How hand-drawn maps are revealing real stories from Bosnia and Herzegovina

A new atlas developed by a Newcastle University geographer offers a contemporary view of life in Bosnia and Herzegovina thirty years after the series of secessionist wars that ravaged the western Balkans in the 1990s as Yugoslavia collapsed.

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

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. Here, Dr Riding writes about the history of the region and how the map is revealing true stories of people’s lives.

Contents:

1. A recent history of Bosnia and Herzegovina
2. What is the ‘Subjective Atlas of Bosnia and Herzegovina’?
3. Why make a subjective atlas of Bosnia and Herzegovina?
4. More than traditional maps
5. Where can the book be found?

Atlas front cover and a selection of contributions. Credit: Riding, J. & De Vet, A. (eds.) (2025). Subjective Atlas of Bosnia and Herzegovina / Subjektivni Atlas Bosne i Hercegovine. Brussels: Subjective Editions.

A recent history of Bosnia and Herzegovina

Bosnia and Herzegovina is a country in the western Balkans, a region of south-eastern Europe sitting at the crossroads of empires, trade routes, and political influence. During the 1990s, as the socialist state of Yugoslavia broke apart, Bosnia and Herzegovina experienced a devastating war that lasted from 1992 to 1995.

The conflict ended with a peace settlement known as the Dayton Agreement. First agreed in Dayton, Ohio, on 21 November 1995 and formally signed in Paris on 14 December 1995, the agreement brought an end to the fighting and established the country’s post-war political system. It divided Bosnia and Herzegovina into two largely ethnically defined entities: the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina and Republika Srpska.

Since the war, Bosnia and Herzegovina has often been described to outside audiences primarily through this political structure. It is a place that has for decades been simplistically defined by maps depicting the boundary line which subdivides Bosnia and Herzegovina. As a result, the country is mostly spoken of purely in terms of its war and internal borders. This simplified narrative has been repeated for decades, and is often shaped by external perspectives rather than everyday lived realities.

What is the ‘Subjective Atlas of Bosnia and Herzegovina’?

The ‘Subjective Atlas of Bosnia and Herzegovina’ brings together over eighty personal mappings from people living in a country long defined by outsiders, and reduced to entities, ethnic categories, and wartime narratives.

Created through participatory mapping workshops held in Sarajevo, Srebrenica, and Vitez, the personal maps included drawings, collages, and photography to capture how people inhabit, remember, and imagine their places and landscapes today.

‘Creative approaches have the power to serve as a pathway for peacebuilding. Imaginative content such as this atlas is built in order to propel dialogue, transform public opinion, elevate underrepresented voices, and inspire hope, intercultural understanding, and cooperation among people living in post-conflict and divided societies. By combining such novel visual storytelling with historical dialogue and memory, witnessing, and intercultural cooperation, PCRC [Post Conflict Research Center] aims to produce and promote programmes, content, and works that represent or advocate acts of justice.’ — Velma Šarić, founder and president of the Post-Conflict Research Center

Working with two NGOs, Sarajevo-based Post Conflict Research Center and Subjective Editions in Brussels, the project – funded in part by the Royal Geographical Society – 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.

’I would like to say how much I enjoyed working on this project. I love being creative, and sometimes you just need to process heavy topics through art. I often think about those days when we were drawing and cutting paper.’ — Amila Čandić, participant

‘With every page, I discover aspects of Bosnia that I (and I imagine many others) tend to overlook in daily life. Yet when I see them laid out so thoughtfully, my first reaction is, “Oh yes, I’ve never noticed that, but it’s so Bosnian!” It will leave a lasting impression on everyone involved—and many beyond.’ — Melisa Sinić, participant

The atlas launched at Vijećnica (Sarajevo City Hall) to coincide with other events to mark the 30-year anniversary of the signing of the Dayton Agreement.

‘Today, the city hall once again becomes a symbol of meeting, dialogue and common reflection. We are proud that Sarajevo has the honour of hosting young authors whose works show the power of creativity and hope for the future of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Their drawings, maps, and photographs remind us that peace is not only the absence of conflict, but also a space that we must constantly build anew.’ – Samir Avdić, Mayor of Sarajevo

Watch a film of the launch here.

Why make a subjective atlas of Bosnia and Herzegovina?

The Subjective Atlas of Bosnia and Herzegovina aims to offer a collection of personal, visually striking stories from rural and urban landscapes across Bosnia and Herzegovina that change the story of division locally and internationally.

Containing many unusual images capturing the journey through the country’s varied landscapes, imagine these images as maps brought together to create a subjective atlas. They are not the kind of maps which you might use regularly to travel from place to place. Many of the maps are heartfelt, familiar, local, accessible, and often joyful, and are hand-drawn using a soft felt-tip pen, pastel crayon, or coloured pencil, making marks on the sort of everyday paper that you might write a shopping list on or use to load a printer. These intimate artworks emerged from participatory mapping workshops with young people as they doodled on paper, glued scraps of card, listened to music, and ate local food such as burek or pita.

