Introduction

Growing up, my parents’ fleeing Bosnia as refugees during the Bosnian war was a part of my critical understanding of who I was as a person. Every experience that I had as a girl growing up in the United States traced back to my experiences viewing them trying to navigate parenting, their relationship, their jobs, and trying to manage their experience of a world they once knew and a world they were trying to forge here. Despite the fact that it is such a foundational part of me, I also struggled with the fact that the Bosnian war wasn’t mentioned in my history classes, or that hardly any of my peers knew that it was a country. I struggled with feelings of exclusion and wondering what my place in the world was at an early age when I realized this incongruence between my life and the lack of cultural knowledge in the West about Bosnia. While I’m still trying to figure out what my place in the world is, a part of my journey has been understanding how Bosnia fits in a larger world example through the transnational feminist lens and seeing how this small country is affected by post-coloniality, nationalism, Islamophobia, and postwar tragedy. Specifically, I hope to explore healing through Bosnian feminist artists using mediums of filmmaking and visual art to bring recognition of Bosnia to the rest of the globe.

The narrative surrounding Bosnia today is a country deeply affected by postwar tragedy, visible in all aspects of social, political, and economic life. The Bosnian war, which lasted from 1992-1995, was caused by ethnic and religious tensions between Bosniaks, Croatians, and Serbians following the dissolution of Yugoslavia in a fight for control of the territory. Ethnic cleansing of Bosnian Muslims was committed by Serb powers in order to create an ethnically “pure” Serb state using murder, torture, and sexual assault. Hundreds of thousands of Bosnians were expelled from their homes, and it is estimated that about 100,000 Bosnians were killed. In 2 days, 8,000 men and boys were murdered in Srebrenica, and each year, Bosnians continue to commemorate the lives lost and the ongoing search for remains. War crimes were committed, specifically acts of rape and sexual violence, which disproportionately affected about 12,000 to 50,000 women. Following the war, it is estimated that around 2 million Bosniaks were displaced (Lee et al., 1998). The signing of the General Framework Agreement for Peace in Bosnia and Herzegovina, or the Dayton Agreement, was reached in 1995. The agreement ended the war and also proposed territorial, political, and governmental frameworks of each nation in Ex-Yugoslavia. Bosnia was divided into a Serb half, Republika Srpska, and Federation of Bosniaks and Croats. Additionally, the presidency is tripartite in which one Serb, one Croat, and one Bosnian rotates control. Talks of an impending conflict remain constant as Serb politicians in Republika Srpska have attempted to partition from Bosnia numerous times and called the Bosnian genocide a “fabricated myth” (Donine, 2022). The current government of Bosnia & Herzegovina, still in place since 1995, has left its constituents in a place of paralysis and inaction to change the politics of the nation due to the ethnic divisions and continued genocide denial (Borger, 2015).

Today, Bosnia is a country that inspires little hope for its people to continue living in. In 2021, the United Nations Populations Fund (UNFPA) found that about half of young people (18-29 years) currently residing in Bosnia and Herzegovina desire to leave Bosnia either temporarily or permanently. Young people cited the high unemployment rate and unfavorable socioeconomic conditions as reasons they would leave the country. The majority of young people polled planning to leave were those who were educated, without children, and unmarried (UNFPA, 2021).

Despite the unfavorable economic, social, and political climate of Bosnia & Herzegovina, it is still a country with hope for its younger generations. In this paper, I will look at Bosnian women with a subaltern transnational feminist lens by analyzing the global narrative of the country as a failing nation; I will look to current Bosnian feminist artists and creators as a way of healing the harm done by postcolonial powers and powerful male-majority politicians in Bosnia by telling the stories of Bosnian subaltern women.

Subaltern Transnational Feminist Lens

To begin, a subaltern transnational feminist lens explores marginalized women facing structural inequalities that affect their quality of life in postcolonial and post globalization contexts. I will use various theoretical frameworks to create an encompassing subaltern transnational feminist lens of Bosnian women, drawing upon the idea of the “subaltern” coined by Gramsci’s theory of cultural hegemony, the One World/Two Worlds theory by Mohanty, project identity by Castells, and the concept of “discrepant dislocations” by John.

