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Entrepreneurship and inter-group collaboration in Bosnia and Herzegovina

Vesna Bojicic-Dzelilovic, Denisa Kostovicova and Fikret Čaušević
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Entrepreneurship and inter-group collaboration in Bosnia and Herzegovina

Bosnia and Herzegovina is a global poster-child of political, social, and even religious post-conflict divisions. They have been entrenched by the ethnically-based power-sharing peace agreement which ended the 1992-1995 war. Similarly, the country’s economy is ethnically divided at a macro level. However, a radically different picture emerges at the grassroots. In some areas where different ethnic groups live in proximate albeit segregated communities, inter-ethnic economic interactions have been a norm since the conflict ended in 1995. Moreover, the economic shock caused by the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020 has further intensified inter-ethnic collaboration. How can this puzzle of inter-ethnic economic interactions in the context of the country’s deep ethnic divisions be explained? We addressed this question from the perspective of pro-peace entrepreneurship operating in entrepreneurial ecosystems. 

How business recovery doesn’t work

Peacebuilding theory and practice considers business recovery after conflicts  to be fundamental for sustainable peace because it supports economic and social cohesion. The understanding is that inter-group interactions in generating economic value can improve relations among formerly antagonised groups, and restore social fabric damaged by war. Entrepreneurship as an activity to discover and exploit new business opportunities and new sources of value is the backbone of business revitalisation. 

Therefore, to stimulate entrepreneurship, the priority is afforded to the elimination of barriers (institutional, regulatory, financial) either created or reinforced by war. In this vein, (re)activation of economic interactions among formerly antagonised groups is envisaged as a self-initiating process innate to business recovery. Understood as rational profit making agents, entrepreneurs can in theory thus ignore war-related inter-group divisions in their decision-making. 

However, these mainstream explanations of positive effects of entrepreneurship overlook the enormity of the challenge of recovering and growing legal and productive economy so that it delivers peace dividends through inter-group economic collaboration. In fact, Bosnia and Herzegovina also demonstrates that as rational actors, economic actors have continued to exploit inter-ethnic interactions in the informal and illegal economy, undermining the country’s legal economy over the last three decades. To explain the peace-positive effects of entrepreneurship, a new theory is required. We need to look inside the black box of peace-positive entrepreneurship.

A narrow economic perspective on entrepreneurship has not been able to account for a variation in inter-group economic collaboration in the post-war economic recovery, thus providing only a partial explanation of the entrepreneurship peace-promoting potential.  We argue and show through a path dependent analysis that inter-group collaboration can play a critical role in the (re)emergence of entrepreneurship in the aftermath of ethnic identity-driven conflicts, and in its development over time. 

The social construction of an entrepreneurial ecosystem in Bosnia and Herzegovina

Approaching entrepreneurship from a community perspective, entrepreneurial ecosystems are conceived as a dynamic product of the interactions between social, societal, and geographic contexts that an entrepreneur engages with. From this perspective, cross-group interactions can be a critical resource that enables an entrepreneur to identify opportunities for business and to sustain those over time. In post-conflict situations there is heightened reliance on place and space assets, including local knowledge, pre-war experiences, physical proximity, and interactions between actors and institutions, to identify and act upon opportunities to (re)start and grow business.

The extent of an entrepreneur’s commitment to locality, her/his identity, attitudes, leadership, and perceptions, are key factors that explain how inter-group interactions are leveraged in the construction of an entrepreneurial ecosystem. All these dimensions display significant variation in entrepreneurial behaviour at the subnational level. 

Entrepreneurs engage with the specificities of the local context and respond to it accordingly, as we show in two micro-economies in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Prijedor and Tešanj. In both cases, inter-ethnic interactions were key in the emergence and resilience of entrepreneurship that underpinned the recovery of local economies. This is despite the entrepreneurs’ responding differently considering the local conditions, defined by the experience of war, the local geography, and the local economies. For example, the returning refugee entrepreneurs belonging to the opposed ethnic group faced more restrictions than the entrepreneurs from the majority group who remained in the locality during the war. Conversely, in some instances, an entrepreneur’s expertise and leadership trumped ethnic identity considerations. Yet others felt indebted to the local inter-ethnic workforce from before the war to include all groups in business revitalisation after the war. This was primarily the pattern among the entrepreneurs active in the productive, foremost domestically-owned or managed-sector, who were able to leverage their local embeddedness and accumulated knowledge of local community and its resources to (re-)establish and develop market presence after the war.

