Gender equality is a democratic and civilizational standard, and mechanisms to implement gender mainstreaming have been established in many countries around the world, including Bosnia and Herzegovina. International mechanisms and women's civil society organizations are the main carriers of these changes, but the real impact of gender mainstreaming depends on the ability of institutions and the commitment of policy makers to move gender from the margins to the center in setting public policy at all levels of government. Unfortunately, across globally, the norm and practice diverge, especially at the local level. In the countries of the Western Balkans, these problems are even more pronounced and insufficiently articulated in academic research. Therefore, this paper analyzes the results of a survey conducted in local communities in Bosnia and Herzegovina. The research included an analysis of legal provisions at the local level and interviews with relevant stakeholders (women activists and members of local equality commissions). The analysis shows that gender equality is addressed in a fragmented and inconsistent manner, that it is not adequately addressed in local documents, and that local gender mechanisms (commissions for gender equality) have been formed to fulfill a formal obligation. In communities with no profiled women's organizations, the situation is even worse when it comes to the possibility of monitoring and improving the work of these mechanisms.

Women’s rights have increasingly become an international concern and various in-ternational conventions on women’s rights came into being in the last decades. Bosnia-Herzegovina has signed and ratified all important international conven-tions relating to women’s rights, whereas the numerous women's civil society organ-izations continue to advocate for the proper implementation of conventions while helping women to claim their rights guaranteed in these conventions and locally enacted laws on gender equality. This article, based on interviews conducted be-tween August 2020 and June 2021 with members of women's civil society organiza-tions in Bosnia-Herzegovina, takes a closer look at the process of norm diffusion. In particular, this article aims to contribute to the understanding of the processes of norm implementation and the related challenges from the perspective of women’s civil society organizations in the specific context of Bosnia-Herzegovina.

Abstract The author analyses volunteering in Bosnia and Herzegovina, focusing on women’s activism in connection with values associated with the concept of civil society, such as solidarity, equity, and reciprocity. Civil society in Bosnia and Herzegovina generally suffers from fragmentation, donor-driven approaches, insufficient transparency and low trust among the general population, all of which present obstacles to voluntary work, as does a legal framework which is certainly not conducive to volunteering. Unlike organizations that do no more than promote the interests of their members, or groups connected to or controlled by political parties, women’s organizations are often seen as undertaking genuine activism. The author reveals differences in attitudes to volunteer work among individual women in organizations of varying sizes, explaining that those differences depend to some extent on women’s locations, ages or experience. Both inter-group and intra-group dynamics, including women’s networks, provide additional insights into voluntarism, especially with regard to the value of solidarity.

The present paper analyzes the status of women politicians and the amount of their representation in the discourse of four daily newspapers (Dnevni Avaz, Oslobođenje, Glas Srpske and Press) during local pre-electoral campain in B&H in 2012. Content analysis which was conducted in this research shows that female politicians are under-represented and invisible. This conclusion was drawn based on the frequency of their newspaper representation in aggregate and in specific journalists' forms of reporting. Through techniques of discursive negotiations of gender in and through media, women's "simbolic annihiliation" is thus brought about, having at the same time ontological consequences with respect to the status of women in matters regarding res publica. At the same time, by using the semiotics of Judith Butler, it is highlighted that this imposition of women's subordination, which is in its very essence patriarchal, makes room for disidentificational resistance through gender-sensitive performative acts and political engagements.

In this work it was tried to point out the forms and contents of political engagements of women within women's movements both old and new, as well as the contemporary obstacles and challenges in globalizing world. The significance of women's movement is not only in its endurance and successfulness, yet also in the fact that it expanded the framework of what is considered political and offered different political sensibility within the movement's activists and general public were socialized politically.