Okay, great. Yes, as Phil said, this is based on part of my HD thesis, which is in its final stages.
I did qualitative four work in a multi.
The only officially multi-ethnic districts in Bosnia-Herzegovina. In 2007, 2008.
I don't know how well people know the case of Bosnia.
I'm sorry if I say too much or too little about it. But please ask the clarification afterwards if we like it.
But this district has is important because it has a separate status to that of either of the two political
ethnic entities which are established in the peace agreements in 95 and has its own supervisor,
which is usually a white American male and has huge amounts of funding.
It's really seen as a sort of a laboratory, I guess, for lots of experiments and reconciliation.
And it's been heralded as a big success story. So it's this sort of semi protectorate in this in Bosnia-Herzegovina.
So my research is you can tell by the title of the paper is really concerned with a critical exploration of reconciliation and citizenship.
In many ways, it's quite theoretical and I hope that my work does have relevance.
But cases other than Bosnia, although that's what we're talking about today.
And I'd be interested to hear what if people got insights from other country contexts and to do the same issues I'm going to be speaking on.
So firstly, I'm going to speak a little bit about the theoretical backgrounds, the work.
So talking about reconciliation in terms of restoration of moral and political community, then I want to say something,
General, I suppose, about reconciliation, citizenship in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Brcko district where I did my fieldwork.
And then I want say something about the field but material and in particular about two case studies,
one of which was local community representation of a displaced persons group with the district government.
And the other one was an informal student. Protests that happened at the time of the ethnic integration of high schools in the district
for taking to key reforms are part of a multi-ethnic reconciliation agenda of the district.
So reconciliation, which is the key topic of my research, I'm sure you'll agree,
is really immersions a bit of a buzz word in sort of concerns of transitional justice and peaceful societies and peace building.
It's this is emerged in the context of the sort of the new walls thesis and the increase in intrastate violence.
We were discussing this morning and also this sort of merging of the development and security agenda,
which I'm hoffler actually illustrated really well in her presentation, which has been quite heavily criticised by other scholars.
So just wanted to take a quote from Duff Elsworth,
who says it contained within the shift in a policy towards conflict resolution and societal reconstruction.
NORLANE Governments of our new methods and systems of governance through which to reassert their authority.
Liberal peace reflects existing consensus that conflicts in the South is best approach.
A number of connected, ameliorative harmonising and especially transformational measures.
So what you've had is a context in which there is greater intervention, greater complexity of intervention,
a shift towards focus on social transformation, social actors as opposed to wars and combatants.
And this is sort of broad and I guess the spectrum of what interventions allowed to include.
And I just wanted to take another short quote from an supplement to an agenda for peace.
Boutros-Ghali, which says that's another feature of such intrastate conflicts is the collapse of state institutions,
especially the police and judiciary, resulting paralysis of governance, a breakdown of law and order in general, banditry in chaos.
Not only the functions of government suspended, its assets are destroyed and looted.
Experienced officials are killed or flee the country. This is rarely the case in interstate wars.
It means international intervention must extend beyond military and humanitarian tasks and must
include the promotion of national reconciliation and the rest abridgements of effective governance.
So this is the context in which reconciliation is becoming increasingly important in the last 10, 15, 20 years.
So what do we know really about reconciliation or the scholarship on reconciliation is is quite varied and generally under theorised.
But I think there are three key points of debate in the literature that are worth
mentioning here and sort of illustrate different approaches to reconciliation.
So the first one is a debate between approaches, which means reconciliation is instrumental.
So you need reconciliation for peace. You need it for stable political government, needed for economic development.
And then there are approaches which setas a goal in itself as representing human securities and freedoms.
And then there's a second division between approaches which see reconciliation as an ongoing movement or
process so necessarily incomplete and then approaches which see reconciliation as an end of movement,
marking closure. Then there's a third division where reconciliation is approached as a normative project where you have focus
on the healing of communities to restore as a peaceful future through the restoration of moral community.
You have consensus over the agreements of sort of social behaviour and morality governing social behaviour.
But you also have those who approach reconciliation is about the restoration of a political community and national unity.
So, of course, these different approaches overlap really in theory and practise.
But generally reconciliation scholarships tended towards much more normative approaches which focus on healing
and the restoration of more community about creation of empathy through contacts of the contacts hypothesis.
Such as psychology and very influential reconciliation.
Work and criticisms of these approaches highlight a tendency towards a sense of closure, of seeing reconciliation as an end point,
of prioritising consensus and national unity over what some authors really see it as a stuff of democratic politics,
which is the ability to contest, you know, social, political membership and conflict about those things.
And also, they've been criticised for lacking in appropriate understanding of context and commonality.
So really, my research starts from this point of criticism of those approaches to reconciliation, of looking towards a politics of reconciliation,
which is being usefully defined by some other scholars to say about Hoess reconciliation as putting to question what's increasingly more,
more alarmingly is taken for granted in uncritical calls for reconciliation, which too often come to signify in the political discourse of our time.
The cool not just to put the traumas of the past behind us, but also in a sense, to put behind us the very politics of the past.
