post-Dayton Bosnia Research Articles

Issue linkage in security assistance: A pathway to recipient security sector reform

ABSTRACT This article applies the international cooperation concept of issue linkage to identify an overlooked pathway to successful security assistance. We argue that providers can effectively incentivise recipients to implement otherwise undesirable reforms when they explicitly link implementation to another good whose value to the recipient outweighs the costs of the reforms. Drawing on original interviews, we find support for our argument in post-Dayton Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH), where the United States used the promise of NATO’s Partnership for Peace program to incentivise BiH to integrate its three armies.

The Symbolic Language of Film of Post-Dayton Bosnia and Herzegovina in the Cultural Memory of War Trauma – Analysis of the Films Quo Vadis Aida? and In the Land of Blood and Honey

The purpose of this study is to show the impact on the creation of cultural memory in which film, as an element of prosthetic memory, is one of the significant mass media forms of the artistic framework, easily accessible and viral convergent digital environment through the analyzes two films In the Land of Blood and Honey and Quo Vadis, Aida? produces in post-Dayton Bosnia and Herzegovina, which treat the most severe war traumas of raped Bosnian women and genocide against Bosniaks that occurred during aggression against Bosnia and Herzegovina in the period 1992-1995. The analysis of these two films was done according to the concept of Astrid Erll which includes three categories of communication: intra–medial (experiential, mythical, antagonistic, and reflexive), inter-medial (premediation and remediation), and pluri-medial communication creating context for film reception as social-integrative collective phenomenon. The results of the analyses of films show that pluri-medial communication is not fully realized for the constructing and stabilizing the historical narrative as a social integrative phenomenon, and the film as a fictional prosthetic memory is not realized as a cultural memory of war traumas of Bosnian society. The film as a platform of prosthetic memory in the digital age has the potential to bypass rigid, censored, and propaganda of pluri-medial communication emphasized in the mass media of Bosnian entity Republikof Srpska as well as Serbia which disables and limits the context of reception of social-integrative collective phenomenon of war traumas based on historical facts.

Government Formation in Multi-level Settings: Evidence from Post-Dayton Bosnia and Herzegovina

This article theorizes and analyzes the process of government formation in multi-level settings. The post-Dayton Bosnia and Herzegovina is taken as a case study, as it represents an example of a multi-level and consociational political system and an ethnically divided and post-conflict society at the same time. Contrary to the theoretical findings arguing that congruence of ruling coalitions along different levels is desirable in multi-level settings, or where large coalitions in consociational arrangements are formed primarily for seat pooling due to the need to achieve a parliamentary majority, we argue that, in case of Bosnia and Herzegovina, a grand coalition was formed based on electoral power between the moderate and hardline parties. Such strategies were not always compatible with aspirations for congruent coalitions, nor did they always strive for coalitions of convenience.

Curating Vraca Memorial Park: Activism, Counter-Memory, and Counter-Politics

Abstract In 2005, officials designated Vraca Memorial Park in Sarajevo, Bosnia–Herzegovina, as a national monument. However, official disputes over responsibility for curating stalled progress on the site's restoration. In response, activists initiated two campaigns to save and restore Vraca: “Let's Save and Restore Vraca Memorial Park” and a campaign to restore the vandalized monument Ženi borac (woman fighter). Challenging the slide toward ruination, activist curators produced the site as a lively space of politics. Contributing to international political sociology scholarship on memory and its curation, the article develops the concept of activist curatorship through sustained engagement with activist practices of clearing, cleaning, and re-curating at the site between 2005 and 2020. Activist curation is an evolving and open-ended counter-memorial practice engaged by variously situated curators, both ordinary people and museum professionals. At Vraca, activist curating is held together through an alternative mnemonic community that mobilizes the legacy of anti-fascism, while curation is central to how activist interventions endure. Activist curators create space for political commentary on the past and open space for alternative forms of political community to proliferate, those which reach beyond the fragmentation of political, social, and memorial life in post-Dayton Bosnia–Herzegovina.