Conclusion 

We need a better understanding of how business recovers after conflict so that it advances inter-group collaboration and peacebuilding, with relevant policy implications. Economic liberalisation and other business environment-friendly economic reform policies may create business opportunities for a rational economic actor. But if, how, and which local business agents will act upon them depends on a host of factors that are in turn contingent on the entrepreneur as well as the location.

Facilitating peace-promoting entrepreneurship, and inter-ethnic collaboration along with it, requires policies that are suited to local contexts and based on recognition of the path-dependent nature of entrepreneurs’ responses and adaptation to war-affected situations. 

This is a summary of the article “Tested by the COVID-19 economic shock: peace-positive entrepreneurship and intergroup collaboration in post-conflict business recovery.”

This Week in Peace #63: December 20

Tara Abhasakun
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This Week in Peace #63: December 20

This week, are Israel and Hamas inching closer to a ceasefire? Peace talks between Rwanda and DRC called off. Amidst Sudan’s deteriorating situation, UN envoy attends meeting on peace efforts.

Are Israel and Hamas inching closer to a ceasefire?

After over a year and three months of war, are Israel and Hamas inching closer to a ceasefire? This week, a senior Palestinian official part of indirect negotiations between the two parties told BBC that talks were “in the decisive and final phase.”

The US, Qatar, and Egypt have resumed mediation efforts, and say that both sides are showing more willingness to come to a deal. Israeli defense minister Israel Katz said that a deal is closer than ever. 

Hamas spokesperson Bassem Naim told Newsweek that progress on talks was “positive and optimistic.” Naim added that “Unless Netanyahu and his government set new conditions, we may reach an agreement soon,” and that, “On our part, we are showing all flexibility to facilitate reaching an agreement.”

But some obstacles remain, Israeli and US officials say, including the disclosure of names of hostages to be released by Hamas, and details on the positioning of Israeli forces. Israel is still carrying out airstrikes in Gaza, with a strike on one of the last functioning medical facilities in northern Gaza on December 17 killing eight people according to medics, Washington Post reported.

Hamas’s brutal attack on Israel on October 7 killed over 1,200 people, and Israel’s operations in Gaza since then have, according to Gaza’s Ministry of Health, killed 44,786 Palestinians as of December 10. 

Peace talks between Rwanda and DRC called off

Peace talks between Rwanda and the DRC which were set to take place on December 15 were called off. Congolese presidency spokesman Giscard Kusema told AFP that the hurdle to peace talks was over a Rwandan demand to “…set as a precondition for the signing of an agreement that the DRC hold a direct dialogue with the M23.”

On December 13, Rwandan Foreign Minister Olivier Nduhungirehe said that Rwanda desired “a firm commitment from the DRC to resume direct talks with the M23 within a well-defined framework and timeframe.” However, DRC’s government says that the M23 only exists due to Rwanda’s military support, and that if Rwanda withdraws its troops from DRC, the conflict with M23 will end. 

Both M23 and Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR) have committed grave war crimes and violations of international law, including unlawful killings and sexual violence. DRC’s crisis has left over 7 million people internally displaced, accounting for 10 percent of the world’s internally displaced people (IDPs). This follows a number of failed peace efforts between the DRC government and M23 rebels. To learn more about the human suffering caused by this crisis, click here. 

Amidst Sudan’s deteriorating situation, UN envoy attends meeting on peace efforts

Amidst the deteriorating humanitarian situation in Sudan, the UN envoy for Sudan on December 18 joined a meeting in Mauritania focused on coordinating peace efforts in the country. Discussions at the meeting in Nouakchott reviewed the efforts of the UN and Saudi Arabia in Sudan’s situation. 

