The first ISSRPL met in both Bosnia and Herzegovina and in Croatia and focused its attention on The Role of Religion in the Conflicts of ex-Yugoslavia.

South Eastern Europe, the new geopolitical name for the Balkans, is the most complex region of the “old continent”.   This is a part of the world where it is impossible to point to any borders between states and regions that are not, to a greater or less extent, transcended by ethno-religious, ethno-national, state, linguistic or other specific features and differences.  Religion is at times the decisive factor of collective identity, and at times, incontestably, complicit in ideological differences and tensions.  The region appears to form the major laboratory for the conundrum of how to construe and construct the European order.   Is religion capable of manifesting its universal content, despite linguistic, ethnic and state differences, and how could that content participate in the shaping of a political order in which religious identities transcend regional, ethnic and linguistic borders?  Will it be possible to build on the past experiences of tolerance and intolerance in the Balkans to provide the impulse for the sustainable political culture of the community of states and nations in the region?  What is the spectrum of theoretical interpretations of traditional and modern models of the political order?

If anything, the conflicts of the former Yugoslavia proved the fragility of social order and, tragically, the political utility of ethnic and religious labels as mobilizing ideologies for conflict and violence. Examining the way communities which once lived together peacefully were ruptured and reconstituted in slogans of ethno-national and ethno-religious ideologies, the first ISSRPL explored the lived context of the conflict in Bosnia and Herzegovina and Croatia, seeing how in some places the destruction of the war was an everyday physical presence in vacated houses and bombed out buildings whereas in other places narratives of violence were expanding beyond the experience. Both of these aspects took on active roles in understanding the process of othering which divides the populations of the former Yugoslavia and remains one of the obstacles to rebuilding social relations.

These were some of the issues and questions that the participants in the school discussed together with members of the public from Bosnia and Herzegovina and beyond during the first International Summer School on Religion and Public Life.

Our hosts were International Forum Bosnia and Inter-University Centre Dubrovnik.

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