While the preceding three chapters are critical, Chapter 7 can be described as hopeful. It asks the question of ‘what now’, having identified numerous sources of anxieties around a potential renewed conflict in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH), as helped or fully created by the global project of transitional justice. As this chapter is interested in changes for ‘Never Again’, it explores how activists and practitioners in BiH resist and challenge the practices seen as harmful for non-recurrence, pushing different political communities towards a place of enhanced ontological security with, despite, and perhaps even against transitional justice. In this chapter, there are numerous illustrations of what people can do to challenge and change the post-conflict status quo across different aspects of action at the intersection of truth recovery, memorialisation, and education. The chapter conceptualises and imagines non-recurrence beyond governance as not only resistance but also co-existence, binding, and healing; as a form of work.

Chapter 1 is the introductory chapter. It introduces the reader to the two seemingly complementary global imperatives of ‘dealing with the past’ and ensuring non-repetition of mass atrocities. The chapter sets up a conundrum about transitional justice, ontological (in)securities, and non-recurrence. It then proceeds with a summary of the book’s key questions and core arguments. The chapter subsequently puts forward a brief history of the evolution of transitional justice as a global project, a vehicle of peace as well as security, discussing the claimed intersections between transitional justice and ‘Never Again’. This is followed by brief notes on methodology and contributions of the book. In outlining the contributions, the chapter demonstrates how the book interacts with and enriches scholarly knowledge in the field of transitional justice as well as in ontological security studies. Finally, the chapter introduces the outline of the book with brief chapter summaries.

Chapter 8 is the concluding chapter. It aims to draw wider conclusions about prevention of conflict repetition in and after transitional justice as a field of research, policy, and practice. It summarises where non-recurrence stands theoretically and practically in relation to the book’s findings and stories of ‘Never Again’ as lived experience. Furthermore, it invites the reader to imagine the futures of prevention of conflict repetition and transitional justice, together as well as apart. The chapter ends by signalling how pertinent the ‘Never Again’ promise continues to be in the lives of millions of people around the world and invites further research on the topic that will enrich the discipline with new contexts and perspectives.

Chapter 4 is the first of the three chapters that draw on interviews, observations, and life stories from Bosnia and Herzegovina to narrate a story about what ‘Never Again’ means for the people in this country and formulate a claim about transitional justice’s complicity in the construction of conflict recurrence anxieties. This chapter proposes that the lack of state-sponsored, state-wide truth recovery and a national dialogue about the characteristics, dynamics, and consequences of the war creates anxieties about potential conflict repetition. It then demonstrates how the global project of transitional justice is complicit in creating and sustaining these anxieties. In particular, the chapter shows how the normative hierarchy of transitional justice and the positioning of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia as a key source of the historical status quo helped enhance the building of multiple, competing, and often parallel biographical narratives about the war that prolong anxieties about potential conflict recurrence.