This news comes as El Fasher, the capital of North Darfur state, has been under seige. UN spokesman Stéphane Dujarric told reporters on December 17 that the World Food Programme has been unable to get into El Fasher. A WFP convoy with 178 metric tons of aid and food headed for Zamzam Camp was rerouted to Kalma Camp due to security concerns, Dujarric said. The convoy did, however, provide assistance to almost 15,000 people. Dujarric added that the WFP is trying to reach 14 hunger hotspots across Darfur, Kordofan, Khartoum, and Gezira states, but is struggling due to the ongoing fighting, Sudan Tribune reported.

Last month, it was reported that over 61,000 people had died in Sudan’s Khartoum state, a number much higher than previously believed. While 26,000 of these people were killed in violence, the leading cause of death across the country was preventable disease and starvation, BBC reported.

Sudan’s conflict, which began in April last year, has led to a major humanitarian crisis with millions displaced.

This Week in Peace will be on a hiatus for the holidays next week, however, we will be back the following week.

Environmental Violence in Peace Research: A Gap and Opportunity

Richard Marcantonio
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Environmental Violence in Peace Research: A Gap and Opportunity

In Ukraine, over 6.5 million acres of agricultural land have been mined or contaminated to date, requiring costly remediation to render safe for livelihoods, food, and freedom of movement. In Ukraine’s urban centers, more than 210,000 buildings have been destroyed, many of which contain hazardous material such as asbestos. In Gaza, most agricultural land has been destroyed or otherwise rendered unsafe, while 70% of the water infrastructure has been destroyed or damaged. The environment can be more than a potential trigger of conflict. The environment during conflict is degraded, neglected, a mechanism of control, and a vector of violence—all of which erode peace and possibilities to restore it.

Peace studies as a field of research has historically overlooked critical aspects of the environment in conflict, though scholars in adjacent fields have long highlighted concerns of violent environments. The emergent field of environmental peacebuilding has worked to address this gap, but even it has underrepresented important areas critical to human flourishing and peace. For example, environmental peacebuilding has predominantly focused on natural resource management rather than environmental management, despite a long history of considerations for the toxic remnants of war and ecocide in the ecology of conflict. Importantly, the gaps should be seen not as shortfalls of the past, but rather open opportunities of the future for peace scholars and practitioners. In many cases it is peace scholarship, especially empirical evidence derived from on the ground fieldwork, that needs to catch up to communities of practice.

The dominant lens of environment-conflict relationships in peace studies has been the environment as a potential trigger of (armed) conflict. Resource scarcity and abundance have both been shown to contribute to conflict, but also to cooperation. The long-running debates around the direction and impact of this relationship are many.  Climate change as a driver of numerous ecological and social outcomes, a purported ‘threat multiplier’ contributing to direct violence has also been explored in depth—again with robust debates. Alongside this, in the field of ecological economics, the idea of ecological distribution conflicts emerged capturing direct violence tied to the unequal distribution of toxic risks—a core inequality found in environmental justice research and activism.

Investigating if, how, and under what conditions environmental stresses can beget conflict is important. But human-caused environmental change itself is a vector of violence. Climate is not just a threat multiplier, it is a hazard that directly harms humans. In the long-running debate about whether climate change ‘causes’ conflict, for example, explorations up the causal chain stop at ‘climate,’ rather than further up the chain to attribute the “cause” of climate. 

Environmental violence— direct harm to human health from human-produced pollution beyond what is needed to meet human needs and flourishing—is a primary cause of human suffering detracting from peace. In fact, it is one of the largest sources of early human mortality today. We can map and measure the sources, distribution, and outcomes of environmental violence, so it is not invisible and thus potentially manageable and mitigatable. Yet, these environmental vectors of human harm are often not conceptualized as violence, importantly not in environmental policy nor in peace studies. This is despite recent recognitions of a clean, safe, and healthy environment as a human right.

