Skip to main content

Reclaiming Peace and Cultivating Hope Beyond the Crisis Narrative: Towards Accountability and Action

 

EuPRA Conference Sarajevo 2026

Dates

-

Location

Sarajevo
Bosnia & Herzegovina
    Introduction

    To build community requires vigilant awareness of the work we must continually do to undermine all the socialization that leads us to behave in ways that perpetuate domination 
    - bell hooks (2003, 36)

     

    The world today is marked by overlapping and intensifying crises — from genocidal violence and accelerating ecological collapse to the militarisation of Europe and the ongoing reproduction of racialised and colonial hierarchies. In such context, peace research is called to reckon with its own histories by recognising a plurality of ontologies and epistemologies, and engaging with ethical responsibilities. Instead, the field has been entangled with the very structures it seeks to critique, reproducing frameworks that stabilise the status quo rather than challenge it. The dominance of crisis narratives shaping contemporary politics across scales adds to these stabilising processes; they help legitimise responses that prioritise urgency over accountability and narrows the space for political imagination.

    The task before us is not simply to reform peace research, but to reimagine its horizons, methods, and commitments. Rather than reinforcing the crisis narrative, the current times require us to critically examine alternative ways of living together that foreground accountability and social justice. 

    In this context, the 2026 EuPRA Conference in Sarajevo invites critical, decolonial, feminist, Indigenous, diasporic, and other forms of engagements with the question of how we might live together otherwise. We welcome contributions that foreground forms of knowledge, experience, and struggles that have been marginalised, silenced, or rendered unintelligible within dominant peace discourses — including those emerging from liberation movements, community organising, artistic and embodied practices, and everyday acts of care and survival.

    The conference aims to collectively cultivate and engage with the work of re-imagining and building worlds that might yet be. We therefore encourage dialogues and collaborations that explore what peace might mean as justice, as repair, as accountability, as refusal, as creativity, and as radical hope.

    We warmly encourage contributors across all stages of life and professional experience to submit abstracts, whether you are involved in academia, in arts, working as a practitioner or if you in other ways identify yourself in peace work. We particularly welcome contributions from those who have traditionally been marginalised or excluded within academic spaces.

    By bringing together scholars, activists, artists, and communities, this conference seeks to create a space in which peace is not only discussed or theorised, but also practiced: as resistance to violence and erasure, as solidarity across borders and struggles, and as collective worldmaking grounded in dignity, relationality, and the possibility of living otherwise.

     


    Themes

    #EuPRA2026 will cover the following 10 themes:

    1. War, Genocide and Everyday Violence
    2. Dialogues, Mediation and Local Peace
    3. Security, Power and Contemporary Challenges to Peace
    4. Feminist Peace Research
    5. Decolonial and Critical Peace Studies
    6. Nonviolence, Democracy and Social Movements
    7. Youth, Education and Peace Pedagogies
    8. Mobility, Borders and Geographies of Peace
    9. Climate, Ecology and Peace
    10. Arts, Media and Digital Peace Practices

     


    Venue

     

    Hotel Europe

     

    Hotel Europe, Sarajevo

     

    Address:

    Vladislava Skarića 5,
    Sarajevo 71000,
    Bosnia & Herzegovina

    Website: https://www.hoteleuropegroup.ba

    Telephone: +387 (0)33 580 400

     


    Safe Space

    All EuPRA events are conducted within the frame of the EuPRA Safe Space and Code of Conduct rules. 

    Attending EuPRA events means you agree with these rules.

     


    Socials

    The conference uses #EuPRA2026 as a hashtag on all platforms.

     


    In partnership with

    Post-Conflict Research Center

     

     

     

     

    Last update: 14 August 2026

    The programme is open to last-minute changes. Please check the programme regularly.   
    Updates to the programme will also be announced on BlueSky @euprapeace. We use the hashtag #EuPRA2026.

    To save paper, no copies of the programme or abstracts will be handed out at the conference.

     

    Jump to

     

    Keynote speakers

    Frank Möller
    Frank Möller

    Frank Möller currently works as a Senior Research Fellow at the Tampere Peace Research Institute, Tampere University, Finland. His main research focusses on visual peace research, the visualisation of peace and the relationship between art and peace. His most recent book is Peace, Complexity, Visuality: Ambiguities in Peace and Conflict (Palgrave Macmillan 2023), written with Rasmus Bellmer. Frank’s current work is well documented on the website Image & Peace, created together with Bellmer.

    Slađana Lazić
    Slađana Lazić

    Slađana Lazić (she/they, PhD) is a scholar and educator focusing on the questions of peace and justice, politics of knowledge production in PACS, anti- and decolonial approaches to thinking/knowing/doing peace otherwise,and the post-Yugoslav space. They are one of the co-founders of the YugoslaWomen+Collective and serve as an assistant professor of Peace and Conflict studies, and Speaker of the InnPeace Research Center at the University of Innsbruck, Austria. Together with Elena Stavrevska, Slađana co-edited the Special Issue on “Peace in Plural: Towards Decolonial and Feminist Approaches to Peace”.

     

    Programme

    The full programme will be published after the conference registration has been closed!
     

    4 November 2026
    8:30 – 9:30
    Registration desk

    REGISTRATION



    5 November 2026



    6 November 2026


    Photo by Sporisevic Photography

     

    Public transportation

    You can find useful information on public transport in Sarajevo on https://meetbosnia.com/sarajevo-public-transport-amazing-tips-get-around/

     


    Hotels & hostels

    Below are some of the hotels and hostels recommended by our conference partner.

    Hotels:

    Hotel Holiday
    • Website: https://www.hotelholiday.ba
    • Approx. price per night: ~€90 – €140+ per night
    • Location: Central Sarajevo, next to the History Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina and within walking distance of the city center. One of Sarajevo’s most iconic and recognizable hotels.
    Hotel Europe
    • Website: https://www.hoteleurope.ba
    • Approx. price per night: ~€100 – €150 + per night
    • Location: Central Old Town location - one of Sarajevo’s best-known historic hotels.
    Hotel Sahat
    • Website: https://www.notahoteli.com
    • Approx. price per night: roughly €45 - €90
    • Location: About 200–230 m (approximately a 3 - 5 min walk to Baščaršija/Sebilj area and main central streets)
    Courtyard by Marriott Sarajevo

     

    Hostels:

    https://www.hostelworld.com/hostels/europe/bosnia-and-herzegovina/sarajevo/ 

     

     

    Sarajevo!