Together with local and international academics in Sarajevo we investigated how school textbooks shape narratives around conflict, identity, and reconciliation in two days of workshops organized by IBEI – Institut Barcelona d’Estudis Internacionals and PCRC.
This interdisciplinary workshop gathered scholars, practitioners, and professors to critically examine how school textbooks influence the formation of group identities, narratives of conflict, and prospects for reconciliation. By focusing on textbooks as both indicators of dominant political knowledge and instruments of peacebuilding or contestation, the workshop aimed to foster dialogue around the ways education mediates political and social change.
The key questions participants had to cover in their papers included how textbooks construct national identity and shape collective memory in conflict-affected societies, and the ways in which their narratives can legitimize or challenge political violence.