Socio-spatial agency and positive peace in Mostar, Bosnia and Herzegovina

ABSTRACT

Mostar has been divided since 1992, which marked the start of the civil war in Bosnia and Herzegovina. In 1995 the violent conflict ended and in 2004 the city was reunified by an interim city statute even though it remains highly contested. Drawing on research conducted in Mostar from 2014 to 2018, this article presents spatial interventions to discuss how socio spatial agency contributes to the experience of a ‘positive peace’. As such, the article presents examples of shared spaces in the divided city to focus on the temporal dimensions of the peace process.

KEYWORDS:

• Socio-spatial agency
• shared spaces
• peace and conflict
• Mostar

Acknowledgements

Sincere thanks, as ever, go to those who spent time sharing their stories with me in Mostar.  Thanks are also extended to the anonymous reviewers and in particular the special edition editors who have offered invaluable feedback and support through this process.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Susan Forde is an Associate Lecturer at the University of York. She has published in Cooperation and Conflict, and the Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding, her monograph ‘Movement as Conflict Transformation: Rescripting Mostar, Bosnia-Herzegovina’ has recently been published in the Palgrave Macmillan series, Rethinking Peace and Conflict Studies.

Notes

1 The empirical data for this article has been presented in other publications by the author. Yet, the article departs from previous work through conceptualizing socio-spatial agency in relation to the creation of shared spaces which the work explores through the concept of positive peace (Galtung, 1967, p. 15). This conceptual understanding is deployed critically and with a view to illuminating not only progress made, but the temporality of such efforts.

2 Importantly, these actions are sometimes not intentionally for the purpose of traversing the conflict divide.

3 However, residents of the ‘Central Zone’ were left without direct political representation and could only ‘vote on the city-wide list’ of candidates, though challenged, this provision was upheld (ICG, 2009, p. 10).

4 Critically, this was directed by the international community, with the OSCE and Council of Europe banning teaching on the 1992–1995 conflict until a consensus on the violent past was reached, combined with the 2004 regulation that only textbooks designed for Bosniak, Croat and Serb students can be used (Laketa & Suleymanova, 2017, p. 11). In Mostar, all schools remain ethnically divided, with the exception of ‘the School for Traffic Technicians and the Old Gymnasium’ (Laketa, 2016, p. 9) .

Additional information

Funding

This research received no specific funding.