible theoretical basis for informing the practice of grassroots peacebuilding, or at least strategies for generating appropriate and effective theory.