Citizen endorsement of contested peace settlements: public opinion in post-Dayton Bosnia

ABSTRACT This article asks what shapes public support for comprehensive peace agreements that aim to end violent conflict in deeply divided societies. Although public perceptions are critical for the success of territorial settlements, little scholarly attention has focused on citizen attitudes towards peace in the post-implementation phase. We develop and empirically test a theory of citizen support for peace agreements that relates power-sharing institutions to broader citizens’ security considerations and integrates into this theory the roles of international peacekeeping, ascriptive minority/majority identities and exposure to alternative governance structures (i.e. federal, consociational and centripetalist). We argue that the degree to which a peace treaty provides credible security to citizens determines public support for power-sharing. We test this argument in a least likely case Bosnia Herzegovina. Using data from a 2013 representative survey with 1007 respondents, we examine the determinants of popular support for the Dayton Peace Accords. Our findings suggest that in each of the three main ethnic groups of Bosnia, more people would have voted for Dayton than against it and highlight the mechanisms through which individual and ethnic group security concerns shape support for the country’s post-conflict institutions.

Consociationalism in the post-Dayton Bosnia and Herzegovina

This paper outlines the theoretical underpinnings of the consociational power-sharing approach and its presence in the political system of the post-Dayton Bosnia and Herzegovina. The power-sharing framework used in this study provides insights into the theory of consociationalism as a power-sharing approach and tries to contribute to our understanding of the presence and relevance of this model to the Bosnian political system. The consociational framework emphasises the role of the political elites in providing the political stability and economic prosperity in the heterogeneous societies. It has four main features: grand coalition, proportional representation, segmental autonomy and mutual veto. The functioning and performance of this model depends, to a large extent, on factors that are conducive to elite cooperation. These factors are: population size, balance of power among segments, multiparty system, segmental isolation, nature of social cleavages, overarching loyalties and tradition of elite accommodation. This paper shows that all features of consociationalism exist in the post-Dayton Bosnian political system. However, grand coalitions are always made after the elections and mainly for the distribution of positions in the executive bodies of state apparatus and without any strategic platform and goals to be achieved and accounted for, agreed in advance. Proportionality has been mainly replaced with the parity-giving rise to imbalanced representation in state institutions. Segmental autonomy has been misconceived and veto power has been used to block all legislation beneficial to the state.

Fenomen apstinencije u demokratskim izborima s osvrtom na Opće izbore u Bosni i Hercegovini

Abstinence is a conscious and voluntary waiver of one original political right, the right to vote. Often, the very act of abstinence is understood as a kind of election, as an expression of disagreement with political alternatives, candidates and parties participating in the elections. Abstinence is close to the notion of apolitical, that is the disinterest and indifference of citizens, of individuals and groups to politics and participation in the political life of the community. The paper analyzes the difference between abstinence in elections and apoliticality and attempts to point to the problem of increasing abstinence from voting in general elections in post-Dayton Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Dejtonska i postdejtonska koncepcija upravne vlasti Bosne i Hercegovine - dvadeset i pet godina nakon Dejtonskog mirovnog sporazuma

The Dayton Peace Agreement of 1995 established today's Bosnia and Herzegovina as a multiple, complex, specific, and unique state with international legal subjectivity with regard to state law, constitutional law, and administrative law. As a result, the form of socio-political order such as it exists in Bosnia and Herzegovina is unknown in modern political systems. From the initial minimum competences granted to state-level institutions as regulated by the Dayton Constitution, there have been, over the course of twenty-five years, significant amendments made in this respect. With the intervention of the Office of the High Representative (OHR) into the constitutional and legal framework, and, to a lesser extent, by consensual transfer of jurisdiction from the entity level to the state level, administrative capacities of Bosnia and Herzegovina have been strengthened in organisational and functional terms, thus significantly derogating the respective administrative authority of the entities of the Republic of Srpska and the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina. This is accompanied by strong hyperinflation of the administrative bodies and organisations at the state level, mostly of unstable legitimacy, which, along with the existence of administrative structures at the remaining thirteen levels of government, classifies the post-Dayton Bosnia and Herzegovina as a complex, segmented, and dysfunctional state. The subject of this paper is an analysis of the Dayton and post-Dayton conceptions of the administrative power of Bosnia and Herzegovina twenty five years since its establishment. The paper, using methods of qualitative analysis of legal acts, legal exegesis, as well as comparative and axiological methods, and relying on the theories and conceptions of the distribution of competences in a complex state, seeks to present the Dayton and post-Dayton conceptions of the administrative power in Bosnia and Herzegovina from a twenty-five year distance. The basic research hypothesis is that states with complex organisational structure, such as Bosnia and Herzegovina, require decentralised organisational and material structures in the executive branch both from the aspect of functionality and economy and the aspect of their sustainability.

