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The mass destruction of Bosnian cultural heritage was used as a tool of ethnic cleansing and genocide during the final decade of the 20th century. This paper examines it and the post-war response to that destruction and process of coming to terms with the resultant social trauma in terms of their potential for (re)defining the complex relations between heritage reconstruction and building human resilience. A quarter century after the end of armed conflict in Bosnia and the signing of the Dayton peace agreement, the processes of post-war social and economic recovery are still underway, with cultural heritage playing a non-negligible role in them. The integration of heritage in implementing the peace agreement is reflected in all the post-war phases of Bosnian life at two parallel levels. The first is the official level, overdetermined by the balance of political consensus and tensions, expressed through the legislative framework and the activities of public institutions. At that level, heritage discourse, including the determination of what heritage is reconstructible, has served the politics of the day, which have over the past 25 years oscillated between impulses towards ever deeper social division, on the one hand, and a search for connective values for the establishment of social trust, on the other. This paper presents an analysis of how authorized heritage discourse (AHD), as expressed through the activities of the Commission to protect National Monuments of Bosnia and Herzegovina and the international organizations –UNESCO, the Council of Europe, and the European Commission – have reflected and supported this post-war politics and the economic reality. There is also a contrasting analysis of the inclusive discourse on heritage, established through attempts by individuals and communities to use the reconstruction of damaged cultural landscapes to realise a non-discriminatory approach to the right to heritage and its evaluation, given the need to process social trauma. The example of Bosnia throws light on how confronting the violent reformulation of cultural memory as a means of ethnic cleansing, genocide, and post-war exclusionism can revive inclusive discourse on heritage as a spontaneous method of building social and societal resilience and ultimately a tool for peacebuilding.

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