Managing mass migration after the war: The case of Sarajevo’s unification in 1996

Abstract

This study analyses the immediate consequences of the transition from war to peace in Sarajevo, the capital city of Bosnia–Herzegovina. It focuses on the management of a tense security situation related to the postwar unification of the city, which was divided between warring belligerents during the Bosnian conflict. Firstly, it shows how ethno-nationalist leaders' visions and practices of ethnic homogenization continued after the end of the war as the result of the Dayton Peace Agreement (DPA). The principal tool of their postwar ‘ethnic engineering’ endeavour was to maintain and generate an atmosphere of fear, based on anticipated discrimination, maltreatment, and persecution from former belligerents. Secondly, this study explores how experienced wartime violence and related transformations in personal identities and social positioning activated latent boundaries between groups and made individuals more disposed to forms of group identification. As a result, the mass migration of people out and into Sarajevo strengthened the grip over the territories assigned to former adversaries by the DPA. This article argues that studying the mutually constitutive roles of the elite's ethnic engineering as well as ordinary people's experiences is necessary to understand how organised wartime violence transformed into structural, institutional, and other less visible forms during the postwar period. Ethno-nationalists’ discourses and points of view demonstrate how wartime violence channelled the postwar lives of Sarajevo's residents into a desired spatio-political arrangement.