Bosnia–Herzegovina: Domestic Agency and the Inadequacy of the Liberal Peace (original) (raw)
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Between partition and pluralism: the Bosnian jigsaw and an ‘ambivalent peace’
2009
This article argues that the attempted creation of a liberal state in Bosnia and Herzegovina by various international actors has failed to generate legitimacy among the local population. While the Dayton agreements institutionalized ethnic divisions, the post‐Dayton reconstruction process was dominated by Western liberal discourses that have tended to marginalize local voices.
Dayton at twenty: towards new politics in Bosnia- Herzegovina
Southeast European and Black Sea Studies, 2015
The Dayton Agreement continues to be mentioned as a potential model by Western politicians and pundits for various conflicts and sectarian violence around the globe, most recently for Syria, Ukraine and Iraq. Indeed, the Dayton Agreement is rightly associated by Bosnians and foreigners alike with the end of war and the absence of renewed armed conflict. However, for most people in BiH it is also associated with ushering in a political-economic order of inequality and dispossession, not only of the means of dignified livelihood, but of a future and the agentive capacities to shape that future. For this reason, most long-time observers caution against seeing BiH as a 'success story,' or at least recognizing it as one with a morbid after-life. The articles in this collection make clear that negotiations for peace between warring parties may not be the best conditions under which to design a system to secure freedom and prosperity. Indeed, they caution us to draw sharp distinctions between peace accords and social contracts.
2022
The peace-building process in Bosnia and Herzegovina (B&H) has been more successful in the initial post-Dayton phase from 1999 to 2005/06/07. Throughout that period, peace did not mean a mere absence of war; it also reflected various efforts in support of legal, political, and institutional transformation necessary for the state’s recovery. However, the recovery of B&H was less successful at later stages, especially after 2008. Since that year, many have lamented that the country was failing, or is at serious risk of failing. The question is: why did two phases produced different outcomes in B&H and why each phase last for so long? This chapter looks at external realities to answer these questions. It observes the role played by NATO/EU, representing American-led liberal, institutional and rules-based order in Europe with direct influence on policies in B&H from one side, and the role of Russia, representing a rival geopolitical pole with opposing stimulus. It is significant to evaluate how these systems-level factors and determinants outline key pressures on B&H, as well as predict the likely course of B&H in the future.
Post-Dayton (im)possibilities for the Left in Bosnia and Herzegovina
Resetting the Left in Europe: Challenges, Attempts and Obstacles, 2021
This paper aims to analyse the political environment in Bosnia and Herzegovina, in an effort to look for both the reasons for the failures of establishing a new political and social alternative to the ethno-determined narrative, and also the possibilities for overcoming it. Could Bosnia and Herzegovina's Dayton-constructed reality provide a chance for the emergence of a new, radical Left, or does it rather pose the main obstacle to it? Finally, what are the leftist alternatives to the current state of division, a situation that is advantageous to ethno-elites in their position as the new political and economic classes? Where-and what-is the Left in contemporary Bosnia and Herzegovina?
The Dayton Accords ended the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1995. The 10th anniversary gives reason to investigate the post-war period, today's realities and future perspectives. Bosnian authors and international experts express their views on recent developments. Insiders and outsiders, working in the conflict and on its transformation, have been invited to tackle the questions: Which conflict lines mark the present society? Did peacebuilding activities address the underlying causes? What are obstacles for conflict transformation? What are the potentials and limits of international support? What does "civil society" mean in Bosnia and how is it related to statebuilding and democratisation? How can people constructively deal with the past in order to design the future in the region of former Yugoslavia? The book gives an overview on an important research focus of the Berghof Research Center, highlighting the work of its most important cooperation partners.