Gramsci’s theory of cultural hegemony, or the idea of the “dominant” group in a global context producing the majority of the cultural knowledge and recreating it as the norm, is central to the understanding of the subaltern transnational feminist lens. If the dominant group produces the dominant cultural norms, then the minority group, or the “subaltern” is silenced. In “Can the Subaltern Speak?”, Gayatri Chakravarty Spivak’s main argument is that Western scholars cannot speak for members of the subaltern who have been excluded from social, political, and cultural systems of power, and that the subaltern need spaces to speak and resist the sociopolitical powers that oppress them. She writes, “For the (gender-unspecified) “true” subaltern group, whose identity is its difference, there is no unrepresentable subaltern subject that can know and speak itself; the intellectual’s solution is not to abstain from representation…If, in the contest of colonial production, the subaltern has no history and cannot speak, the subaltern as female is even more deeply in shadow” (Spivak, 40-41). Spivak adds an intersectional dimension to the subaltern transnational feminist lens by focusing on subaltern women’s greater repression than their male counterparts.

Mohanty’s One-Third/Two-Thirds Worlds theory adds another dimension to the subaltern transnational feminist lens through her grappling with divisions such as First World/Third World and Global North/Global South divisions frequently mentioned in postcolonial studies. In “‘Under Western Eyes’ Revisited: Feminist Solidarity through Anticapitalist Struggles,” Mohanty (2003) revisits her revolutionary piece “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses” published in 1984. She describes how the One-Third/Two-Thirds theory addresses the limitations of other divisions in postcolonial studies seeking to distinguish between affluent and marginalized areas of the world such as Global South and Global North, as well as First World and Third World. She explains that these lead to confusing geographical and ideological boundaries because there are “affluent and marginal nations and communities [that] obviously do not line up neatly within this geographical frame” (Mohanty, 2003, p. 505). She writes, “By focusing on quality of life as the criteria for distinguishing between social minorities and majorities, One-Third/Two-Thirds Worlds draws attention to the continuities as well as the discontinuities between the haves and have-nots within the boundaries of nations and between nations and indigenous communities” (Mohanty, 2003, p. 506). Within the subaltern transnational feminist framework that we are working in, reduced quality of life due to the history of globalization and colonization serves as the distinction between the subaltern and the dominant group.

Castells’ project identity framework adds to the theory of the subaltern transitional feminist lens by highlighting the subaltern woman’s agency to act and oppose herself directly to the dominant political and social structures that oppress her by using surrounding cultural and political tools. Castells (2010) defines resistance identity as one that is “when social actors, on the basis of whatever cultural materials are available to them, build a new identity that redefines their position in society and, by so doing, seek the transformation of overall social structure” (p. 8). Spivak asks the question of whether subaltern women can speak; forming project identity and using their agency to act and directly resist patriarchal power structures through political action and social movements provides an avenue for subaltern women to break their silence.

Bosnian Women Today: Past, Present, and Future

Feminism in Bosnia has provided a movement with which women in Bosnia, impacted by the legacy of war, patriarchal structures in society, and the rise of nationalism, have been able to bring global attention to gender inequality ingrained within the political system since the war and the unique issues that they face. Their work is particularly important to be amplified because it is also largely unknown by global audiences. In “The politics of gender, witnessing, post coloniality and trauma: Bosnian feminist trajectories,” Husanovic (2009) describes how much of feminism in Bosnia is still unknown globally to Western intellectuals in transnational feminist studies, writing, “The emerging feminist political gestures in Bosnia and Herzegovina, with their ‘situated  knowledges’ and their ‘standpoints’, are still very much ‘a terra incognita’, or a ‘blind  spot’ of gender  studies  in wider regional circles (former Yugoslav, Balkan, South East European or Central European, European…)” (p. 99). Eastern European feminist movements are sequestered and silenced, both domestically by men and globally by Western feminist intellectuals who rarely discuss the issues women face in this region.

