ABSTRACT
This chapter explains the transnational encounters that took place in the war/postwar and postsocialist context of Bosnia and Herzegovina between 1993 and 2013. It illuminates two decades of encounters between the Swedish organization Kvinna till Kvinna and women's groups in Bosnia. Bosnia experienced unprecedented development in all significant fields under socialism. Women were encouraged to pursue education, which was extremely important for Bosnia where in the early 1930s over 80 per cent of women were illiterate. The leading structures of Yugoslavia considered the "Woman Question" to have been solved with the socialist revolution. Even though discouraged, women's political and social activism was not completely stifled in official state-socialist women's organisations or by the feminist movement that emerged in the mid-1970s as one of the first such movements in the socialist parts of Europe. The rhetoric and practice of Kvinna till Kvinna display a belief that former Yugoslavia in general and Bosnia in particular lagged behind societies in the West.
