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| Landon Lauder ('17) in Mostar, Bosnia & Herzegovina |
Class of 2017
While some people said before my departure that only spending a week in a foreign country isn’t enough to gain anything of value, I always met that assertion with a degree of skepticism. A part of me believed it, especially when so many of my peers are spending weeks and even semesters abroad, but another part of me rejected it. Reflecting back on the week, it seemed like at least a month. Our days were jam-packed with experiences that left imprints on my thinking and on me in general that I know I will carry with me into whatever future plans are out there.
Even before I entered college, I knew I had a diverse array of subject interests. While taking seven different classes a day in high school allows that to be accommodated, college is less forgiving for those with minds that think outside of a singularity or binary. It is opportunities such as this ISL&R program that mesh together different disciplines.
There were so many lessons packed into the week we were in Bosnia and Herzegovina, too many to list. Some were general and practical and others were specific towards a particular subject area. For me, the trip provided a rich amount of political science information and lessons. My interest in world issues came unexpectedly when I took a US foreign policy class last summer by happenstance. Ever since then, I try to understand how the issues we experience at home are often impacted from events abroad and that we as a global people experience common issues that vary to some degree. The issues faced in Bosnia and Herzegovina are no different.
One of Bosnia and Herzegovina’s largest downfalls that will seem to plague them for years to come is their inability to accept diverse ethnicities and reflect that in governmental structures. Unfortunately, this problem was carried much too far and resulted in a horrendous war that has left Bosnia and Herzegovina in the state it is in today, barely keeping up with the world around it. Nevertheless, we in the United States are also experiencing similar issues with our diversity and government recognition of such, although thankfully it has not, nor will it ever, result in future war.
Perhaps the largest impact on this trip for me was when the University of Sarajevo professors spoke with us about the problems facing Bosnia and Herzegovina, especially how it relates to the government there. Unlike in the U.S., Bosnia and Herzegovina’s constitution is not all inclusive and thus rights and privileges are restricted or nonexistent for some of the population, including what we deem the most important for a democracy to function: voting. These non-constituents live on the fringe without political rights or political representation in any government action, regardless if corrupt or not.
This is certainly a lesson here in the U.S. we need to be particularly careful of. Although our Congress does claim to be a representative makeup of what the founding fathers intended, we see now that minority groups such as races/nationalities, gender, and sexual orientation are not represented fairly in our nation’s law-making body. According to the Congressional Research Service, the 113th Congress (the one previous to the current that started in January of this year) was only 19% women, 8.3% African American, and 6.9% Hispanic.1 Additionally, there were only six openly homosexual members of the 113th Congress.2 If Congress is truly supposed to be a representative body of the populous, then it should match or come close to matching the demographic makeup of the nation. According to the 2010 census data from the U.S. Census Bureau, the nation is 50.8% women, 13.6% African American, and 16.3% Hispanic or Latino.3 There are also approximately 1.6%-5% of self-identifying LGBT people in the U.S., although this estimate may be higher.4 So how can we say our Congress is representative of our nation’s people? How can we say they have an equal vote?
Perhaps we have an advantage in this realm. While it seemed as if many ethnic politicians in Bosnia and Herzegovina represent their own interests, both personal and ethnic, we can say to a very limited degree that our politicians do try to represent issues beyond their own makeup. However, going into politics, this failure of demographic representation is something I will focus closely upon, especially now since the minority populations outnumber the previously dominant white male population. We must avoid a situation that is prevalent in Bosnia Herzegovina where our politicians are corrupt and self-interested to the point where there is no effective power sharing.
The other element of this entire experience is more personal. I remember watching the film “Moja Prica” in my preparatory class for this trip where most of the interviewees were upset and left in a state of learned hopelessness because of the current situation. When we spoke with the women of Snaga Zene (an NGO helping women affected by the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina) or when we were just casually chatting with Faruk (our tour guide) here and there, I saw a unique dichotomy in attitudes towards the past and the future. First, it seems the people understand you cannot have one without the other. The past has gotten the country into its state today. However, this is the point of departure between the past and future, as if the past’s only value is for the sake of history. The future, for most, has a positive outlook, especially in the younger generations. Using Faruk’s outlook as an example, he was very hopeful for the future of the country under certain conditions. The people must be given more power in the government to help weed out corruption and to integrate the country into the rest of the developed world (which is reflected in Bosnia and Herzegovina’s efforts to enter into the EU). Additionally, the women of Snaga Zene accept their position in the present, since history had dealt them a horrible hand, one of death and sexual exploitation. Nevertheless, they above all want to see the younger generation be happy and aspire for greatness, to guide the country into better times.
While the future is conditionally positive, the past is almost so revolting that many do not wish to speak of it. The trauma almost everyone experienced was so gruesome that it affects the way in which they process their thoughts about it. The women in Snaga Zene especially noted that too much time has been spent on talking about the atrocities of the past and more needs to be given to the possibility of justice and the future. However, as the ICTY (International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia) representative noted when we met with him, sometimes we must rehash the past in order to seek the very justice that allows a region to move forward.
So here, I saw a unique dynamic to post-war societies that is often solely located within political science. While demographics and justice are crucial, we must also understand the psychological underpinnings of a society when we move forward with solutions to a political issue. The ability for a society to effectively address psychological trauma and to facilitate the intergroup contact needed for diverse nations is the key to a post-conflict society, especially to Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Perhaps the largest takeaway from this experience is that large issues such as identities require not just one lens, but multiple. How can we even begin to address an issue that resulted in some sort of conflict when we only approach it from one angle? A better question yet is why does higher education want to send us into the real world with tunnel vision such as this? For me, I know now that the field of political science is not complete without a lens of psychology. At the end of the day, politics deals with humans and those humans have psychological needs. Additionally, we make our political institutions. They are not born through some sort of act of paper and pen. They are created by our thoughts. It is time we ought to respect it as such.
1 The research data can be found at https://www.senate.gov/CRSReports/crs-publish.cfm?pid=%260BL+R%5CC%3F ↩
2 Although there is no variable yet listed in Congressional research for sexual orientation, the New York Times has published an article on the matter and it can be found here: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/26/us/politics/gay-lawmakers-growing-presence-suggests-shift-in-attitudes.html?_r=0↩
3The official 2010 census data can be found at this link, which has subparts for different identities: http://www.census.gov/2010census/data/↩
4The information can be found here, a story published by the Washington Post: http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/health-survey-gives-government-its-first-large-scale-data-on-gay-bisexual-population/2014/07/14/2db9f4b0-092f-11e4-bbf1-cc51275e7f8f_story.htmldata/↩
McConnell Scholar Landon Lauder, of Russell, Ky., is a junior at the University of Louisville. He is studying political science, psychology, social change and peace, justice and conflict transformation.