Recent work in environmental security studies has begun to question and recognize climate as a form of violence as an additional valence of environment-conflict relationships. However, it is still a heterodox position in key peace studies conversations. For example, in the last twenty years the Journal of Peace Research, which many consider the flagship journal of peace studies, has not published a single research article on environmental violence, slow violence, climate violence, or environmental justice. Like many venues, these sources of human suffering are not considered a form of or akin to direct violence, and therefore not peace studies.

The gap of environmental violence is in part a result of two additional gaps. First is a gap in systems thinking as an underpinning concept and methodology for tracking and understanding the complexity in human-environment interactions in peace studies. Recent work has strongly pushed this point and demonstrated the value of systems thinking for peace studies, especially complex adaptive systems thinking. Second is the need for multi and transdisciplinary investigations, either executed by individuals or research teams. In other words, scholarship that thoroughly integrates multiple ways of knowing and knowledge bases from the humanities to the environmental and social sciences, to comprehensively account for environmental violence and its multivalent impacts that degrade peace and human security.

Environmental violence is a complex, multivalent, but not intractable phenomena. It is also one of the greatest threats to human flourishing and peace today. Mainstreaming it in peace studies is not only essential, but a generative opportunity.

In a Small Sewing Workshop, 20 Afghan Women Silently Press On

Humayoon Babur
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In a Small Sewing Workshop, 20 Afghan Women Silently Press On

Over three years have passed since Afghan women were systematically barred from education, work, and public life under Taliban rule. But in a small, brightly lit sewing workshop in Kabul’s Khair Khana neighborhood, the hum of sewing machines tells a story of quiet defiance.

Here, 20 women gather daily to stitch garments and, with them, a semblance of hope. It’s not just fabric they work on; it’s their resilience, survival, and determination to chart a path forward.

Khadija (name changed for security), the workshop’s founder, presides over the scene like a patient teacher and determined entrepreneur. She started this initiative with little more than a dream, her tailoring skills, and 200,000 Afghanis (around $2,941). The result is a lifeline—not just for herself but for her team of women and girls who otherwise have few places to turn.

“I learned tailoring from my mother and started working at home,” she says. “But I wanted to provide opportunities for other women. That’s why I set up this workshop. Now, 20 girls work with me.”

The workshop produces various garments, from casual to traditional Afghan attire. These hand-sewn outfits, rich in cultural symbolism, are sold in Kabul and beyond. Recently, orders have started arriving from international buyers, including Afghan communities in the U.S.

“Our handmade clothes have reached Ghazni and even international markets,” Khadija says. “We’re proud of what we’ve achieved, but we need support to grow. Afghan women are hardworking, and with the right resources and access to markets, we can achieve anything.”

Struggles and Silent Resistance

The workshop is a microcosm of Afghan women’s struggle to reclaim their agency. Many of the women who work here, including young girls like Sadaf and Lima (names changed for security), had their education abruptly halted when the Taliban shut schools for girls. Now, they’ve turned to tailoring as a way to move forward.

Lima, photo via MAWJ News, used with permission.

“It has been three years since education stopped,” Sadaf says, carefully measuring fabric. “I turned to tailoring to make a living, but I still hope for change. I want support for handicrafts and education so women can continue their lives.”

For Lima, the workshop has become both a refuge and a springboard for ambition. “After schools closed, I started working here,” she says. “I’ve learned tailoring and now have goals for the future. Like Khadija, I want to open a workshop someday and provide jobs for other women.”

Some of the garments crafted here—such as intricately embroidered Afghan dresses that hold deep cultural significance—ironically find their way back to the workers’ families. 

Despite their economic hardships, these workers prioritize preserving cultural traditions by purchasing these items. This reflects the resilience of Afghan culture amidst the ongoing challenges in the country, where economic struggles are juxtaposed with the desire to uphold heritage and identity. 

It’s a quiet but potent form of resistance, a reminder that Afghan women continue to contribute to the country’s fabric, both literally and metaphorically.  

Challenges of Survival

Running a small business in Afghanistan is no small feat. The economy remains isolated, and opportunities to connect with global markets are scarce. Najib Sahibzada, an economic expert, acknowledges the barriers.

