In this chapter, I offer a reflection on several ‘critical incidences’ from the past 20 years of my social work experience, initially as a social work student and then as a practitioner, activist and a researcher in the region that I come from, which is most commonly labelled South-East Europe. I studied social work in my home town of Zagreb, Croatia during the 1991–95 war. Following five years of study and work in England, I then lived and worked in Bosnia and Herzegovina from 1999 to 2007, a country that was ‘recovering’ from a war that lasted from 1992 to the end of 1996. During these war and post-war periods, I worked for a number of local and international organisations or initiatives – from initiating or taking part in small-scale community activities to working as a consultant for organisations such as UNICEF, Save the Children, USAID and the EC.

The critical incidences that I shall reflect on are all related to the manner in which international and supranational organisations get involved in countries that experience extreme political conflicts and/or war. These are not, nor do I claim them to be, the only legitimate examples of these organisations’ possible roles and actions. However, the reasons why I am focusing on these incidents in this book are two-fold. First, these organisations were not so active in my region prior to the war. Yet, over the past 20 years, they have become powerful stakeholders who define, at least on paper, how social work is to be implemented and practised. In a sense, the war provided these organisations an opportunity to implement a particular type of social work engagement. Second, international organisations within social work (such as the International Federation of Social Workers, IFSW) seem to be developing a new relationship with the area of work that is frequently referred to as ‘social development’, one which is promptly added to contexts that have experienced political conflict. Hence, our profession is rethinking its past, current and possible future roles in this sphere of our practice and in contexts to which such labels are applied. It is also an additional field of work where international organisations play an active and important role worldwide (such as through the implementation of the UN Millennium Development Goals).