This article explores the causes of political stability in deeply divided societies. Building upon literature on consociationalism and post-conflict management, in the case of post-Dayton Bosnia and ...Herzegovina, we determine periods of political stability and explain their causes. According to the widespread arguments on BiH, consociational institutional design has replicated and cemented deep ethnic cleavages and bolstered centrifugal and nationalistic politics, while external actors tried simultaneously to make the state stabile and functional through their interventionist involvement. When the external actors mitigated their interventionalist approach in early 2006, the political situation began to deteriorate. The goal of the article is to explain periods of political stability by identifying the causes arising from the interaction between external actors and local elites within a constraining structural and institutional context. It argues that, alongside external actors, the political stability depends on the type of governing parties i.e. whether they are moderate or hardlines.
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.
Bosnia and Herzegovina remains a country with a number of deeply rooted structural challenges, which are linked to the political and the broader social sphere. The current paper provides an overview ...on a range of key factors that have led to the country's fragility. During the analysis we start with the concerns related to multi-ethnic democracies, and specifically to Bosnia and Herzegovina's unique state structure. The latter was founded in 1995, in line with the so-called Dayton Peace Agreement. We also touch upon variables that are connected to the economic and social fields, by discussing indicators that are related to labor market distortions or the level of corruption. The study provides an overview on Bosnia and Herzegovina's position referring to international fragility indexes. Based on the analysis, we find various aspects that raise concerns regarding Bosnia and Herzegovina's fragility.
The turbulent events in the territory of the SFRY and in the Socialist Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina in the 1990s can be observed and analyzed from historical, legal and constitutional ...perspective. These events are still topical and highly important to historians, politicologists, and constitutionalists, since they triggered the creation of the Republic of Srpska, first as a state of the Serbian people of Bosnia and Herzegovina, and later as a constitutional entity and an integral part of a complex state of Bosnia and Herzegovina. At the beginning of the 1990s, the Serbian people in Bosnia and Herzegovina wanted to preserve the federal state (SFRY), in its federal form of government. Legal and legitimate representatives of the Serbs advocated for changing the statehood status of SR Bosnia and Herzegovina, in compliance with the constitution of that time. The secession of Slovenia and Croatia triggered the dissolution of the SFRY, which inevitably resulted in the dissolution of the constitutional order of SR Bosnia and Herzegovina. The lack of consensus among the constitutive peoples of SR Bosnia and Herzegovina on the change of the statehood status and the form of its future organisation resulted in the outbreak of a civil war. The dissolution of SR Bosnia and Herzegovina institutions and its territorial organisation eventually resulted in the creation of the Republic of Srpska, and then the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Exposed to strong political, military and economic pressure during the civil war and in its aftermath (during the peace-building negotiations in Dayton), the Republic of Srpska accepted to become a constituent part of the B&H Federation. The Dayton Peace Agreement (Accords) affirmed the independence of Bosnia and Herzegovina, its constitutional order, and its bipartite structure composed of the Republic of Srpska and the B&H Federation, as two equal constitutive and state-building entities. In the past 27 years since its creation, the Constitution of the Republic of Srpska has sustained a series of changes, for various reasons. When analyzing the status of the Republic of Srpska in Bosnia and Herzegovina, its current position and loyalty toward a common state are based on adherence to the Dayton Peace Agreement and an endeavour to preserve its political, national, ethical, cultural and every other form of survival, identity and subjectivity. The European integrations cannot and should not be the reason for constitutional changes and for arriving at solutions contrary to the Dayton agreement.
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.
Through this longitudinal study of a historically significant, complex, conflicted and evolving macromarketing space, Bosnia’s Arizona Market, the authors reveal that marketing systems are not merely ...random artifacts of human behavior; rather, they are adaptive, purposeful, can be pernicious and/or provisioning, and ultimately—if they are to reflect our humanity—must be well integrated into other prosocial systems to affect the best possible outcomes for all stakeholders. By engaging with a marketing system in a post-conflict, divided society, we are better able to understand the genesis and evolution of markets and marketing systems; the relationships among war economy, peace accords, and the ways that post-war marketing systems create community, provide for community needs, and create new vulnerabilities for some community members. The authors conclude with a discussion of implications for sustainable peace and prosperity in Bosnia and in other post-conflict marketing systems, and suggestions for future research.
Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) is a complex state union composed of two entities and three constituent peoples. This fact is a consequence of the 1992-95 civil war, which changed the ethnic structure ...of BiH. From the institutional perspective, the two entities were given in Dayton a high level of political autonomy. The so-called “entity veto” was created in Dayton, and it is implemented by many key political bodies – from the House of Peoples and the House of Representatives of the Parliamentary Assembly of BiH to the Presidency of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Beside that, it is argued that BiH lacks the “internal recognition” and many of the political actors advocate radical constitutional changes which would disrupt or even completely change the “Dayton” architecture of BiH. Because of that it is not surprising that secessionist rhetoric exists in BiH’s political sphere. The secessionist rhetoric in the Republic of Srpska (RS) will be analysed in this paper and possible secessionist strategy will be described. The aim of this paper is to determine whether secessionist arguments, rhetoric and possibly politics represent an integral strategy and coherent political platform, or whether they are just generated for daily political purposes. Authors will also try to determine whether this secessionist rhetoric is “institutionalised”, i.e. whether it is present in official documents of RS institutions and/or major political parties, or just in the activities of social movements and/or individual political subjects.
The wave of ethnic conflict that has recently swept across parts
of Eastern Europe, the former Soviet Union, and Africa has led many
political observers to fear that these conflicts are contagious.
...Initial outbreaks in such places as Bosnia, Chechnya, and Rwanda,
if not contained, appear capable of setting off epidemics of
catastrophic proportions. In this volume, David Lake and Donald
Rothchild have organized an ambitious, sophisticated exploration of
both the origins and spread of ethnic conflict, one that will be
useful to policymakers and theorists alike. The editors and
contributors argue that ethnic conflict is not caused directly by
intergroup differences or centuries-old feuds and that the collapse
of the Soviet Union did not simply uncork ethnic passions long
suppressed. They look instead at how anxieties over security,
competition for resources, breakdown in communication with the
government, and the inability to make enduring commitments lead
ethnic groups into conflict, and they consider the strategic
interactions that underlie ethnic conflict and its effective
management. How, why, and when do ethnic conflicts either diffuse
by precipitating similar conflicts elsewhere or escalate by
bringing in outside parties? How can such transnational ethnic
conflicts best be managed? Following an introduction by the
editors, which lays a strong theoretical foundation for approaching
these questions, Timur Kuran, Stuart Hill, Donald Rothchild, Colin
Cameron, Will H. Moore, and David R. Davis examine the diffusion of
ideas across national borders and ethnic alliances. Without
disputing that conflict can spread, James D. Fearon, Stephen M.
Saideman, Sandra Halperin, and Paula Garb argue that ethnic
conflict today is primarily a local phenomenon and that it is
breaking out in many places simultaneously for similar but largely
independent reasons. Stephen D. Krasner, Daniel T. Froats, Cynthia
S. Kaplan, Edmond J. Keller, Bruce W. Jentleson, and I. William
Zartman focus on the management of transnational ethnic conflicts
and emphasize the importance of domestic confidence-building
measures, international intervention, and preventive diplomacy.
Abstract
From the perspective of Bosnia-Herzegovina (BiH) today, the legacy of the Dayton Peace Agreement (DPA) remains mixed. The dominant view is that the DPA is the origin of its political ...impasse, economic stagnation, and failed nation-building. Yet, it is indisputable that DPA has been successful in preventing the recurrence of a major violent ethnic conflict in BiH. More recently, the failures of Syrian peace talks to yield a durable settlement have evoked the lessons from the DPA. However, most analyses have concluded the parallels with the Bosnian war and its resolution are misplaced given the complexity and severity of the war in Syria. This article argues for a more nuanced approach to distilling the Dayton legacy, particularly when it is employed as a historical analogy. It highlights the usefulness of the DPA as an analogy for successful conflict termination, while offering lessons about the pitfalls of externally imposed consociational arrangements.
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