Because feminism in this region is hardly discussed in Western feminist studies, it is important to historically contextualize Bosnian feminism through a history of colonialism, socialism, and Orientalism. In “Unveiling Muslim Women in Socialist Yugoslavia: The Body Between Socialism, Secularism, and Colonialism,” Hadziristic details women’s rights and struggles in the Balkans from the time of the Ottoman empire. When the Muslim-ruled Ottoman empire fell, the Orthodox Christian Austria-Hungary came into colonial rule of the Balkan region in 1878. Muslim Bosnians, who had previously been in the ethnic majority and identified themselves with the Ottomans, became ethnic minorities. Subsequently, Bosnian Muslims secluded themselves, and they began to seclude their young girls from school and the public eye. As a result, Bosnian Muslim women faced greater issues with illiteracy, patriarchal family relations, and gender norms of silence and modesty (Hadziristic, 2017, p. 186). Despite the fact that all women in the Austria-Hungary empire faced gender inequality, Islam was blamed as a whole for these societal problems, and the veil acted as a symbol of everything “backwards.” It is with this Orientalist view of Islam that the establishment of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia came into power in 1945 and banned the veil as well as all public displays of religion. At the same time, women saw vast improvements in rights, including the right to vote, the right to an education, and the right to employment (Hadziristic, 2017, p. 189). Socialist Yugoslavian feminists differed from liberal feminists in the West in that gender equality was seen as necessary in order to maintain the social progress and movement towards modernity that they were seeking. Yugoslavian socialist feminists were radical and criticized the unequal labor norms and the “double shift” in the household that remained despite the improvement in rights (Hadziristic, 2017, p. 199).

Today, women in Bosnia face various gender issues such as underrepresentation in political life, domestic violence, and employment discrimination. Bosnia only became an independent state in 1992, and the war delayed progress in women’s rights since the transfer of power to the nationalist tripartite political system. Women were the unspoken victims of the Bosnian war as mass rape and forced pregnancy was used as a war weapon, but sexual assault victims could not be recognized by the government that they were victims. Bosnia’s policies have specific infrastructure to maintain gender equality. For example, the Convention on the United Nations Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women and signed the Optional Protocol was ratified in 1993, and the Constitution of Bosnia and Herzegovina prohibits gender discrimination. However, this infrastructure is ignored by male-majority politicians (Akyol, 2019). For example, elected women represent 20% of the Parliamentary Assembly despite the national quota for the underrepresented sex in Bosnian politics being at least 40% (Kadribašić et al., 2020).

Additionally in Bosnia, women in Bosnia experience high rates of sexual and domestic violence, and exact numbers aren’t known due to lack of transparent state reporting across the Balkans. 48% of Bosnian women surveyed have experienced some form of abuse since the age of 15 (OSCE, 2019). Additionally, there is no national data collection about gender-based violence. Lack of statistics in these areas mean the state of women’s rights cannot be properly addressed without an understanding of the scope of gender violence in the country. Many Bosnian women do not know what to do or who to go to in the case that they experience violence. Women in Bosnia that experience sexual violence fail to report it due to multiple factors, including social stigma, low trust in institutions, inadequate punishments for perpetrators, and fear of perpetrator retaliation (Human Rights Watch, 2020). 25% of women in Bosnia believe domestic violence to be a private matter meant for the house (OSCE, 2019). These social attitudes are additional barriers for domestic violence survivors who wish to speak out in Bosnia.

Patriarchal nationalism, ingrained into the political structures of Bosnia, remains as an aftermath of the war that has created a delay in Bosnian women’s rights. In “Against the odds: Sustaining feminist momentum in post-war Bosnia-Herzegovina,” Cockburn (2013), a professor of Sociology at the City University in London, returns to Bosnia 17 years after the war to re-interview women from a medical care center, Medica, that had been treating victims of rape during the war. In this anthropological study, she asks the same women to recollect memories and talk about changes that they have seen in their country since the war. The feminist women describe patriarchal nationalism as the dominant ideology in Bosnia, which has only increased since the war. After the signing of the Dayton agreement that ended the war in 1995, political parties were decentralized and nationalist. Currently, almost 100% of political parties that win elections in Bosnia are right-wing nationalist, ensuring partisan and policy gridlock due to ethnic tensions (Cockburn, 2013, p. 27). Because nationalism keeps ethno religious conflict in the forefront of Bosnian politics, women are left in subordinated positions and silenced. The women also describe the postwar upticks in domestic violence, saying “‘There were many frustrated men, unemployed, some with post-traumatic stress disorder, acting out their frustration on those around them. It’s pathological.’…the economic situation in BiH, characterized by poverty, joblessness and lack of prospects, provides fertile ground for the pathology” (p. 29).

