Reading and talk

Decolonizing Dayton - DON’T DREAM DREAMS

Theatre & Discussion

Dayton, Ohio. Thirty years ago, the Bosnian War was brought to an end with a peace agreement in this small US-American town.

Thirty years later, the staged reading Don’t Dream Dreams by Tahir Herenda places an uncomfortable question at its center: What remains of a peace agreement when “negative peace” becomes political normality? And further: How does an agreement shape a society when its very architecture produces political blockades rather than overcoming them? Based on original quotations from international actors involved in the Dayton process, the piece exposes the political mechanisms that ended the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina – while simultaneously cementing its long-term structural contradictions. The reading invites us to reassess the responsibility of international diplomacy: What lessons do we draw when calculations of power replace justice – and continue to define political reality today?

“Don’t dream, don’t dream that the West will come and solve this problem” – a sentence from the negotiations that has lost none of its urgency three decades later.

Even today, Bosnia and Herzegovina is shaped by a constitutional system that favors political blockades and perpetuates deep-rooted national divisions. Secessionist ambitions of certain regions, fragile institutions, and stalled reform processes complicate the country’s path toward the EU. The reading therefore also raises the question: How long can peace be administered without actually being shaped? With original quotations from international diplomats and actors of the Sarajevo War Theatre.

Staged reading by Tahir Herenda, Maja Burazerović

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