CORVINUS JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY AND SOCIAL POLICY , 2023
Despite the long years of the political, economic, and military presence of the international community, with its remarkable amount of aid, Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) still suffers from political instability, a lack of economic growth, and high rates of unemployment. The Dayton Peace Accords (DPA), which were signed in 1995 to end the violent war that involved ethnic cleansing and caused unforgettable humanitarian and economic loss, set up highly decentralized state institutions within a divided society. The DPA's vision was based on the neoliberal agenda and strongly emphasized the belief that ethnic harmony and sustainable peace would be achieved only through a reconstruction program involving neoliberal policies. Against the backdrop of this vision, the absence of intergroup cohesion among distinct ethnic collective identities remains a puzzle in the neoliberal state-building agenda of the international community. By highlighting the limitations of state-building as applied to its implementation in BiH, this research aims to plausibly specify the root causes of why state-building initiatives remain ill-equipped to create a higher-level shared collective identity in BiH. To this end, it will critically discuss the (in)effectiveness of the Dayton recipe for BiH for building a functional and sovereign state along with the aforementioned higher-level shared collective identity.
This thesis aims to explore the role of non-nationalist political actors in the Socialist Republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina between 1989 and 1991, a period which coincides with the multi-party transition in Bosnia and in the Yugoslav federation. The research pays particular attention to the two main non-nationalist parties, the League of Communists (SKBiH-SDP) and the Alliance of Reformist Forces of Yugoslavia (SRSJ), although other civic, youth and social-liberal organisations will be also analysed. All these movements claimed to represent the interests of all the citizens, regardless of their national belonging, and defended a secular and non-exclusivist concept for Bosnia-Herzegovina. The research aims, on the one hand, to examine the discourses, practices, and mutual interconnections of the non-nationalist actors; on the other hand, to explain the factors that led these actors to suffer such a heavy defeat in the Bosnian-Herzegovinian transition, in terms of political strategy, of popular support and of votes in the 1990 elections, which are the turning point of the whole process. The three nationalist parties (the Muslim SDA, the Serb SDS and the Croat HDZ) obtained an unexpectedly large triumph, securing 84% of seats in Parliament. The ethnification of political and social sphere that began in 1990, and the complete failure of power-sharing agreements between national parties after the vote, are among the leading factors that led to the Bosnian war within the context of the Yugoslav dissolution. However, at that time, such outcome was far from predictable. The SKBiH was believed to enjoy a certain social consensus and still had a considerable organisational structure; the SRSJ counted on an innovative political project based on liberal Yugoslavism, as well as on the huge charisma as the “saviour of the country” of its leader, the Federal Prime Minister Ante Marković, for his role in introducing economic reforms in the country. The apparently high potential of a non-national option in Bosnia-Herzegovina, commonly depicted as “little Yugoslavia” (where positive assessments of inter-ethnic relations and support for the country’s unity, beyond the commonplaces, were revealed by social studies and polls) calls for a re-examination of the 1989-1991 Bosnian context. How did the Bosnian Communists tackle the 1989-90 wave of global and state-wide events, and the consequent dilemmas of democratisation? How did the liberal-reformist option embodied by Marković operate in the Bosnian scenario? What is the role of the civic, non-regime alternatives: what kind of relationship did they establish with the Communist rule, and how did they face the increasing ethnification? What solutions for the Yugoslav crisis, in its various stages, did these actors envision? Did some alleged “polarisation along ethnic lines” occur in Bosnian society and, if so, did it affect the decline of non-nationalist actors, or was it rather the opposite? To what extent did the events and the actors out of Bosnia-Herzegovina influence the path of the transition in the republic? These are some key questions raised by this research, which aims to offer a fresh perspective on two fields which have been understudied in the (yet very extensive) literature about the dissolution of Yugoslavia: the alternatives to ethno-nationalism, and the late- and post- Communist transition in Bosnia-Herzegovina. This work uses a variety of local sources (press reports; political documents issued by non-nationalist actors; selected interviews with former politicians, activists and observers of that political context – journalists, academics - ) which have been either unused or overlooked by scholars until now. These sources have been collected during several long research stays in Sarajevo and shorter stays in other cities of former Yugoslavia.