The Abyss of Ethnic Division: Two Decades of Discussing War in the Parliament of Bosnia and Herzegovina

Abstract

The article analyses over two decades of parliamentary debates in Bosnia–Herzegovina in order to understand the role of war past in the political reconciliation of Bosnian elites. We show that the discourse of war identified in the Parliament of Bosnia–Herzegovina structurally differs from the mainstream notion of Bosnian politics. The patterns detected in the parliamentary debates indicate that the central conflict exists primarily alongside Bosniak–Serb grievances, with Croat MPs being far less engaged. We argue that the three-sided conflict, often portrayed by literature as the major obstacle to reconciliation in Bosnia–Herzegovina, needs to be re-evaluated as a 2 + 1 model in which Croat MPs play a balancing role in maintaining the Post-Dayton status quo.