Bosnia and Herzegovina

Bosnia and Herzegovina's tripartite political system — three presidents, three parliaments, three of everything — institutionalizes the ethnic divisions that produced the war, and this affects men's healing in a concrete way: mental health services are organized along ethnic lines, meaning a Bosniak man in Republika Srpska or a Serb man in the Federation faces barriers to care that are political rather than clinical. The war's sexual violence against women received international attention and prosecution at The Hague, but the sexual violence against men — documented in detention camps like Omarska and Keraterm — remains one of the war's least-discussed atrocities.

The Srebrenica genocide, where over 8,000 Bosniak men and boys were systematically murdered, created a wound that defines Bosniak masculinity to this day. Mothers and widows lead the commemorations, but the surviving men — those who escaped through the forests, those who were too young to be targeted, those who live with the guilt of survival — carry a trauma that the culture commemorates but doesn't treat. The Dayton generation — men born after the war — inherit their fathers' trauma without the war experience to contextualize it. They feel the weight but can't name its source, and they express it through emigration, which is the Bosnian man's most common form of therapy: leaving.