On Thursday, July 4th, 2024 at 12:00 PM (CET), we are hosting the CAS SEE Seminar with Faris Kočan on “The Story of Baljvine, a warless village in Bosnia-Herzegovina” in conversation with the RECAS  Fellow Valentina Otmačić.

Hana Ćurak

Faris Kočan

Faris Kočan is Assistant Professor at Chair of International Relations, University of Ljubljana, Faculty of Social Sciences. Currently, he is the principal investigator of the University of Ljubljana team in the Horizon Europe project RECLAIM – Reclaiming Liberal Democracy in Europe in the Postfactual Age. He has published, among others, in the Nationalities Papers, Peacebuilding, Journal of International Relations and Development, Ethnopolitics and Southeast European and Black Sea Studies, primarily on the securitisation of identities in the context of European integration of Bosnia and Herzegovina.

About the Seminar

In this talk, Faris Kočan will reflect upon the dynamics of interethnic relations in Baljvine, a village in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH), where local Bosniaks and Serbs did not resort to interethnic violence that otherwise marked most of BiH during the last war. Drawing on structural factors that shed light on the dynamics of relations in post-conflict societies where interethnic violence occurred, the aim is to explain why and how bloodshed was prevented in Baljvine during the last war. To demonstrate how intersubjective motivations and a set of smaller coincidences in Baljvine affected structural factors and resulted in avoidance of interethnic violence, Kočan will discuss the concept of ”peace mosaic” – to show how several smaller pieces have to align in a community to allow it to remain peaceful.

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Fellowship

Fellowships are supported by OSF Western Balkans, ERSTE Foundation and Rockefeller Brothers Fund.

UNIRI The Moise Palace: Cres Island

An education center of the University of Rijeka. A five-hundred-year-old patrician townhouse and the largest Renaissance palace on the Croatian islands. A venue and forum for various scientific and research activities, it welcomes visiting academics, students and scholars.