Ideology of neo-fascism, education, and culture of peace : the empirical case of Bosnia and Herzegovina

The aim of this article is to critically analyse intellectual conditions for education pertaining to the empirical and normative knowledge dimensions that can oppose the ideologies of neo-fascism. The analytical basis is a literature review of various studies from the domains of sociology of knowledge, war sociology, social epistemology, and critical pedagogy. The article explains the social need for better-quality public education pertaining to the meaning of political, media, and religious use and misuse of “identitarian concepts” and “identitarian terminology.” The privileged strategies of the political application of referential systems and mechanisms of ‘differentiating’ serve as the epistemic foundation to teach the concepts, terminology, taxonomies, and classifications used to separate people into “ours” and “theirs.” The genocide of Bosnian Bosniaks in the war against the Bosnian-Herzegovinian multicultural society conveys the need to create peaceful emancipatory identity politics and for a new pedagogy of emancipation of many of the oppressed and disenfranchised who are difficult to explicitly name. Conceptual problems, related to certain obvious paradoxes intrinsic in the politics of the collective representation of citizens after genocide, are linked to these processes.War anomi