Despite the unique postwar issues and systemic inequalities that women face in Bosnia, feminist resistance has been and is currently taking place in order for these women to change the structural and social barriers around them. Medica has been critical in providing medical care and shelter for women and specific issues they face since the war including rape, human trafficking, and domestic violence. Medica, United Women located in Banja Luka, and other NGOs focus on lobbying politicians and speaking to them directly to change laws. One women’s rights issue that Bosnia faced after the war was that domestic violence was not considered a crime legally. After years of struggle, Medica and other NGOs fighting for women’s rights helped initiate the Law on Protection Against Domestic Violence in 2005 in the Federation of Bosnia and Republika Srpska, providing people with both the vocabulary of what domestic violence was and an avenue for criminal prosecution (Cockburn, 2013, p. 30).

Among Bosnian filmmakers and artists that have brought creative healing to Bosnian women and global awareness to the stories of Bosnians, Jasmila Zbanic is an important name. Zbanic won the Best Director award by the European Film Academy, and her film Quo Vadis, Aida?, which is about a U.N. translator trying to save her family during the Srebrenica massacre, won film of the year. Her stance on Balkan politics is that the atrocities that happened during the war were the fault of individuals; Serbs as a group are not to be excluded or vilified because this was the exact mentality that created the initial divide during the war. She takes a humanistic approach as a Bosnian; despite knowing how many lives were lost on the Bosnian side and how deeply tied emotions are to these atrocities, she actively chooses not to be on any side. In fact, because Zbanic chose a Serbian woman, Jasna Duricic, to play the main character, Aida, in her movie, many Serbians call this actress a “Muslim-loving traitor.” On the other hand, Bosniak politicians dislike Zbanic for not choosing a Bosnian actress and for showing Serbian’s humanity in the movie (Higgins, 2022). Effectively, it is impossible for political actors in the Balkans to recognize Jasmila Zbanic for her global work and art that brings attention to the historical events of the Bosnian genocide due to the political and ethnic conflict that still remains between Bosnians, Croatians, and Serbians. Despite the criticism against her in the region, global audiences have been extremely receptive to her work.

Another Bosnian filmmaker and visual artist who has gained global attention for her feminist resistance artwork is Sejla Kameric. Kameric’s first work that gained global success was her Bosnian Girl (2003) piece, initially a street poster campaign across Europe, which writes, ‘No teeth…? A mustache…? Smell like shit…? Bosnian Girl!’ on top of a picture of a dark-haired Bosnian girl. Bosnian Girl’s initial street poster medium grabbed people’s attention immediately. Her work is permanently displayed at the Tate Modern, Musée d’Art Moderne de la ville de Paris, MACBA in Barcelona, and museums across Europe. Bosnian Girl originated from graffiti written by a Dutch soldier on military barracks in Srebrenica. Famously, Dutch soldiers had failed to protect Srebrenica and allowed Serb military to enter and overrun the area, resulting in one of the greatest atrocities in European history since the Holocaust (Ćehić, 2020). Her art is considered to be revolutionary for Bosnian people as a reminder of the Bosnian genocide to global audiences, and she specifically highlights the inhumane treatment of Bosnian women during the war as feminist resistance.

Subaltern Transnational Feminist Framework of Bosnian Women

By encompassing the idea of the “subaltern,” One-Third/Two-Thirds Worlds theory by Mohanty, and the resistance identity concept by Castells, an encompassing subaltern transnational feminist framework can be employed to examined the way Bosnian women view the world as a result of the war, postcolonialism, patriarchy, and nationalism that affects them in their daily lives.

Bosnian women’s voices are excluded from the dominant political structure, as seen by the low political participation of Bosnian women in the government. Additionally, many laws fail to describe how they directly impact women since decision-making is excluded from most Bosnian women, meaning basic laws about domestic violence, femicide, and sexual assault are still in progress. Judges also fail to properly assign enough time in jail for perpetrators of crimes against women. In a world where genocide denial is fervent and even war criminals do not get enough time in jail for contributing to the mass murder and rape of thousands, it is no wonder than Bosnian women are more silenced from speaking out about sexual assault or domestic violence. Bosnian women are also implicated transnationally due to the united struggles of Ex-Yugoslavian women. Bosnia lacks statistics and transparency about how much gender violence, femicide, and sexual assault is directly impacting its constituents by failing to survey and display this information to world organizations. Serbia and Croatia also lack similar transparency across borders, meaning Balkan women are united through their struggles despite ethnic or religious differences (Curic, 2022). When it is unknown how many women are exactly impacted by the failure of the state to adequately support and protect women, it is also easier to sweep it under the rug as a “not-issue.” Bosnian women as the subaltern within this framework functions to highlight how repressed Bosnian women’s voices are through all of these various avenues.

