The Bosnian police, multi-ethnic democracy, and the race of ‘European civilization’

Abstract

In many social science accounts of the role of law enforcement organizations in relation to race and racism, police are positioned as the agents of racialization projects, directly or indirectly carrying out the state's work of demarcating insiders from outsiders along racial or ethnic lines. This paper will argue that in post-war Bosnia-Herzegovina the Bosnian police themselves have been the targets of a massive racialization project – one undertaken by police reformers from the international community. Furthermore, by entering the fray with Anglo-American paradigms of ethnicity and identity, and by imposing reforms governed by such paradigms, they only differently ‘ethnicized’ the Bosnian police rather than helping them to heal extant divisions. In turn, these imposed solutions trapped internationals and Bosnians alike in a situation in which the presence or absence of appropriate ethnic demographics became, for too long, one of the main proxy measures for democratic policing practice.