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This report investigates how content that can contribute to the early stages of radicalisation reaches young people in Bosnia and Herzegovina through TikTok, and how they make sense of it. The analysis rests on a purposive sample of 333 posts gathered in Bosnia and Herzegovina from March to September 2026, every one of them coded for stage of radicalisation, dominant narrative, target, emotional tone and conspiratorial framing, and on two focus groups held in September 2026 in which participants with contrasting backgrounds discussed the same six videos. The study forms part of RADAR, a regional project that also covers Montenegro and Serbia, three neighbours whose common language and tightly connected online environment allow divisive narratives to cross borders with ease.
The research took place in a tense political season. The observation period ran into the campaign for the general elections of 4 October 2026, which unfolded amid open disputes over the constitutional order and the powers of the entities, and it included Mladić’s death, the wartime Bosnian Serb commander convicted of genocide. Three decades after Dayton, the country holds EU candidate status, yet the first intergovernmental conference that would formally launch accession negotiations has still not taken place.
Three themes run through the sample. The first and by far the largest is the war of 1992–1995, which TikTok content keeps reopening through competing accounts of who attacked, who defended and who suffered, ranging from commemoration to the denial of the Srebrenica genocide and the celebration of convicted commanders. The second is the state itself, as posts promote secession, a third entity or unification with a neighbouring country, and recast domestic political rivals as threats to the community. The third is religion, used to mark ethnic boundaries and, in its sharpest form, to equate a whole faith with violence. Across all three, the content rarely invents new material. Its typical move is to take existing footage, from wartime archives to television interviews, and give it a new meaning through a caption or bacground music.
Both groups recognised selective editing, missing context and attempts to provoke, and both drew a clear line between remembering a crime and using that memory to mobilise the next generation. The participants from civil society organisations analysed how each video had been assembled, while the university students in the second group engaged more with whether they found the message convincing. Neither group saw itself as the main audience at risk; both located that risk among younger viewers who meet these stories without the background needed to question them.
For Bosnia and Herzegovina, the findings suggest that the digital space reproduces divisions already embedded in politics, schooling and family memory, and that it does so faster and with less context than any other channel. Responses aimed only at removing content will therefore reach a small part of the problem. What is needed is a shared, fact-based approach to the history of the 1990s in education, together with media literacy that teaches young people to ask where a piece of footage came from and what was left out. Both belong at the centre of the societal transformation that EU accession requires, since a state whose citizens cannot agree on the facts of the recent past will find it hard to build the institutional consensus that membership presupposes.