Bosna i Hercegovina - država ili protektorat?

In this paper, through the analysis of the normative framework for the operation of these institutions, but also their activity, and the application of international standards in BiH, we will try to find an answer to the question of whether Bosnia and Herzegovina is a state or a protectorate. A lot has been achieved through the implementation of the Dayton Agreement, but most of it was due to the activity of the international community. According to the General Framework Agreement for Peace, this activity does not envisage a protectorate. However, especially in the first years of the functioning of post-Dayton Bosnia and Herzegovina, many constitutional and legal theorists tried to define the legal nature of Bosnia and Herzegovina's dependence on the international community in certain elements (which later softened). The results showed no unambiguous answer. In the last fifteen years, this issue has moved to the periphery of interest in domestic and regional constitutional and legal science. But it seems the time to re-establish it has come, especially in light of the announcement of changes in the attitudes of key actors in the international community towards Bosnia and Herzegovina. We are also interested in the issue related to this central research, which is the degree of sovereignty of the state of Bosnia and Herzegovina inside and outside, given the Dayton construct of the international community's involvement in the constitutional and political system of Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Language Intermediaries and Local Agency: Peacebuilding, Translation/Interpreting and Political Disempowerment in ‘Mature’ Post-Dayton Bosnia–Herzegovina

The peace negotiations ending the 1992–95 Bosnian war established a constitutional system of ethnic power-sharing giving international peacebuilding a significant role in post-conflict Bosnia’s governance and economy. This indefinite mission depended – like any other intervention where foreigners work across linguistic boundaries – on interlinguistic mediation by locally-recruited translators/interpreters, an aspect of knowledge production that even current research into peacebuilding’s micropolitics often neglects. On an individual level, their frequently-overlooked agency was integral to peacebuilding practice. Yet theorizing their agency must also acknowledge the macrosocial level, where critics argue the post-war constitution has stripped Bosnians of political agency, foreclosing political participation as anything but ethnic subjects corresponding to three institutionalized ethnic identities. The entrenched, growing disconnect between political elites and the public, expressed through social protest in 2014, foregrounds agency and dis/empowerment in Bosnian society more sharply than pre-2014 research accounted for, revealing further interlinkages between international peacebuilding and domestic political contestation.

Letting Nature Swallow the Past: Politics, Memory, and Abandoned Monuments in Postwar Bosnia and Herzegovina

AbstractDuring the 1992–1995 war in Bosnia and Herzegovina, the built physical landscape and places of cultural heritage were deliberately targeted and destroyed as part of the strategy of ethnic cleansing. The 1995 Dayton Peace Agreement recognized the potential for cultural heritage to contribute to postwar reconciliation and rebuilding; Annex 8 established a commission to preserve national monuments. This paper examines the politics of cultural heritage in post-Dayton Bosnia and the ways in which it has been (ab)used to propagate a narrow, exclusivist identity. It focuses on the struggles to control the Commission to Preserve National Monuments as well as the fates of two monuments in particular—Vraca Memorial Park and the Partisans’ Memorial Cemetery—whose abandonment signifies the wider struggles over memory and identity in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Navigating Consociationalism's Afterlives: Women, Peace and Security in Post-Dayton Bosnia-Herzegovina

This article revisits the gendered implications of the Dayton peace settlement in Bosnia-Herzegovina and assesses possibilities for the meaningful integration of the Women, Peace and Security agenda into the consociational structures and post-conflict political agenda. This article outlines how the reification and legitimization of ethno-nationalist power over two decades of Dayton has restricted the terrain for gender activism. A critical assessment of post-Dayton governance reveals an unanticipated stratification of the agreement. International pressure for the stability of the peace settlement further constrains the complex task of addressing the gendered legacies of conflict and conflict transformation. In this context, local and international efforts to navigate Dayton's afterlives through gender activism act as a powerful reminder that Bosnia-Herzegovina's unfulfilled peace must remain a priority in research, activist and policymaking agendas.

