The Bosnian and Bosniak writer Jasmina Musabegović (1941-2023) is known to the cultural public of Bosnia and Herzegovina for her novels, essays, and translations from the French language. It is less known, however, that a small collection of lullabies in the Bosnian language is also attributed to Musabegović's research and writing work. The aforementioned collection was published by BZK „Preporod“(Bosniaks' Cultural Society „Preporod“) in 1997 in Sarajevo, with the editorial supervision of literary historian and folklorist Munib Maglajlić. In this paper, the aforementioned collection of writer Jasmina Musabegović will be presented through a thematic analysis of selected poems on a literary-poetic level, and then it will go into the broader context of the overall work of the collected folk lullabies among the Bosniaks so far. The most frequent themes and motifs also will be reviewed within the entire corpus related to that material. With this approach, we tried to draw attention to Musabegović's cultural contribution, which, apart from her literary work, was also reflected in her collection of folk wisdom.

Approximately sixty lyrical songs were inscribed into the Folklore Archive of the National Museum during the field research in Brcko conducted by Bosnian writer and folklorist Alija Nametak as an employee of the Institute for Folklore Research in 1956, including a ballad about a mother who sacrificed her son to save her brother's life. This moving ballad has been inscribed at least twice more in Bosnia's north, and two variants of this song were recorded in Derventa - they are included in a large collection made by Smajl Bradaric and kept in the National Museum of BiH's Folklore Archive. The National Museum and the BiH Slavic Committee collaborated to publish this collection (Bradari 2018). The mentioned ballad was also discussed in Munib Maglajlic's 1985 study "Muslim Oral Ballads," in the section entitled Conflict in the Family, indicating its importance, but also a solid number of variants throughout Bosnia (Maglajlić 2018). The variants presented here, however, were not the subjects of Maglajlić's analyses, even though he found as many as nine versions of this ballad from various sources for his study. This paper will use the method of three-variant ballad promotion to see the oral poet from Bosnia's north in action. It will try to show and highlight the poetic achievements of the "northern" variants. The poetic shaping of key motifs will be considered in each recorded variant, and the difference between them will be established. Methods of interpretation and analysis will be used.

During ethnographic research into newly established suburbs around Sarajevo, which are mainly inhabited by Srebrenica’s population who survived the persecution and genocide of 1995, I had the task of recording certain lifestyle changes of these refugees. This paper analyses the oral literary lyrical heritage of the Srebrenica region, ie. oral songs which were remembered mostly by women. Since I was myself one of those populations I relied on my personal experience that expanded my insight into more detailed knowledge, as well as the various circumstances that shaped the way of life of my respondents. On the other hand, the research aimed, among other things, to examine the role of Srebrenica women in the memory of the intangible cultural heritage of their region in recent times. First, I considered women’s self-organizing as a response to the genocide and the consequent absence of male family members and community leaders. Then I draw upon my research to consider the impact of these activities on collective attitudes toward the memory of the Srebrenicas' former spiritual life examining the presence of traditional and oral patterns in everyday life. The paper relies on interpretative and analytical methods of the science of literature.

This article focuses on the former war refugees, who (partly) returned to their homeland Bosnia and Herzegovina and became significant investors in their local communities. We are particularly interested in their experiences with manoeuvring between different countries and institutional environments, as these refugee entrepreneurs are running their businesses simultaneously in developed European economies (Switzerland and Sweden) and in their home country. Although the two companies run by the former refugees described in the article are located in the areas that remain divided along the ethnic lines caused by the war (Srebrenica and Banja Luka), we find that the post-war returnees’ businesses are ethnically tolerant and inclusive, sending a powerful message to the formal institutions, which often act in the opposite way.

Abstract This paper provides insights into the informal economy of Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH), a post--conflict transition economy in the Western Balkan region aspiring to became part of the European Union. After the introductory section and literature review, we introduce the economic outlook of BiH and then provide evidence estimating the size of the informal economy, which is identified to be around 30% over the last couple of years. As the size of the informal economy is high and persistent, this implies that current policy approaches are not efficient in tackling this economic challenge. To understand how the informal economy operates in practice, we use data from two different surveys to assess tax morality, undeclared work and the structure of the participants in the informal economy. In the next section, we supplement the study with ethnographic insights. In particular, we identify how participants in the informal economy use it for different purposes and with different motives. This includes reliance on the informal economy as a survival strategy for households, as a way to supplement insufficient formal income, to compensate for economic insecurity, or to decrease costs of formal business by using “envelope wage” practices, but equally importantly to overcome formal institutional rigidities linked to current contradictory laws. Still, we find indications that the growth of informal business is converging to formalisation, as informality at some stages of business development becomes a burden to higher entrepreneurial growth aspirations.

In our research, we analyse the role of informal practices in relation to migration and diaspora investments in BiH by asking the following research questions: ˗ How have informal practices influenced migratory processes from and to BiH? - How do informal networks operate across different borders with regard to the BiH diaspora and within the state? Our findings reveal a broad trend among members of the BiH diaspora investing in their homeland by utilising informal practices and networks. The findings also indicate that members of the BiH migrant groups/diaspora primarily engage and seek engagement with specific localities, communities and issues that derive from their pre-migration places and social networks. In most cases, when engaging in transactions with and investment in their local communities, they rely on the pre-existing social networks, kinship and informal connections that often run across different ethnicities and nation state borders. Unlike the traditional form of linear economic migration and returnas has been the case with Gastarbeiter (guest workers), who went to earn money overseas and after accumulation of sufficient capital would permanently return homecontemporary migrants from BiH often only partially return to their hometowns as investors, while continuing to run successful business in the countries of their settlement/immigration. In the process of establishing and operating their businesses at both ends, they heavily rely on their informal networks. These new trans-local entrepreneurs tend to engage in a certain degree of informality, sometimes strategically circumventing the formal system, as a way to ensure the survival of their businesses. In addition to extended family networks, our findings emphasize the importance of informal local and regional affiliations with respect to emigration, return and business networks.

This paper discusses interpretations, categorisations and inventories of the sevdalinka, an oral lyric tradition from Bosnia and one of the country’s most important examples of intangible cultural heritage. The sevdalinka represents traditional oral lyric poetry, a celebrated form of love song, which came into existence in urban places in a broader region of the Balkans as a fusion of the existing lyrical forms and Islamic influences. The term sevdalinka for this kind of songs became widely accepted only at the end of the 19th century. Before that, this oral lyrical tradition was usually called sevdalija. Both terms, sevdalinka and sevdalija, have their roots in the Arabic word sawdā adopted as sevdah (meaning love, desire, longing) via Turkish into the languages of some Balkan peoples. In today’s context, the sevdalinka is most often understood as a Bosnian (or more precisely, Bosniak) indigenous traditional love song. As an important part of the Bosnian intangible cultural heritage, ethnologists, ethnomusicologists, folklorists and other scholars have often used the sevdalinka as a source and medium through which to explore various social, historical and cultural traditions in Bosnia. This paper will first provide a historical summary of the records, inventories and research interests in this oral lyrical genre and then offer an overview of the categorisations of the sevdalinka in specialized encyclopaedias and literary theory. Finally, by analysing themes and motifs found in sevdalinkas, the paper will discuss a number of scholarly examples from manuscripts published in late 19th and early 20th century in Bosnia and Herzegovina.