Bosnia and Herzegovina
Europe
Policy Brief
2025
Bosnia and Herzegovina
Europe
Policy Brief
2025
The Institute for Development Impact (I4DI) had the honor to collaborate with the Peacebuilding Initiative at the Yale Jackson School of Global Affairs to produce a policy brief on “Everyday Peace in Bosnia and Herzegovina”.
This brief examines how people in Bosnia and Herzegovina understand and sustain peace in everyday life. The study draws on ten focus-group discussions in Sarajevo and East Sarajevo, using a participatory Fuzzy Cognitive Mapping approach to elicit and map how participants perceive the conditions, factors, and drivers that contribute to their understanding of everyday peace. The analysis identifies common patterns and relationships situating peace in the interplay of institutional reliability, information integrity, and civic tone and interaction. The research also identifies several context-specific social, economic, legal, and psychosocial pressures that affect how predictable daily life feels in each individual locality.
In Sarajevo and in East Sarajevo, a sample composed of higher-education students, professors, peace specialists from civil society, and local government officials described everyday peace in terms of a confidence that systems and people behave in predictable ways. Three dimensions of predictability are defined in this brief as conditions that allow people to plan, act, and interact without uncertainty: Institutional Reliability refers to the consistent application of rules, timely decisions, and clearly defined and explained outcomes; Information Integrity refers to the accuracy and transparency of public communication; Civic Tone and Interaction refers to the quality of behavior in the public sphere, where the interplay of certain social dynamics either enable or restrain cooperation.
Participants also described the factors that they perceive as negative influences toward everyday peace, making it harder to sustain. In cognitive maps, strong negative drivers included unemployment and uncertainty about the future, inconsistent administration, contradictory and sensational reporting, fragmented historical narratives and denial of crimes, and the inconsistent enforcement of laws, among others. This policy brief proposes a set of practical measures that strengthen the positive conditions linked to everyday peace and address constraining variables. These include building institutional literacy and imposing clearer service standards, improving public communication and professional media practice, expanding transparent opportunities for young people, reinforcing civic and professional ethics in education and public service, and supporting practical cooperation efforts across communities.
Read other research projects from Yale’s Peacebuilding Initiative: https://jackson.yale.edu/
Nurkić, Mak¹, Panter-Brick, Catherine¹, Simon, David¹, Šabić-Hamidović, Dzenana², Vujović, Srdjan², Ropp, Lauren², & Pozderac, Andrea² (2025). Everyday Peace in Bosnia and Herzegovina: Findings from Sarajevo and East Sarajevo. Policy Brief, Peacebuilding Initiative, Jackson School of Global Affairs, Yale University, and Institute for Development Impact (I4DI)
Co-authors’ affiliation:
¹ Jackson School of Global Affairs, Peacebuilding Initiative, Yale University
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