The One-Third/Two-Thirds Worlds theory helps make sense of Bosnia’s unique positionality as the subaltern due to the low quality of life in the region, specifically affecting how Bosnian women are perceived and ignored by the West. Bosnia does not fit into the Global North/South binary that draws a line separating North America, Australia, and Europe from Asia, Africa, and South America due to its geographic location in southeastern Europe. Most maps depicting this binary categorize Bosnia as a part of the Global North, while some have Bosnia as a part of the Global South (World Population Review, 2023). This contradiction is interesting in how the West perceives Bosnia as a country and explains why development does not occur there. The “West” intervened once when several European and American world leaders created and signed the Dayton Agreement in 1995 to stop the conflict in Bosnia, and the governmental structure that they left has contributed to Bosnia being a “failing state.” Bosnia has been consistently excluded from entry into the European Union due to the country lacking various reforms needed to be a candidate of the E.U. (Preussen, 2022). Additionally, the view of Bosnia as a country between Islamic Orientalist, Western European Christian, and Eastern European ex-communist categories places Bosnia into a marginal position, neither fitting into Western Europe or the Middle East, leading to its exclusion from both categories. Hadziristic (2017) describes this further when talking about how veiling takes place as an Islamic practice in Bosnia, writing, “What makes post war Yugoslavia fit strangely into this postcolonial story is its Non-Aligned positioning between binaries of East and West, modernity and backwardness. It does not fit neatly into the Orientalist framework of state unveilings in Iran, Turkey, Algeria, contemporary France or Quebec, or even the early USSR. This is partly because colonialism was experienced and understood in very different ways. Indeed, the anxiety about what was seen as defective Eastern ways of being, the remnants of the Ottoman times, and an aspired Western mode was real in the Balkans, and dominant communist discourse resembled Bakić-Hayden’s ‘nested Orientalisms’” (p. 197-198).

Additionally, while Bosnia is a developing nation, it is not “Third World” but technically Second World due to its position as a communist country that was not a part of the Soviet Union. Thus, Bosnia does not fit into the First-World/Third-World binary from Western postcolonial studies intellectuals either. Bosnia is a part of the two-thirds world because of the marginal quality of life there and lack of opportunities. As stated by Mohanty (2003), the One-Third/Two-Thirds Worlds theory looks at the “discontinuities between the haves and have-nots within the boundaries of nations and between nations and indigenous communities.” Bosnia is a country of have-nots. Within the subaltern transnational feminist framework, Bosnian women suffer from the greatest lack of opportunities. They are excluded from political participation and legislation through dominant patriarchal nationalist politics and suffer from high rates of sexual and domestic violence.

As a mechanism of resistance to the barriers that Bosnian women face, Castells’ project identity framework makes sense of the ways that Bosnian subaltern women protest the dominant patriarchal nationalist political and cultural structures around them by using the cultural tools around them. It is important to understand that the war has delayed progress for women’s rights; many of the proposed legal actions of feminists, such as domestic violence laws, changing the legal definition of rape from “forced” to “lack of consent,” and femicide laws, have long since been achieved by most countries in the West (Curic, 2022). The country only gained its independence in 1992, and Bosnian women require healing as a group due to the history of mass rape as a weapon of war. The complex governmental structure also makes political change more difficult, having been dubbed as the most complicated system of government despite only governing about 3 million people (Nardelli and Dzidic, 2014).

Despite these barriers, there are various mechanisms with which Bosnian feminists use cultural tools around them to resist the dominant domestic identity imposed on them by Bosnian traditional culture. Some Bosnian feminists choose NGOs such as Medica and United Women to enact political change (Cockburn, 2013). Others have chosen to lobby members of the Parliament for a law that specifically addresses femicide. And others have chosen to take protests to the streets to protest femicide (Curic, 2022). However, even demonstrations that promote political change are difficult due to the Bosnian government’s inefficiency to properly execute these laws. Thus, art as feminist resistance is proposed as a healing way to recover by relating Bosnia to a larger global issue that women all around the world face.

