scholarly journals For Human Rights: Constructing the multinational Brčko District in Bosnia and Herzegovina

2018 ◽  
Vol 15 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Andréa Carolina Schvartz Peres
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Bosnia And Herzegovina ◽  
Urban Space ◽  
Educational System ◽  
School System ◽  
Cultural Rights ◽  
Administrative Unit ◽  
Post War ◽  
Year 2000

Abstract The Brčko District was conceived to be a multiethnic political-administrative unit in post-war Bosnia and Herzegovina. Various efforts have been made to accomplish this since the year 2000, such as the construction of urban space with the equitable presence of the three national groups recognized by the Constitution of Bosnia and Herzegovina and the unification of the school system, both with the aim to guarantee human rights, understood as equal cultural rights. This article focuses on the educational system and the monuments policy to critically analyze these endeavors by revealing how policies for the construction of a multinational space have contributed to the maintenance of a divided city, where the borderlines do not need to be official to exist and constantly remind everyone to which group they belong to and what this means.

Bosnian voices from the bottom of the well: Genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity and victims’ right to remedies

2021 ◽  
pp. 026975802110464
Author(s):  
Alma Begicevic
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Bosnia And Herzegovina ◽  
Public Discourse ◽  
Peace Treaty ◽  
Close Family Member ◽  
Cultural Rights ◽  
Post Conflict ◽  
Archival Documents ◽  
Post War ◽  
The One

Human rights advocates call for reparation as an important step to acknowledge and repair historical injustice and mass harms. In Bosnia and Herzegovina, victims of war continue to seek monetary reparation for non-pecuniary damages caused by genocide: murder, injury to human body and dignity, and harms inflicted upon a close family member. They seek legal remedies using national, foreign, and international human rights judicial venues. Drawing from qualitative, ethnographic research data and archival documents, the article examines legal claims and public discourse regarding reparation and makes a case for a reconceptualization of reparation by including victim voices. The article concludes that despite being absent from the post-conflict victims’ reparation programs in Bosnia and Herzegovina, monetary reparation has assumed a social valuation attribute. On the one hand, it is a victim’s call for retributive, legal conceptions of justice – that someone who escaped international and national criminal justice programs pays. On the other hand, it is a tool to draw attention to Bosnian victims’ present civil and political exclusions that came with the international post-conflict peace treaty. While the post-war reconstruction focused on international trials, democratization, restorative justice, and state building programs, it also restricted socio-economic and cultural rights by redefining the citizenship and dismantling the welfare state. Reparation is a debt owed to victims.

Streets, scum and people: Discourses of (in)civility in postwar Bihać, Bosnia and Herzegovina

2018 ◽  
Vol 18 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 326-356 ◽  
Author(s):  
Azra Hromadžić
Keyword(s):  
Bosnia And Herzegovina ◽  
Urban Space ◽  
Public Spaces ◽  
Democratic Politics ◽  
Ethnographic Research ◽  
Careful Attention ◽  
Political Inclusion ◽  
Material Things ◽  
Post War ◽  
The City

Building on more than ten years of ethnographic research in post-war Bosnia-Herzegovina, this article documents discourses and practices of civility as mutuality with limits. This mode of civility operates to regulate the field of socio-political inclusion in Bosnia-Herzegovina; it stretches to include self-described “urbanites” while, at the same time, it excludes “rural others” and “rural others within.” In order to illustrate the workings of civility as mutuality with limits, the focus is on interconnections and messy relationships between different aspects of civility: moral, political/civil, and socio-cultural. Furthermore, by using ethnography in the manner of theory, three assumptions present in theories of civility are challenged. First, there is an overwhelming association of civility with bourgeois urban space where civility is located in the city. However, the focus here is on how civility works in the context of Balkan and Bosnian semi-periphery, suspended between urbanity and rurality. Second, much literature on civility implies that people enter public spaces in ways that are unmarked. As is shown here, however, people’s bodies always carry traces of histories of inequality. Third, scholarship on civility mainly takes the materiality of urban space for granted. By paying careful attention to what crumbling urban space looks and feels like, it is demonstrated how civility is often entangled with, experienced through and articulated via material things, such as ruins. These converging, historically shaped logics, geographies and materialities of (in)civility illustrate how civility works as an “incomplete horizon” of political entanglement, recognition and mutuality, thus producing layers of distinction and hierarchies of value, which place a limit on the prospects of democratic politics in Bosnia-Herzegovina and beyond.

