This Was Not Our War: Bosnian Women Reclaiming the Peace
Review by Ellen Michaud
Friends Journal
February 2005
Clearly incensed by the myopic efforts
of contemporary historians to reduce the last decade's events in
Bosnia to statistics and the exploits of male political leaders
and warriors, Swanee Hunt, former U.S. ambassador to Austria and
currently director of the Women and Public Policy Program at Harvard
University's Kennedy School of Government, has heard the voices
of 26 Bosnian women and offered them an opportunity to counterbalance
some of the gender-skewed, postwar analysis that has blatantly
ignored the experiences of more than half the Bosnian population. "Top-down
policies should be critiqued by ground-level actors," writes
Swanee Hunt. In this book, she creates the framework for that to
occur. Keenly reported, intelligently reasoned, and passionately
presented, This Was Not Our War is a must read for policy makers,
historians, cultural anthropologists, and peacebuilders.