In the early summer of 2016, news unlikely to appear in some “ordinary and untroubled country” took the headlines of all major and minor media outlets in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH). In this instance, the decision of Jajce high school students to oppose the decision of the cantonal government to convert their high school into yet another case of “two schools under one roof” (TSUOR) embodied a stance against politics of successive ethnonational structural reorganization of BiH. Placed in this specific socio-political environment, student opposition became filled with political symbolism that for the standing regime seemed too reminiscent of Yugoslav times. Throughout more than one year, Jajce teenagers developed a vibrant student movement which, while offering a non-textbook example of BiH, attempted to redraw the lines of the imaginable BiH community, proposing a paradigm inside of which inter-ethnic relations would not be overdetermined by antagonism.

This article combines insights from political anthropology, identity studies, and sociology in an attempt to reinterpret the symbolism of the student struggle by contextualizing its development inside of Jajce and BiH itself.

You can read the whole article HERE, which was written by Igor Stipic (iASK)and was published in, Urge For Engagement, Belgrade 2019.