Social Work in a Post-war Dystopia: A Case Study of Bosnia and Herzegovina

Since the mid-2000s, I have been researching the long-term consequences of the war against Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) on social work and social work education in the country. Over the years, I have participated in numerous international gatherings and have published extensively on the role of the social work profession in the context of war and post-conflict reconstruction, sharing insights from the Bosnian experience, which is both unique and widely relevant but is essentially unknown to the larger European and international social work community. Rooted in personal positionality and reflexivity, the purpose of this paper is to revisit the impact in BiH of the most disturbing and painful experiences of the war, as well as lessons learned from the unprecedented international intervention in post-war peacebuilding efforts. The paper discusses three crucial challenges faced by Bosnian post-war society — post-conflictness, poverty and the transition to a market economy and liberal democracy, and the way their complex interactions have resulted in the political, economic, and social disempowerment of large parts of the population. Finally, the paper explores the question of whether social work education can become a site of resistance and empowerment. I argue that social work can contribute to the democratization of society only if it is re-affirmed as a profession for peace, human rights, and social justice. This implies that social work (education) should abandon its current inclination to legitimize the status quo and should actively engage with questions of justice, freedom, power, and politics.