So what I'm really interested in,
in my research is asking what the political will the political community is that reconciliation approaches necessarily require within that,
what type of political subject is a reconciled subject?
And to really start to explore a very underexploited dynamic between reconciliation and citizen reconciliation and citizenship.
So to sort of turn to the case itself because of obvious time constraints,
not against talk about the historical development of citizenship in Bosnia, Prix's sort of 1992.
And this isn't to say that's not important. It's extremely important in influencing the ways in which citizenship is understood in Bosnia today.
And if you are particularly interested in that, we can talk about if. Could only have time to go into it now.
So this sort of personal point wants to draw out from this sort of background to the context.
Is it during the war in 1995, there was a narrowing of political identification.
So access to citizenship came founded on ethnic group identity, ethnic religion.
So you had a split in Bosnia between the three main ethnic groups, Bosniaks, Bosnian Serbs and Croats.
These ethnic identities became increasingly politicised and questions about political
community of who was in or out of political community became a matter of life and death.
And then in 1995, the Dayton Peace Accords established what a local scholar.
What some mortgage was referred to as an ethanol palace.
The Dayton Peace Accords being criticised for solidifying the gains made in during ethnic cleansing territorially.
And it's created a political state structure where your political representation is
linked to ethnic group affiliation is a concession of democracy to ethnic entities.
Three, a tripartite presidency which isn't, you know, a man or woman, a transsexual.
It's a bosun's of Boston and KRA that that's how you define. That's how the state sees you as a political subject.
This has actually been in tension with a nation building project being pushed by
international actors to establish a Bosnian unity of Bosnian identity or to re-establish,
depending on your perspective, so essential actors imposer an anthem, a flag and a currency which were new.
Often domestic politicians were unable to agree.
And research in Bosnia suggests that there's a real stateless problem now that where you actually have is a by and by Bosniac members of
the community in the sense of state of a Bosnian identity and a disaffection by members of the Bosnian Serb and Bosnian crack populations.
I mean, that's a massive generalisation, obviously. But the 10 but the trend tends to be that there's this statement problem.
It has legitimacy in the eyes of some members of the community and others.
So Brcko District has been established in this context.
It was in 1999 and it was awarded its unitary and the status pursued very aggressive reconciliate reforms.
They even have a multi-ethnic assembly which operates without a national ethnic veto at the state level.
They've integrated the judiciary, the police school system. It's this massive success story of return of reconciliation.
The approach to reconciliation in this case has been very much based on contact and integration,
of creating a sense of understanding of the other of an active citizenry, citizenry.
People actively participate in multi-ethnic projects in Greece, but also a sense of closure.
So reconciliation now is seen as being achieved.
And then the discussion, the public discussion about the district now is about attracting foreign direct investment,
playing a key role in the movement from Bosnia into the European Union as the key political agenda now.
So in my research there and I chose a formal space of citizenship,
which are local communities and a less formal space of citizenship, which was public protest.
So in the first case,
formal representation of local citizenships in the district has the representative bodies affiliated to territorial parts of the district.
So you have a territory. So the suburb of the town.
So about one who votes her steering board and the president, who will then take the miles in the district government,
the district government will decide whether or not to give them funding for a new playground, an education project, for example.
Now, during the war, all these local community representative groups became ethnically homogenised and displaced from territory.
So what happened was, say, a Bosniac community living in suburb, one of Bridgegate town will be forcibly displaced.
They would take them. This is like Nizza. So Mrs. Eid needs a bridge go so that one would actually be in the village traffic, you know, 30 miles away.
But then on the front line had the development of parallel local community representation.
So in Brcko District suburb, too, you'd have one sensing at Boston seven months into his imprisonment, something Bosniac.
So a key part of the multi-ethnic reform was the district to integrate these groups.
There's an interesting case of a small urban area in the east of the district Compressive Kapolei, where displaced persons, Greek,
Bosnian Serbs who are displaced in central Bosnia and now demanding separate representation to the local Bosniac population.
This has been denied by the district government on the basis that it's ethnically divisive.
But I did interviews with the Bosnian Serb population and these really highlights there that whilst ethnicity is important,
it interacts with other very salient concerns, some of which are political economy concerns.
So they have very low standards of living and high unemployment levels because of
their marginalisation as both a rural community and a displaced persons community.
Not necessarily because they're Bosnian Serb, but in the city.
So the question of ethnicity for them really interacts with these other Senate pets categories that can't be taken into account by the
district government because it's so preoccupied with the relationships between ethnic groups and with establishing multi ethnicity.
So the points of which ethnicity did become important were at crisis points to do with political representation.
So through the local community and also in joining together associations and deciding who would be the president.
So ethnicity was extremely important. But in particular ways and in particular times.
And in many ways, the political discourse about ethnicity coming from the elites,
they found exceptionally frustrating because they didn't want to only understand
their questions of representation in terms of the ethnic or multiethnic lands.
The second case study got swamped.
The second case study was one of the student protests at the time of the integration of the high schools in about 2000 2001.