Yet, it’s important to see these artworks as maps, because it is maps that traditionally give borders a certain legitimacy in international law. This is referred to as ‘the power of maps’ by geographers, and relates to a long-held popular belief that a map objectively represents space.

A spread from the book. Selection of personal effects recovered from mass graves after the 1992 to 1995 war in Bosnia. Frozen in time, these objects hold the last traces of identity and existence.

More than traditional maps

In our new atlas of Bosnia and Herzegovina, you will see that we subvert the traditional map and show the reader a series of human interactions by mapping the everyday entanglements of places and people.

These maps are created by lots of hands, and they do not provide an objective view, or an accurate representation of the territory of Bosnia and Herzegovina. On the contrary, maps show frustration, inherited trauma, and community. One map looks like a cat clawing at the lines drawn across the country thirty years ago, while others depict heart-shaped collections of cigarette butts and local flora. Collectively they show that a country is more than its outline, its borders, both internal and external.

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 maps portray snippets of Bosnian and Herzegovinian everyday life: the many signs that state the façade of a building is falling down; football graffiti; a collage of iconic Volkswagen Golfs from mark I to III that continue to be repatched and repaired; a diasporic shopping list of everyday things; a recently cleared minefield; personal collections of crocheted handworks dotted around an apartment; an array of beautifully knitted woollen socks; juices; jams; burek; rakija; and cigarettes.

The atlas contains stories about villages where only a few people remain, places inhabited in summer months, and souvenirs, postcards, and photographs sent by family now living abroad to the grandma left behind. Bullet-ridden pockmarked buildings appear alongside mappings of villagers who help each other through small acts of kindness. The contents of a single purple bag, family photo albums, rolling hills, and cemeteries are detailed beside mappings that explore environmental justice and human rights.

Importantly, the new atlas does not deny the conflict affected present, and the experiences of citizens during an endless transition era, marked by ethno-nationalism, mass unemployment, nepotism, and corruption.

Yet, maps in the atlas go further than defining this place only in terms of war and its aftermath.

There are acts of solidarity here that depict a collective desire to reimagine the country and move beyond the decades-long political impasse. One map for instance shows how this political stagnation is precipitating an urgent public health crisis in the country, as its cities are now among the most polluted places on earth. Together these personal maps remember the traumatic past, acknowledge the difficult present, and hope for a better future.

The atlas is not a complete story of Bosnia and Herzegovina. It explicitly states on the front cover 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, the traumatic, environmental, and material legacies of conflict, are often missing from reports and studies.

Our hopes are that all those who call Bosnia and Herzegovina home can find a little bit of their home within its pages.

A spread from the book. A domestic collage highlighting one grandmother's experience of being torn between memories of her diasporic children and her home.

Where can the book be found?

The atlas is published in both English and Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian (BCS), and is available in bookshops in Bosnia and Herzegovina. You can get your own copy of the atlas via the website of the publisher Subjective Editions for €27.50 (Subjective Atlas of Bosnia and Herzegovina — Subjective Editions) and a PDF version of the book is also available for €6.00 (Subjective e-Atlas of Bosnia and Herzegovina — Subjective Editions).

You might also like:

• find out more about the author, Dr James Riding, a cultural and political geographer with research expertise in the western Balkans
• watch a film about the making of the ‘Subjective Atlas of Bosnia and Herzegovina’
• read the recent themed intervention in Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers published by Annelys De Vet on participative design and situated mapping: ‘Making a Subjective Atlas of Palestine: On participative design and situated mapping’, by Annelys de Vet https://doi.org/10.1111/tran.12706
• buy the book here
• explore the work of the two collaborating NGOs: Sarajevo-based the Post Conflict Research Centre (PCRC) and Subjective Editions in Brussels
  
  

Suggested further reading

de Vet, A. (2025) Making a Subjective Atlas of Palestine: On participative design and situated mapping. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 50, e12706. Available from: https://doi.org/10.1111/tran.12706

Duggan, M., & Gutiérrez-Ujaque, D. (2025). Counter-mapping as praxis: Participation, pedagogy, and creativity. Progress in Human Geography, 49(6), 562-580. https://doi.org/10.1177/03091325251348610

Riding, J. & De Vet, A. (eds.) (2025). Subjective Atlas of Bosnia and Herzegovina / Subjektivni Atlas Bosne i Hercegovine. Brussels: Subjective Editions.

Riding, J. (2019) The Geopolitics of Memory: A Journey to Bosnia. Stuttgart: ibidem-Verlag.

Funding

The author disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: The project was made possible through a NUAcT Fellowship held by Riding at Newcastle University, with additional funding obtained through an ISRF small group grant, an ESRC IAA grant, an RGS-IBG small group grant, and an ISPF ODA grant.