The Learning From the Past (LFTP) summer school is a two-week interactive program that takes place in Bosnia & Herzegovina (BiH). The LFTP school provides an opportunity to undergraduate students and graduate students, as well as to emerging researchers and professionals, to meet and study with people from different countries, cultures and academic disciplines as they learn from and with local peacemaking practitioners and academic experts in the fields of transitional justice, post-conflict resolution, peace-building, and security studies.
The summer school is held in Sarajevo, Mostar, Srebrenica and Klotjevac and includes professors and practitioners who work in post-conflict communities from all around Bosnia & Herzegovina (BiH). Sadly, BiH and the Balkan region as a whole remain in a post-conflict state, and there is a significant ongoing need for healing from the trauma of the fratricidal wars of the 1990s. The tensions that led to the 1990s wars are largely undealt with, and those tensions still affect the everyday life of the majority of citizen of BiH.
Although there are many governmental and non-governmental organizations in and around BiH working in the fields of transitional justice and reconciliation, they show limited tangible or real-world outcomes. BiH and the Balkans are the largest living laboratory for post-conflict, transitional justice, and reconciliation studies. By learning about past and current issues in BiH, this summer school contibutes to local efforts to deal with the past while also seeking to learn from some of the most inspirational professors and practitioners who are seeking to steer BiH society beyond the tragic events in the 1990's in order to establish a foundation for lasting peace in the region. As this school both deals with the past and seeks ways to move into the future together, a range of teaching and learning strategies will be utilized. LFTP summer school participants will experience a variety of lectures, class discussions, workshops, and field visits, all in an experiential and cross-cultural learning setting.
This summer school provides participants with the opportunity to apply their previous experiences and studies in a challenging new setting. The LFTP staff hopes that this summer school helps participants apply new methodological tools and techniques in their future fields of study and work, whether those fields be transitional justice, post-conflict resolution, peace-building, security studies, preventative diplomacy, genocide studies, international law, sociology, anthropology or many others. The LFTP scummer school promotes the active involvement of participants from a variety of backgrounds in order that participants might interact with the 'Other,' so that we may all better understand each other's view and challenge existing stereotypes and myths.
The summer school will apply integrative and interdisciplinary perspectives drawing from a variety of methodological frameworks in the social sciences. The LFTP summer school's overall aim is to equip participants with the tools and expertise that the local experts have accrued from their years of experience in dealing with the past, transitional justice and reconciliation in order to launch LFTP participants into their chosen fields so that we all might be better equipped to steer our world, whether through academic endeavors or practical field work, toward tolerance, respect and lasting peace.
