The weight of ethnic collectivism. Youth, ethnicity and boundaries in post-conflict Bosnia Herzegovina

In Bosnia and Herzegovina ethnic collective identities have been manipulated and politicized, becoming fixed labels inferred by kinship and ethno‐religious origins. The war has been the testing ground for a new collective order, which then moved to the next level with the green light of Dayton, and ethnopolitics is widely used to promote ethnonational identification while preventing and challenging a civic, non‐ethnic one. By relying on empirical material collected through semi‐structured interviews conducted in Sarajevo, this work focuses on the ‘sons of war’, the generation born during the 1992–95 conflict, and it explores their modalities of dealing and coping with deep ethnically based socio‐political divisions. The research results show how, although trying to move beyond the boundaries of ethnonational belonging, Bosnian youth sometimes do end up maintaining and going along with a despised status quo by virtue of ‘the weight of ethnic collectivism’ – perceived as unchangeable and without alternatives.