Victims of ‘ethnic cleansing’ have returned home in significant numbers all over Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) but no municipality has been as successful in peacefully reversing ethnic cleansing as the Drvar region in western BiH. In 1991, 97% of Drvar’s…
It is estimated that about 90,000 current residents of Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH), lived elsewhere in BiH before the war. Some came to Sarajevo to seek work in the years after the war but for many…
Over a few days in May 2014, Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) experienced the heaviest rainfall reported in 120 years. The deluge led to the flooding of the rivers Bosna, Drina, Una, Sava and Vrbas and their tributaries, damaging 43,000 homes…
The political elites of post-Dayton Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) have carefully patrolled their respective histories of ‘what happened’ during the war, with school curricula, public broadcasting, public events and memorial sites on all sides mostly narrating an un-nuanced story of…
Between 1993 and 1995, humanitarian actors made multiple unsuccessful attempts to evacuate civilians from the Srebrenica enclave. On July 11th 1995, Serb forces broke through the southern perimeter of the town, triggering a mass movement of 25,000 people desperate to…
While more than 1.2 million Bosnians still have not returned after fleeing the conflict, the vast majority successfully received refugee status in countries of asylum. Germany and Austria took in hundreds of thousands of refugees, most of whom were given…
Unaccompanied children claiming asylum in the United Kingdom (UK) live in the precarious position of having to learn to adapt to their host country while knowing that they may eventually be returned to the country they have fled from. Local…
There is a widespread, and growing, expectation that no matter where a person seeks asylum, comparable procedures and consistent standards of fairness will be applied in assessing their claim under the Refugee Convention. While positive steps have certainly been taken…
Men, women and children risk sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV) in situations of conflict and emergency and during the process of flight. Even once they are settled, in displacement camps or urban areas, their individual insecurity often increases, due to…
While it is evident why resettlement countries are interested in the self-reliance of refugees, these are not necessarily the same benchmarks of success against which refugees measure themselves. By investing in understanding more about how refugees define their own success,…