ABSTRACT
We felt honoured to be asked to contribute to a book on social work in Northern Ireland. At the same time, we faced a dilemma. We felt that, for a while, we ‘wrote the war out of ourselves’. All that we wished to explore, analyse and offer to scholarship on social work and political conflict, based on our experiences in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH henceforth) – we did, for now. The post-war period brought sufficient challenges to focus our attentions elsewhere, at least to a degree. At the same time, these words hit the paper at a particular point in time, where our experiences of political conflict and war reverberate louder than the usual, everyday, low-level, hum – almost a form of tinnitus that many who have lived through a war live with on a daily basis. The Belfast Agreement was signed just over twenty years ago, two-and-a-half years after the Dayton Peace Accord ensuring the end of violent political conflict in BiH. Another recent anniversary is the start of the Siege of Sarajevo twenty-seven years ago – the longest in the history of modern warfare.
