Our short (maga-)zine, called “Stop, Stop Ibar Water”, was one of the most memorable and rewarding group projects of my time at AUC. Our project is centred around Mitrovica and the Ibar river, as one might deduce from the title. The title is the first line of an old Serbian love poem about two lovers separated by the river. Although this was not the title we originally imagined, which was “The River Runs Red”, we felt this was more positive and a poetic imagination of what the situation could be in years or decades to come. The River Runs Red was an idea based on an old tale of Albanian children being drowned by Serbs in the Ibar River. However, after doing more research on the topic, we realised that there was no documentation or provided sources for this tale, underlining how polarised the conflict is and how it has been that way for a long time.
One of the things that made the project so wonderful was the group I worked on it with. Thomas, Ema, Ben, Julie, Dave and I showed up with motivation to each meeting and were all doing the best we could to realise everything we imagined for the project. We all helped each other out where we could, stuck to deadlines and completed tasks early in order to make the process of creating a zine much easier than I had first imagined.
That is not to say that it was smooth sailing. Our zine required editing of a lot of pictures, adjusting the shades to be the exact same and cutting out parts of pictures to make contrasting overlays (see example below) and staring at the screen for that long has certainly left me with one or two headaches.
This picture in particular, of graffiti under the bridge in Mitrovica, required a lot of outlining on my mousepad. At one point while I was outlining it, I joked to Thomas that I was going to get carpal tunnel from working with my hand in this cramped position. Despite the challenges of making the zine, I am extremely happy with how our project turned out, which is why I encourage you to follow the link below to our Google Drive to look and read through it yourselves.
Throughout our research on Mitrovica, I felt more and more disappointed that we could not visit Kosovo this year, as I believe it would have enriched our project immensely to talk to the people on both sides in Mitrovica and gather perspectives not just from politicians or published interviews, but from the people living there. That being said, I am immensely grateful for the meetings Anne and Lola set up for us in these short but memorable four weeks.
From meetings with amazing and important initiatives, such as the New Social Initiative, Community Building Mitrovica, or Kosovo 2.0, to meetings with UNMIK or Prime Minister Albin Kurti, the meetings and interviews were life-changing and eye-opening opportunities that shaped my understanding of the world and our project massively. We tried to include as many different quotes, perspectives and insights from our Peace Lab journey as we could, and once again I recommend you look into our zine, that my group and I put so much work and love into, and also look at the other projects from this course that have informed, inspired and entertained me massively. I mourn for future IR students who will not be able to get this Peace Lab experience, but I hope that you can read our blog entry and look at our projects to inform yourself about the complex situation in Kosovo and help out in any way you can.
The link to our zine: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1cWWDi79LMDBX6gBdOFt8edXD5UJXH8qF/view?usp=sharing
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