‘A Blitzkrieg Against the Republika Srpska’: Securitizing Constitutional Reform in Bosnia and Herzegovina

Abstract

Twenty-six years after the Dayton Peace Agreement, Bosnia and Herzegovina’s constitution has remained largely intact, despite a well-established consensus on the necessity of reforming the post-Dayton system. This article looks at the Prud and Butmir Processes, two of the last unsuccessful attempts at comprehensive constitutional reform, with a focus on the political elite from the Republika Srpska. We use securitization theory, combining content and discourse analyses, to understand how the Prud and Butmir Processes, and by extension the overall constitutional reform, were successfully framed as existential threats to the Republika Srpska by the ethnopolitical elite, justifying the continuation of conflict-perpetuating routines.