Nonkilling Balkans Forum to be held in Sarajevo

The Nonkilling Balkans Forum Initiative will be organizing in collaboration with the Center for Global Nonkilling and the University of Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina, the Nonkilling Balkans Exploratory Forum on August 28 and 29, 2014. The Forum follows the tracks of the Nonkilling Korea: Six Culture Exploratory Seminar (Seoul, August 2010) but with significant innovations and regional dimensions.

Nonkilling Balkans Forum is an open process leading to the established of an autonomous nonkilling organization in the Balkans region (Albania, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Macedonia, Greece, Turkey, Montenegro, Slovenia, Serbia and Kosovo) and its communities abroad. It is presented as “a Balkans and global gathering of leaders from a broad range of scientific and humanitarian disciplines” with the goal of exploring the possibilities of: Transforming the Balkans as a whole into a world region whose future will be free of killing of humans by humans; Supporting numerous Balkans and Balkans-related global ideas and movements aiming to establish, in this historically and politically volatile region, societies founded on the principles of humanitarian value of nonkilling.

The organization and delivery of this global gathering of scientists and humanists in Sarajevo in represents an orchestrated entry of this part of the world into the third millenium. This event will also coincide with the 100th anniversary of the beginning of World War I – one of the bloodiest and most tragic pages of human history, symbolically started in Sarajevo in 1914, and the decades after the end of the bloodiest war in Europe since World War II.

As part of the activities of the Nonkilling Balkans 2014 Exploratory Forum, the Center for Global Nonkilling will also present its first Nonkilling Communities Flag and Award to the Bosnian municipality of Bosanski Petrovac in a ceremony that will take place on August 26. The Nonkilling Communities initiative was envisioned as a form to encourage, recognize and support local communities where no killings take place or where nonkilling good practices are being implemented to reduce killing. The Flag and Award seeks to honor local governments and communities that have shown efforts to significantly reduce killing or that have become communities with no killing.

Organizers Rifet Bahtijaragić (a Canadian-Bosnian author and member of the Nonkilling Arts Research Committee) and Ivana Milojević (Adjunct Professor, University of the Sunshine Coast, Australia, and Visiting Professor, University of Novi Sad, Serbia) welcome registrations to participate in the event via: info@nonkillingbalkans.org