‘Ipak Može Zajedno!’: How a Grassroots Student Movement in Bosnia and Herzegovina Fought the System

Significant obstacles to sustainable peace exist in Bosnia and Herzegovina due to the ethnic partitions created by the 1995 Dayton Peace Agreement and the subsequent failures of the Bosnian government and international interventions to reform post-conflict education, particularly the “two schools under one roof” policy. This thesis explores a student-led education reform effort in Jajce, an ethnically mixed town in central Bosnia. It provides insights into local attitudes towards ethnic segregation and considers what constitutes a successful, locally-led protest while describing current barriers to education reform in Bosnian public schools. The students in Jajce sought to discourage further ethnic segregation in public schools by opposing an extension of the “two schools under one roof” policy to the high school in their hometown. Later, they protested the same policy in the Cantonal capital, Travnik. The break-up of Yugoslavia and the war in Bosnia offers context for this research. The history of the education system in Bosnia is analyzed using two opposed political theories that deal with how to best organize the type of group diversity present in Bosnia and Herzegovina: Charles Taylors’ politics of recognition (1994) and Brian Barry’s liberal egalitarianism (2001). The student protest movement in Jajce lies at the nexus of recognizing a distinct ethno-specific identity concurrently with promoting multiculturalism. This seemingly complex intersection is what many have largely failed to understand