Pursuing Non-Violent Community Approaches to Social Change Despite Surrounding Violence

Although the survival and quality of life of millions of people around the world get frequently and severely hampered by armed violence, war remains broadly accepted as an unavoidable or most effective way of problem-solving. Nevertheless, some communities reject buying into the idea of armed violence as a problem-solving mechanism and create their own, nonviolent pathways to change. Their experiences contain a wealth of lessons for building a more peaceful human society. In this chapter I analyze the experiences and approaches of two ethnically mixed communities which opted out of inter-ethnic violence during the 1991–1995 war in former Yugoslavia: the communities of Gorski kotar in Croatia and Tuzla in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Using datasets created during my doctoral research and additional information sources, I contrast the dynamics identified in these two communities with the dynamics that were prevailing in the rest of wartime Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina. This allows me to identify and discuss five alternative approaches applied by the communities of Tuzla and Gorski kotar that helped them preserve inter-ethnic peace at local level, namely the alternative approach to the nature of conflict and its parties; to group identities and intergroup relations; to governance and rule of law; to information; and to courage.