The Orao Affair: The Key to Military Integration in Post-Dayton Bosnia and Herzegovina

ABSTRACTFollowing Dayton, three ethnocentric armies remained in Bosnia and Herzegovina, presenting a significant obstacle to the consolidation of the multi-ethnic Bosnian state. This article examines the development of the separate armies and the reform process that ultimately unified them. It will contend that such progress would not have been possible without the political fallout that followed the revelation that a Bosnian company had been conducting trade with Iraq in contravention of a UN embargo prior to the 2003 invasion. Faced with the threat of international sanctions, local and international actors moved rapidly to overhaul the defense sector, resulting in the military integration of the three armed forces and the creation of a single army answerable to the Bosnian state.

Cannibal states, empty bellies: Protest, history and political imagination in post-Dayton Bosnia

In February 2014, Bosnia-Herzegovina witnessed its largest and most dramatic wave of civic protests since the end of the 1992–1995 war and the signing of Dayton Peace Accords. Confrontations with the police and the destruction of dozens of government buildings subsequently gave way to the formation of plenums – town hall assemblies – where protesters collectively articulated their grievances against the country's corrupt and deeply unpopular political authorities. The plenums emphasized Bosnia's pressing problems of widespread unemployment, rising poverty and corruption, and in so doing sidelined the ossified nationalist rhetoric and identity politics. This article analyzes the main representations of protests, and the sociopolitical and economic pressures that helped usher in this massive public uprising. We demonstrate how protesters sought to break out of the impasses of post-Dayton ethnic politics by actively recuperating and representing alternative visions of participatory politics and popular sovereignty associated with socialist-era imaginaries and embodied in the plenum. We argue that these efforts signal the emergence of a new kind of prefigurative politics that provide alternative practices of political organization, decision-making, and sociability in Bosnia and beyond.

“Islamic cafés” and “Sharia dating:” Muslim youth, spaces of sociability, and partner relationships in Bosnia-Herzegovina

The paper explores forms of sociability and partner relationships among pious young Muslims in Sarajevo with a focus on the emic concepts of Islamic cafés (hospitality establishments perceived to operate according to Islamic moral principles) and Sharia dating (premarital relationships perceived to be sanctioned by Sharia). It draws on 10 months of ethnographic fieldwork conducted in different spaces of Islamic worship, learning, and sociability. This paper places the renewed interest in Islam within the context of a post-Dayton Bosnia characterized by complex and impractical government structures, lingering post-war grievances, and a brutal transition to a neoliberal capitalist economy. Although it acknowledges the continuing relevance of Islam as a resource for Bosniak nation building, it suggests treating the Muslim faith community as overlapping but distinct from the Bosniak community. By focusing on gendered interaction and partner-seeking strategies, this paper explores how young members of this faith community contextually negotiate their Islamic beliefs with mainstream local expectations of conventional behavior. The paper argues that believers’ varying responses to this predicament can be observed as an example of the localization of Islam, but they do not constitute a return to local, traditional gender roles and marriage practices, nor are they an introduction of foreign cultural patterns.

On the Other Side of an Ethnocratic State? lgbt Activism in Post-Dayton Bosnia and Herzegovina

This paper discusses the developmental dynamics of Bosnian and Herzegovinian (BiH) lgbt (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender) activism in the context of the European integration (Europeanization) process. Although the official politics of BiH authorities aspires towards the European Union (eu), the country’s political deadlock and the steady position of the potential eu candidate, have created conditions in which activism operates with declarative and financial support from European organizations while having very limited impact on policies and local institutions. In this set-up, lgbt activism and non-heterosexual sexualities are placed between the specific local context of an ethnocratic state and the Western European narratives of lgbt rights and freedoms. I draw upon a range of primary sources, including the material obtained through a series of semi-structured interviews with activists, to argue that, for the time being, the lgbt movement in BiH lacks either governmental, political or societal support. However, marginal sites of non-heteronormative resistance could potentially appear as a departure point for creating an intersectionality-sensitive political platform from which to struggle for a general civic and political equality and institutional accountability.