Bosnian feminist artists and filmmakers that directly resist and bring global awareness to the patriarchal, postwar, and postcolonial traumas that Bosnian women face and which limit their opportunities use the creative cultural tools around them to help bring Bosnian women into solidarity with other women around the world facing similar struggles while also telling their unique story. Bosnia is clearly past the point of reparation, and nothing can be done to bring back the lives lost or help the country move on politically since the governmental structure is based on maintaining conflict. Thus, creative work by Bosnian women may act in the formation of healing and solidarity with other women.

Jasmila Zbanic’s work is critically-acclaimed and prize-winning across the world, and many of her most famous works deal with telling the stories of Bosnian women, including Grbavica, Red Rubber Boots, and Quo Vadis Aida? Her work is very necessary in order to bring a voice to the stories of subaltern Bosnian women, and she aims to tell stories of Bosnian women without having a political underlying message (Higgins, 2022). Husanovic (2013) writes, “Much of women’s art in Bosnia is similar to Zbanic’s in its impact: resisting various attempts to depoliticize the control of interpretation and representation of witnessing that come from the official political-aesthetic practices of appropriation, representation, codification, and routinization of traumatic experiences (like rape, siege, missing persons, mass graves, demobilized soldiers, urbicide, deep insecurity about basic life needs, etc.). Interventions in a post-war and post-socialist context such as Bosnia have to deal with the overall context where female subjects are depoliticized by being reduced to simplified archetypes devoid of complexity so as to reproduce dominant patriarchal regimes and norms” (p.106). The criticism from male-majority politicians in Bosnia and Serbia for her work has led to her exclusion from her home country but a greater acceptance from the world for telling the stories of these women in a way that no one can deny. Her films about rape against Bosnian women and Bosnian genocide bring to light the reality that Bosnian women face since in Bosnia, the past acts as the present. Zbanic’s purposeful blindness to the ethnicity or religion of the Balkan actor that she chooses to play a role in her films showcases her commitment to not wanting to politicize her work because she knows that creating these categories and purposefully excluding people on the basis of their ethnicity would be sustaining the same categories that created conflict in the first place. In her work, she also aims to tell the truth; she does not want to make it seem like all Serbs are bad and all Bosnians are victims (Higgins, 2022). She wants to capture the objective events that occurred to Bosnian women and bring it to light.

Similarly, Sejla Kameric’s piece Bosnian Girl tells the unique story of Bosnian women to the world while also telling a universal, humanistic story of the conflict that occurs when we generalize groups of people. In an interview with DSCENE, Kameric discusses Bosnian Girl’s political usage and universality, exclaiming, “We live in a permanent war where a woman’s body is used as territory. I am Bosnian Girl; I am the target, the victim, the territory to be dominated. But this work is not about me or about a Bosnian girl; it is about any girl or woman, anyone whose rights were denied. This work is from Bosnia, but it tells a universal story of prejudice, intolerance, and bigotry” (Pesic, 2022). Bosnian Girl both shocks and yet does not surprise its audience. In the artwork, the Dutch soldier categorized all Bosnian girls with negative stereotypes like lacking teeth, smelling bad, and having facial hair. By categorizing them in a negative way, it was also easier for outside forces to dehumanize Bosnian women and turn a blind eye to their suffering. Her use of cultural tools around her to oppose those harmful stereotypes are non-institutional and non-political; Kameric’s point of telling the story of Bosnian women was to find common ground with other women around the world whose rights were denied and whose voice was not listened to.

In conclusion, the subaltern transnational feminist lens of Bosnian women proposes that Bosnian women’s unique positionality as women fighting against oppression on all fronts to resist being silenced allows them to propose social movements and political change in the fabric of their country through healing, humanism, and compassion. Jasmila Zbanic and Sejla Kameric’s works are iconic and provide inspiration for other Bosnian women to follow suit in bringing awareness of Bosnia to global audiences. Bosnia’s future as a nation is unknown due to high emigration and unemployment rates, as well as potential ethno religious conflict arising again in the future. The dominant patriarchal nationalism ingrained into Bosnian governmental structures since the war continues to exclude women from the decision-making table, and it has led to sustained high rates of sexual and domestic violence for Bosnian women. Bosnian feminist work provides hope for younger generations of Bosnian girls that there will be change done so that their future is secured.

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