A new atlas initiated by Newcastle University,UK, academic offers a contemporary view of life in Bosnia and Herzegovina 30 years after the war that ravaged the western Balkan country in the 1990s.

Dr James Riding has been conducting research in Bosnia and Herzegovina for more than 10 years to explore how its citizens are affected by the traumatic, material, and environmental legacies of the 1992 to 1995 war in Bosnia.

The war in Bosnia ended through the creation of a peace agreement often referred to as the Dayton Agreement, which was initialled in Dayton, Ohio, on 21 November 1995. The agreement, which was re-signed ceremonially in Paris on 14 December 1995, separated Bosnia and Herzegovina into two ethnically-defined entities, known as Federacija Bosne i Hercegovine and Republika Srpska, creating a complicated political structure shared between three constituent ethnic groups.

Dr Riding has explored how young people in Bosnia and Herzegovina are affected by this divided political context. Working with two NGOs, Sarajevo-based the Post Conflict Research Centre (PCRC) and Subjective Editions in Brussels, Dr Riding brought together more than 80 young people from across Bosnia and Herzegovina to create their own personal maps of everyday life and memories of a country too often defined by outsiders.

The maps have now been edited and brought together in a new Subjective Atlas of Bosnia and Herzegovina, which will be launched in Sarajevo at a special event on 3 December to coincide with other events marking the 30-year anniversary of the signing of the Dayton Agreement.

Dr Riding, Senior Lecturer in Human Geography at Newcastle University, UK, said: “This project is an attempt to ‘free the map’ by moving away from an outsider’s view of Bosnia and Herzegovina to something more personal that offers an alternative narrative about the lives and identities of people who live there.
“By giving people an opportunity to express how they feel about their environment, culture and identity, the atlas presents a unique, multi-layered, traumatic, but also often joyful, story of life in Bosnia and Herzegovina – showing the country as citizens see it rather than as the world sees it, contributing potentially to the process of reconciliation and remembrance in a country where people are still living with trauma.
“The project attempts to challenge a top-down narrative of Bosnia and Herzegovina that moves beyond defining this place as ethnically divided. The atlas explicitly states that this is a subjective story of the country. A focus on the subjective is perhaps uniquely appropriate in a place where the voices of those who experienced war and its aftermath are often missing from reports and studies. We hope the atlas, created by many, provides a unique representation of Bosnia and Herzegovina that all those who call Bosnia and Herzegovina home, can find a little bit of their home in.”

Created through participatory workshops held in Sarajevo, Srebrenica, and Vitez, the personal and subjective maps in the atlas use drawing, collage, and photography to capture how people inhabit, remember, and imagine their surroundings today.

The atlas offers a collection of visually striking stories from both urban and rural landscapes, from mappings of war-damaged buildings to a collection of plants that grow on mass grave sites and indicate that bodies lie beneath the surface.

Images of everyday life and memories from childhood are also common throughout the book, from pictures of homemade jams and fruit juices to unfinished houses that evidence a prolonged period of economic stagnation in the country.

Velma Šarić, founder and president of the Post-Conflict Research Centre writes in the atlas that:
“This subjective atlas is one of many collaborations we have undertaken at the Post-Conflict Research Centre, a women-led peacebuilding organisation and research centre dedicated to fostering a culture of peace and preventing violent conflict in the Western Balkans. PCRC has worked as a local partner to co-develop the Subjective Atlas of Bosnia and Herzegovina, within the artistic and participative methodology developed by Subjective Editions. Our collaboration offered a critical and joyful context for self-representation, experimenting with non-linear visual storytelling forms. We hope this atlas can become a model for future trauma-informed participatory work with young people in conflict-affected societies more widely.”

Annelys De Vet, designer and founder of the subjective atlas series at Subjective Editions, shared the vision of this counter-mapping venture in Bosnia and Herzegovina: “How our perception of the world is being informed (…) through atlases, through cartography often represents quite a singular worldview. The institutionalised, top-down nature of maps and cartography tends to go unremarked and unquestioned. Official maps rarely articulate the conditions under which they are made, even though they are human-made, subjective constructions of a shared socio-political space. Instead, such maps claim to present a ‘singular truth’, supposedly position-free and untouched by the power dynamics and inequalities that govern their production.”

Following the launch event, maps from the atlas will be exhibited in Vijećnica (Sarajevo City Hall) from 4 December to 8 December and then in a week-long exhibition at the Historical Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina (Sarajevo) in April 2026.

The atlas will be available in bookshops across Bosnia and Herzegovina, and at bookshops internationally through Idea Books. Copies are also available from Subjective Editions for €27.50, a PDF version of the book is also available for €6.00.