The Peace Academy is a partner in translating and publishing literature dedicated to the fight against right-wing populism, religious and ethno-national radicalization and violent extremism.intended for the academic and activist communities.
Five academic books dealing with radicalization, ethno-nationalism, right-wing populism, violent extremism,and related phenomena will be translated, published, presented and distributed free of charge in Bosnia and Herzegovina over the next six months. This project was initiated to make globally important topics additionally accessible to the BiH academic and activist communities.
The selection and translation of this literature was preceded by cooperation with representatives of the academic community with the intention of developing a plan to use the translated literature in teaching and curricula in Bosnian and Herzegovinan universities. We expect this literature will also stimulate more local research on these topics and strengthen critical thinking on these topics and the current social reality.
The book The Politics of Fear: What Right-Wing Populist Discourses Mean (Sage Publishing, London, 2015) by Ruth Wodak which explores the micropolitics of right-wing populist parties will soon be available to academic and activist communities in our language. This book makes an important contribution to understanding the various discourses (media, virtual communication, political speeches) within far right populism, making the ways they are enacted and the consequences they can produce more accessible. In this work, Wodak cites examples of nationalist, xenophobic, racist and anti-Semitic rhetoric that has been normalized in public discourse.
The second book Headlines of the Nation, Subtexts of Class: Working Class Populism and the Return of the Repressed in Neoliberal Europe (Berghahn Books, New York / Oxford, 2011) edited by Don Kalb and Gábor Halmai explores the rise of nationalism in Europe through a class prism. One of the key questions raised in this piece is why the working class in Europe is giving more and more votes to far right populist parties. The book consists of studies from Western and Eastern Europe, including Serbia, Romania, Hungary, Italy and Austria. Given that the class prism is under-represented and almost non-existent in thematizing ethno-nationalism in Bosnia and Herzegovina, this book can provide information and help more serious research in this area.
The third book Globalization and Militarism: Feminists Make the Link (Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Lanham, 2016 [2007]) by Cynthia Enloe is dedicated to the unbreakable link between militarism and patriarchy. By dealing with well-known events around the world and everyday "small" situations through the gender prism, the author deconstructs notions of globalization and militarism in all its forms, revealing entirely new dimensions in relation to the way they are commonly approached. Given the common logic behind their background, Enloe offers guidance for change.
A book (the fourth) entitled Les enfants du chaos. Essai sur le temps des martyrs [Children of chaos. Essay on the time of martyrs] (Editions La Découverte, Paris, 2016), by French anthropologist Alain Bertho, is a collection of personal reflections on the pervasiveness of violence around the world, on the one hand, and on the global sense of uncertainty and the disappearance of politics (understood as what is a potent, utopian project), which leaves a gap in the human need for anticipation, hope and vision of the future. The consequences of this are especially devastating for young people. Although the French public is the one addressed by the author, the book could also be interpreted as a kind of call to seek the cause of radicalization within one's own society.
Finally, the fifth book Democracy's Paradox: Populism and its Contemporary Crisis (Berghahn Books, New York / Oxford, 2019), edited by Bruce Kapferer and Dimitrios Theodossopoulos thematizes populism as something inherent in (integral to) democratic processes, not such a new phenomenon, and as one to be viewed within a specific socio-historical context. Through studies of Argentina, Brazil, Australia, Spain and Greece, authors analyze the aspirations of populist parties in those countries in historical perspective, and try to find out whether, in addition to negative (exclusionary effects), populism can produce some emancipatory effects - towards social equality. The conclusions of the authors on this issue vary.
In addition to publishing, promotions and discussions on the topics covered in books at university centers in Bosnia and Herzegovina are planned, as well as providing free distribution of the translated literature in order to raise awareness of international perspectives on radicalization and violent extremism among students, academics, activists / and the general public in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
This significant activity is being implemented by the Network for Peacebuilding (also the publisher) in cooperation with the Peace Academy. The project is funded by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and implementation will be supported by the International Organization for Migration (IOM) within the BHRI program.