From Dayton to Brussels via Tuzla: post-2014 economic restructuring as europeanization discourse/practice in Bosnia and Herzegovina

The political and economic transformations of peacebuilding and state-building efforts in post-Dayton Bosnia–Herzegovina (BiH) have resulted in a dysfunctional, divided and impoverished country in social crisis. Both international and local political elites have tried to manage the crisis, the former through financial aid in combination with externally imposed measures and the latter through institutionalized ethnic nationalism and clientelism; both approaches were made possible by the Dayton Peace Accords. Articulating a demand for greater social justice, the 2014 protests and plenums rejected both ethnic division and the corruption of post-Dayton political economy. This was rightfully seen as a threat by most Bosnian politicians, and appeared to represent an opening for a new reform agenda by the EU. This was most visible in its ‘Compact for Growth and Jobs’, which aimed to revitalize BiH’s path to European integration. We argue that the Compact and the responses to it offer a useful diagnostic to gauge how the post-Dayton political field has shifted since the events of 2014. In this article, we analyse the Compact and its critics, point out their blind spots and discuss what this reveals about the possibility for wider social change in the wake of the 2014 protests and plenums – in other words, thinking Bosnia’s future beyond Dayton and Brussels, via Tuzla.

‘Who sows hunger, reaps rage’: on protest, indignation and redistributive justice in post-Dayton Bosnia-Herzegovina

This paper reflects upon the socio-economic legacies of Dayton Peace Accords, and the ways in which these legacies were brought into focus by the 2014 Bosnian Uprising. This wave of protests, which started in February of 2014 in the industrial city of Tuzla but quickly spread all over the country, was the (un)anticipated result of rising popular indignation over high unemployment, economic decline and general sense of futurelessness. Protesters attacked both symbolic and literal centres of power, targeting local political elites whose self-serving behaviours and insolent attitudes helped deepen the post-war political and economic crisis. Combining long-term ethnographic research of post-war grassroots politics with more recent investigations of the effects of post-war deindustrialization, this paper anchors the new politics of indignation in Bosnia in its broader historical context. The 2014 protests, this paper argues, demarkate Dayton Bosnia as a postsocialist space, deeply transformed by ongoing socio-economic restructuring, and changing conceptions of political solidarity, social justice and political action.

Determinants of mediation success in post-conflict Bosnia: a focused comparison

The main goal of this study is to look at factors determining mediation success in post-conflict environments. More specifically, the authors focus on the level of involvement of the mediator in a post-conflict setting and argue that relational mediation strategies should fare better in such environments. A most similar systems comparison of the European Union/USA and Turkish mediation efforts in Bosnia–Herzegovina, both of which started in October 2009, renders support for the authors’ argument. Their analysis of these two cases suggests that Turkey's relational mediation strategy delivered concrete outcomes in post-Dayton Bosnia compared to the structural intervention style adopted by the European Union/USA. The authors conclude that a relational mediation strategy facilitates the achievement of constructive solutions by helping third parties to make broader assessments of the conflict situation, and by offering flexible options in issue selection and process design.

In “No Man’s Land”: Libraries in Post-Dayton Bosnia and Herzegovina

This paper presents the complex situation that libraries in Bosnia and Herzegovina face and suggests possible avenues for improvement. After brief coverage of the history of libraries in the country from the Middle Ages to the communist period, the paper focuses on the devastation that occurred during the war that took place in Bosnia and Herzegovina between 1992 and 1995, which was formally brought to an end by the Dayton Peace Agreement. The problems that libraries have faced in the current period of peace cannot be understood without reference to this episode of the war. The most difficult problems they face today are the lack of adequate legislation, the politicization of library activities, and the war devastation. In addition, at the beginning of 2014, the library and information system of Bosnia and Herzegovina, which is based on a computer program for cooperative cataloging, was split into two parts. The fragmentation of contemporary Bosnian and Herzegovinian society is evidenced by the damage and division that politics has managed to effect, which the war did not.