Learning national identity: Schooling effects in post-conflict Bosnia-Herzegovina and Croatia

This dissertation addresses the question of how individuals come to possess and understand their identities. Specifically, it focuses on the role of public institutions of education in individual-level identity formation in two Yugoslav successor states: Bosnia-Herzegovina (B-H) and Croatia. In the process, it provides an account of the landscape of identity in these two post-conflict states and makes important theoretical contributions to the study of both state and ethno-national identity.;The dissertation accomplishes three major tasks. First, it documents the clashes over education in post-war B-H and Croatia with a focus on two of the most divided towns in the region: Mostar, B-H and Vukovar, Croatia. In doing so, it demonstrates how the agreements that brought an end to the armed conflicts in the region have allowed the fight over ethnically cleansed territory to move from the battlefield to the classroom.;The second task of this work is to conceptualize and measure individual-level identity. To do so, it develops and tests a latent-variable model of the strength of students' identities by analyzing original survey data of 4,457 secondary school students throughout B-H and Croatia. Specifically, I distinguish between two different objects of identification: the state and the ethno-national group. The analyses reported here suggest that it is crucial to account for the multi-dimensionality of identity and to pay attention to the ways in which individuals hold multiple identities.;Finally, the dissertation assesses the effects of post-conflict school reforms on the identities of students. The main findings of these analyses point to the importance of curriculum in the formation of ethno-national and state identities, while suggesting that school integration does not appear to be as important as educational reformers have assumed. These findings suggest that curricula designed to strengthen the ethno-national identity of a particular group's students might unintentionally promote nationalism in all the students that attend the school. The results of my analyses lead me to argue that in post-conflict educational reform, de-nationalizing the curricula should take precedence over school reintegration.