“Without ties to the outside world, expanding small businesses is extremely challenging,” he says. “But Afghan women can use social media platforms to showcase their products, especially to Afghan communities abroad. It’s one of the few marketing tools available to them.”

Khadija sees potential in this strategy but knows it requires resources and training that many women, including herself, don’t yet have. “Social media could help us, but we need support to get there,” she says.

For the women of Khair Khana, the workshop is more than a place to earn a livelihood. It’s a space where they can reclaim some of the independence and dignity stripped from them. The rhythmic hum of sewing machines fills the air, a steady, determined sound that underscores their perseverance.

“We don’t know what the future holds,” Khadija says. “But we do know that we can’t give up. We have families to support, dreams to pursue, and lives to live.”

Through the dedication of Khadija, Sadaf, Lima, and countless others like them, Afghanistan’s silent majority continues to press on, stitching together hope and resilience, one garment at a time.

This Week in Peace #62: December 13

Tara Abhasakun
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This Week in Peace #62: December 13

This week, with Assad gone, what are Syria’s prospects for peace? Under tense ceasefire, Israeli forces leave Lebanese village.

With Assad gone, what are Syria’s prospects for peace?

Former Syrian President Bashar Al Assad fled the country to Russia on December 8, following a 24-year reign and  over 500,000 people killed in the country’s civil war. Known as a brutal dictator, over 100,000 people were detained or forcibly disappeared under his regime, many of whom were tortured. 

With Assad gone, many are discussing the possibility of peace under Syria’s new Islamist rebel government. This government, led by Abu Mohammad Al-Jolani, is made up of a group known as Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), meaning Organization for the Liberation of the Levant. The group had early links with ISIS and Al Qaeda, however, it has since tried to portray a more moderate image of itself, although the US and other Western countries still label it a terrorist group. 

On December 10, UN Special Envoy for Syria Geir Pedersen warned that the transfer of power had come with the “invasion of public buildings or private homes. But this seems to have stopped and that is a good thing.”

After it captured Aleppo, HTS promised to protect religious and ethnic minorities such as Kurds and Christians. HTS leaders also met with the city’s Christian community. However, human rights groups have been cautious about this promise. Nadine Maenza, president of the International Religious Freedom Secretariat, told Voice of America (VOA), “We pray that continues, as HTS has a troubling history of governing under a harsh version of Islamic law in Idlib.”

There are also concerns about other armed groups targeting minorities, such as the Syrian National Army (SNA), a coalition of Turkish-backed Islamist militias. Human rights experts say the SNA has targeted Kurds, Christians, and Yazidis, and has incited violence against Kurds especially. 

While HTS has not been reported to have significantly violated minority rights since its takeover, experts say that rights groups should keep an eye on its allied factions.

It remains to be seen whether peace is in Syria’s near future. 

Under tense ceasefire, Israeli forces leave Lebanese village

Under a tense ceasefire, Israeli military forces have left the southern Lebanese village of Al-Khiam on December 11. In a statement, Gen. Erik Kurilla called the withdrawal an “important first step in the implementation of a lasting cessation of hostilities and lays the foundation for continued progress.”

On December 12, Lebanon’s army said it had started deploying troops to Al-Khiam after the IDF’s withdrawal, in coordination with UNIFIL. It cautioned Lebanese civilians to not come near the area during its scans of the village for unexploded ordnances, Times of Israel reported. 

Meanwhile, Israel’s army says it is still deployed in other parts of Lebanon’s South, and will work against any threats. Under the ceasefire, the IDF is to entirely withdraw from southern Lebanon by late January. 

Israel and Lebanon’s ceasefire, which began last week, has been difficult. After the ceasefire was declared on November 27, Israel carried out an airstrike on November 28, saying in a statement that suspects had breached the conditions of the ceasefire by arriving in vehicles to areas of southern Lebanon. After Hezbollah fired two rockets at Israeli-occupied territory, Israel launched airstrikes across Lebanon’s South on December 2, killing nine.

On December 11, Al Jazeera reported that Israeli strikes had killed five in southern Lebanon. Israel’s military had no immediate comment on this.

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