Anxieties in cities of southeast European post-conflict societies: introducing an integrative approach to peacebuilding

Project leader: Dr. Rok Zupančič (Professor)

Team members: Dr. Metka Kuhar (Professor), Dr. Faris Kočan (Assistant Professor), Dr. Miha Šlebir (Assistant Professor), Dr. Anastas Vangeli (Assistant Professor), Anđela Đorđević (MA), Anja Kolak (MA)

Duration: 1 September 2021 – 31 August 2024

Funding: Slovenian Research and Innovation Agency (Grant N5-0178)

The main aim of this project is to answer adequately the question of how to reduce the ethnic distance between the people previously involved in armed conflicts and, overall, improve inter-ethnic relations in post-conflict societies. 

Attempts to improve inter-ethnic relations remain a priority for actors involved in peacebuilding in post-conflict societies. Identifying processes that hinder attempts to reduce ethnic distance and mechanisms for improving inter-ethnic relations remains a fundamental priority for peacebuilding studies. The understanding of these processes is lacking because to date, scholars have treated structural factors (historic, political, socioeconomic, etc.) and anxieties – two important aspects that affect the outcome of ethnic relations – as separate elements. 

The overarching goal of the project is twofold: 

1.       To determine how different structural factors and anxieties interact with each other in different post-conflict cities to create ‘post-conflict anxiety’, which eventually affects ethnic distance;

2.       To develop a novel theoretical perspective on anxieties in post-conflict societies and remodel the existing approaches for reducing ethnic distance (based on post-conflict anxiety-centred framework).

Given the fact that the majority of peacebuilding efforts fail, and also that majority of peacebuilding studies explored one or only a few of the structural factors, an innovativity of AnxiousPeace stems from this limitation: exploring the intertwined system of the most relevant structural factors, which have been individually researched in the existing academia, will further understanding of why the existing peacebuilding attempts to reduce ethnic distance often fail.

We will focus on the selected case studies of post-conflict contexts in Southeast Europe: Kosovo, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Croatia. 

A multi-method research design (surveys, interviews, ethnographic observation, discourse analysis) will be applied in order to deepen the understanding of the processes that hinder attempts to reduce ethnic distance.