Recommendations Peace building experiences from countries formed by the disintegration of Yugoslavia

This publication places grass root experiences in peace building in the centre and uses those experiences to articulate recommendations for security policies. When we talk about grass root experiences, we talk about all the activities on the territory of the former Yugoslavia coming from an individual or an organized group of individuals in a war or post-war community that requires strengthening and reconstruction of its broken social relations. By that, we imply those activities that are not the result of a political decision or part of a broader peace building strategy composed by states from this region, nor do they belong to the attempts of international community to stop conflicts. The sources of these activities are individuals who are rarely experienced professionals; people caught in a bloody and extremely destructive conflict who felt a strong need to act and had courage and ideas enough to do it. These people and their experiences represent unrecognized and neglected capacity for local, regional and European security policies. We believe that those experiences hide a great potential to become part of global security policies, which is, in a way, a reason for putting together this publication. Experiences of people in devastated places throughout Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, Kosovo, Montenegro and Croatia could be the foundation upon which we would build any policy referring to the development of security, economic sustainability or any other aspect of human security.

This publication has two purposes. First — it serves as a document, the record of past peace building activities. In order to successfully incorporate those experiences into security policy, it is necessary to gather, document and articulate peace building activities in this region. Research and various round table discussions that were part of this project often revealed a certain lack of effort to gather and articulate those activities. Due to restrictions of space and time, it is impossible to cover all the valuable and important experiences, and we are highly aware of the inadequacy of this type of publication in that context. On the other hand, the unique value of this publication lies exactly in forming the enumerated experiences into recommendations for security policy, in activists’ discussions of the context of the European Union and of creation of Common Foreign and Security Policy in relation to the Balkans, in the ways of integrating peace building experiences into policies, in live debates developing at round tables, in critical thinking and in peace activism itself.