So in Brcko Town, there was the Bosnian Serb population was attending schools and the forcibly displaced Bosniac
and Bosnian population were attending parallel schools in the villages surrounding the town.
The government decided this was no, this would not fit in with their multi-ethnic reforms.
And a big part of their agenda was to bring to busing the students,
Bosniac students back into the town and to stop going to school again in mixed classes.
Now, at the time that this policy was announced and start to be put into practise,
the massive student protests both from these students who already go to school in the town,
the Bosnian Serb students and the students who are being bused in Maine Bosniac students.
Schools were closed for a month and the government changed their policy to having graduated integration programme.
So year by year. Classes of integrated till eventually after seven years had a fully integrated system, which happened a couple of years ago.
So official documentation on the protests and interviews I did with government officials dismisses them as agitation.
Ethno nationalist politicians who are unhappy about the establishment, the district,
he he'd interfered with the school system or manipulating impressionable teenagers to get them to go out and wave flags.
And as you know, break there was cases of breaking the windows of shops owned by Bosnia residents, for example.
But I was quite interested, actually, in what the motivations were of students who take part in the protest,
particularly given the context of now an integrated school system, which there haven't been any further protests at this point.
So what I found I did indicates the students who had taken part to these are these are retrospective narrative interviews,
which raises all sorts of mythological problems.
Obviously, when I did interviews with them and they really suggested that they had their own very specific Meitav motivations.
They were political actors in their own right. They didn't necessarily fit into this logic of ethnic conflict or or ethnic coexistence.
So I did just general interviews with all of the students,
and some of them suggested that it was like they were caught up in the fervour of protests, their classmates.
In doing so, they wanted to do any kind of farm and some other said that they were just not really.
I'm happy that this class they bonded with the six year was was going to be broken off and they weren't going at their graduation photo together.
It's going to be like a strange case. I didn't know in that photo. Others said that they were afraid that if the Bosniac students came out to school,
that would mean that parents were calm and they'd want jobs and houses in the town and
it would create these kind of tensions and insecurities for them and their families.
And I also did manage to find three students who chose not to take part in the protest
despite being part of the Bosnian Serb main high school with Bosnian Serb protests started.
I went to interview them to find out why they hadn't taken part. One of them was very interesting.
Woman she was. She just got herself as pure Bosnian Serb. Her mother and a father wasn't the Serb.
She'd lived in Germany during the wars when she came out to school that year before they were integrated.
She looks kind of crazy. She is like no one wanted to talk to me, like Punky and I will hombach trousers.
And she didn't write Cyrillic, which is the Bosnian Serb script.
And so when it came to it on the process, she wasn't expected to take part because she wasn't seen as being Bosnian Serb in those important ways.
So she could really distance herself from that.
The second scene I interviewed was a Bosnian Croat who was very well integrated into the Bosnian Serb school,
but also have friends in the Bosniac and Bosnian crab populations who been brought back into the town.
And she would describe walking through the town with her classmates and waving to her friends,
her Bosniac friends and then her classmates and why you went to them.
And she gonna have to tow this line of being integrated into one system, having networks with another system.
And she managed it very well through her personality and making choices about what she'd say about the political situation.
And then the third person I interviewed had a mixed, ethnically mixed ethnic background,
and she, for most of her life at school, had been too afraid to say so.
And so when her classmates assumed she was Bosnian Serb because her name, she didn't tell them otherwise.
But then at the point at which the protests happened,
she really felt that she had to come out almost and declared herself as not associated with her classmates.
And this is a really important point for her personally.
In fact, she doesn't feel comfortable. Come back to the district now, isn't untouchable her classmates.
So really like those this example with the student protest really shows that, in fact,
the students didn't conform to actually national logic and that they made choices based on their own personal political convictions,
their friendship groups, their own experiences, their desires to complete their education systems, have a good life like anyone else.
But in but in narratives of that experience of the district. It just doesn't fit in.
So the closing remarks, which I suspect have to make briefly now, four things I want to say about these two cases.
So one is that the primacy of ethnic identities in the integration formula of reconciliation
of this district really denies the realities of experiences for ordinary residents or candy.
The second point linked to that is that ethnicity is important for people,
but it's interaction with other social and political categories is what makes it interesting.
And you need to understand that dynamic to really be able to grapple with questions of reconciliation.
So categories of rural and urban newcomer returnee are very important.
And that's who I mean, this isn't new in terms of literature in Bosnia.
Of other people have been saying this long time for it at my age.
The third point is that multi-ethnic in the district and its conceptualisation of reconciliation
is an end point really d politicises the task of reconciliation and really fails to
take into account the demands on people to be either ethnically neutral or part of the
unified political community won't necessarily resonate with how they understand themselves.
In relation to the people that they share social and fiscal space with,
and then the last part is really that women want to talk about using reconciliation to get transitional justice for sustainable peace.
We have to bear in mind that post-war in post-war societies, the nature of citizen or in the nature of state will be contested.
And any calls or expectations for unity or restoration of community imply a certain type of political subject,
which isn't necessarily going to resonate for people on the ground.