scholarly journals The Mobilization for Spatial Justice in Divided Societies: Urban Commons, Trust Reconstruction, and Socialist Memory in Bosnia and Herzegovina

2021 ◽  
pp. 088832542110051
Author(s):  
Chiara Milan
Keyword(s):  
Lived Experience ◽  
Public Space ◽  
Bosnia And Herzegovina ◽  
Urban Space ◽  
Divided Societies ◽  
Spatial Justice ◽  
Post Conflict ◽  
Community Ties ◽  
Post War ◽  
Urban Commons

The article contributes to the urban studies literature and the study of social movements in divided societies by disclosing the distinctive features and mobilizing potential that the notion of urban commons retains in a war-torn society with a socialist legacy. Specifically, it investigates how urban space and urban commons are reclaimed in a post-conflict and post-socialist country such as Bosnia and Herzegovina. By using Sarajevo as a case study, the article explores several grassroots initiatives undertaken by local urban activists to reappropriate cultural buildings and public space in the city. The study discloses that in a post-conflict and post-socialist society urban commons can bear a unifying potential as acts of commoning favor trust reconstruction processes and strengthen community ties. While the erosion of social ties and the legacy of the war might not encourage mobilization for the commons, the reference to socialist-era practices and language can represent a vantage point to advocate in favor of collective governance. Throughout their actions, urban activists instrumentally referred to the historical experience of socialism to develop a discourse that resonates with the domestic cultural environment. The article points also to a generational difference amongst activists in their references to Yugoslav state socialism. While long-time activists strove to critically reappraise it, the younger ones born in the immediate post-war period appear to hold a more superficial and ambivalent historical knowledge of the socialist heritage, to which they had only partial access and no lived experience.

scholarly journals Human Rights in Bosnia and Herzegovina With Particular Emphasis to the Enjoyment of Economic, Social and Cultural Rights

2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (10) ◽  
Author(s):  
Ljubinko Mitrović
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Bosnia And Herzegovina ◽  
The State ◽  
Human Being ◽  
Political Rights ◽  
Public Authorities ◽  
Cultural Rights ◽  
Democratic State ◽  
Fundamental Freedoms ◽  
Protection Of Human Rights

Human rights and fundamental freedoms are the inherent rights of every human being on the planet, they are, as a rule, universal, indivisible and inalienable. Human rights are there, around and between us, every day and every moment of that day. In addition to the state territory, the inhabitants populating that territory and the public authorities, human rights are nowadays an indispensable, fourth element of the state. It is the duty of every democratic state to protect the basic human rights and fundamental freedoms of every human being, without discrimination on any grounds: sex, race, color, property, origin, political or other opinion. In addition to civil and political rights, which are somehow always in the focus of observation of all of us (certainly because of their importance), human rights and freedoms of the second generation, i.e. economic, social and cultural rights, must not be neglected. These rights will be mostly in focus of this paper, and especially their status and implementation from the perspective of a special institution that deals with the promotion and protection of human rights - the Institution of the Human Rights Ombudsman of Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Provision of Remedies for Violation of Economic, Social and Cultural Rights: A Comparative Study of the United Nations, Inter-American and African Human Rights Systems

2020 ◽  
Vol 28 (2) ◽  
pp. 298-318
Author(s):  
Roman Girma Teshome
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
United Nations ◽  
Comparative Study ◽  
Economic Rights ◽  
Regional Monitoring ◽  
Cultural Rights ◽  
The Past ◽  
The United Nations ◽  
To Receive

The effectiveness of human rights adjudicative procedures partly, if not most importantly, hinges upon the adequacy of the remedies they grant and the implementation of those remedies. This assertion also holds water with regard to the international and regional monitoring bodies established to receive individual complaints related to economic, social and cultural rights (hereinafter ‘ESC rights’ or ‘socio-economic rights’). Remedies can serve two major functions: they are meant, first, to rectify the pecuniary and non-pecuniary damage sustained by the particular victim, and second, to resolve systematic problems existing in the state machinery in order to ensure the non-repetition of the act. Hence, the role of remedies is not confined to correcting the past but also shaping the future by providing reforming measures a state has to undertake. The adequacy of remedies awarded by international and regional human rights bodies is also assessed based on these two benchmarks. The present article examines these issues in relation to individual complaint procedures that deal with the violation of ESC rights, with particular reference to the case laws of the three jurisdictions selected for this work, i.e. the United Nations, Inter-American and African Human Rights Systems.

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