Suchergebnisse

This text is a review of a book by Dr. Muhamed Borogovac The War in Bosnia and Herzegovina: How Genocide Was Rewarded and Republika Srpska Established, Bloomington: Xlibris, 2019 (printed in USA).

Every war brings its share of missing persons, whether military or civilian. And every individual reported missing is then sought by a family anxiously awaiting news of their loved one. These families cannot be left in such a state of anguish. For the truth, however painful it may be, is preferable to the torture of uncertainty and false hope. In Bosnia and Herzegovina civilians were especially affected by a conflict in which belligerents pursued a policy of ethnic cleansing by expelling minority groups from certain regions. Thousands of people who disappeared in combat or were thrown into prison, summarily executed or massacred, are still being sought by their families.

Three years have passed since the beginning of the war in Bosnia. Amidst the reports of human suffering and atrocities, another tragic loss has gone largely unnoted—the destruction of the written record of Bosnia's past.On 25 August 1992, Bosnia's National and University Library, a handsome Moorish-revival building built in the 1890s on the Sarajevo riverfront, was shelled and burned. Before the fire, the library held 1.5 million volumes, including over 155,000 rare books and manuscripts; the country's national archives; deposit copies of newspapers, periodicals and books published in Bosnia; and the collections of the University of Sarajevo. Bombarded with incendiary grenades from Serbian nationalist positions across the river, the library burned for three days; it was reduced to ashes with most of its contents. Braving a hail of sniper fire, librarians and citizen volunteers formed a human chain to pass books out of the burning building. Interviewed by ABC News, one of them said: "We managed to save just a few very precious books. Everything else burned down. And a lot of our heritage, national heritage, lay down there in ashes." Aida Buturovic, a librarian in the National Library's exchanges section, was shot to death by a sniper while attempting to rescue books from the flames.

Since the signing of the Dayton Peace Agreement in December 1995, the state of Bosnia and Herzegovina has undergone specific processes of social and political development. In the period of post-Dayton political development of Bosnia and Herzegovina, important reforms were carried out which enabled not only the consolidation of peace in Bosnia and Herzegovina in the past 25 years, but also the building of institutions of the state of Bosnia and Herzegovina. In this process, the role of the international community and the European Union, expressed through the High Representative for Bosnia and Herzegovina and the EU Special Representative in Bosnia and Herzegovina, appears as a special form of international intervention within the geopolitical framework for building andconsolidating peace under the Dayton Peace Agreement. In the first years of the implementation of the Dayton Peace Agreement, important elements of Bosnian statehood were established by decisions and laws imposed by the High Representatives for Bosnia and Herzegovina on the basis of the Bonn powers. Bosnia and Herzegovina has been given national symbols: a flag, a single currency, as well as common license plates. The constitutions of the entities are harmonized with the Constitution of Bosnia and Herzegovina. The Court of Bosnia and Herzegovina was established. Defense and intelligence reforms have been implemented in Bosnia and Herzegovina. The competencies of state-level institutions have been expanded and the number of ministries in the Council of Ministers of Bosnia and Herzegovina has increased. Comprehensive reforms have also been implemented in the process of meeting the criteria for BiH's full membership in the European Union. The process of European integration, through broad political, economic and reforms in the field of justice and the rule of law has in itself generated positive social changes. In the further integration process, Bosnia and Herzegovina will implement 14 priorities from the Opinion of the European Commission. Due to the complexity of building a political consensus on important issues that determine the stable political development and European future of Bosnia and Herzegovina, the political and technical assistance of the EU Special Representative is necessary in order for Bosnia and Herzegovina to receive a recommendation to open accession negotiations by the end of 2021.

This dissertation explores the 'socio-cultural dilemma' facing international peacebuilders in war-torn societies through a case study of the post-conflict process in Bosnia and Herzegovina. This is done with the help of a typological approach of the grid-group Cultural Theory framework, which defines four social solidarities – or ideal type cultures – of individualism, egalitarianism, fatalism and hierarchy. A central argument in the thesis is that international intervention is culturally individualistic and/or egalitarian, thus socio-culturally unviable in war-torn societies, which are usually dominated by hierarchical and fatalist social solidarities. This underlying socio-cultural conflict is used to trace the Bosnian post-war process, where the relationship between the managing international institution – the Office of the High Representative of the International Community – and the local nationalist elites repeatedly changed in response to the failure of international policies to produce the desired result, namely broad socio-cultural change in the local politics and society. Four different periods in the process are identified: 1) 'economic conditionality', 2) 'Bonn Powers', 3) 'the concept of ownership' and 4) 'Euro-Atlantic integration'. Each period is defined by different culturally biased policies, supported by corresponding social relations and strategic behaviours. The individualistic and egalitarian biased approaches usually resulted in failures, as they were not viable in the local socio-cultural context. After adapting to the local context, new viable approaches produced results in specific policy areas, but at the cost of unwanted side-effects in the form of reinforcement of dominant social solidarities. The result was therefore contrary to the broad goal of the process, which was to transform the local political culture. In other words, the defining and re-defining of the OHR's role in the Bosnian process was a consequence of the dilemma of having to make an unsatisfactory choice: either to adapt to the way the political game is played in the Bosnian socio-cultural context in order to achieve effectiveness in the policy process, or to stay true to the peacebuilders' own cultural biases and attempt to change the local socio-cultural accordingly. In essence, it is argued, this is the socio-cultural viability dilemma that is inherent in international peacebuilding. In unveiling of the socio-cultural viability dilemma, the dissertation explores central problems in the Bosnian post-conflict process. It provides a credible explanation to a number of hitherto unexplained difficulties and paradoxes experienced in Bosnia. It concludes that the international intervention in this particular case was neither a success story nor a failure per se, but one which failed to properly address the dilemma of socio-cultural viability. The key conclusions regarding peacebuilding in general are that there should be a greater under¬¬standing of socio-cultural issues in peacebuilding in order to better manage the socio-cultural viability dilemma. Practically, this means that international peacebuilders need to adapt to local context and strive towards the goal of local ownership of the process. The aim should be to make the intervention as viable as possible, as quickly as possible, to boldly implement policies that promote changes in the local socio-cultural context, and to withdraw only after the necessary conditions for local ownership are in place.

Ten years after Dayton corruption and good governance rather than ethnic nationalism are widely alleged to be the central problems facing international attempts to construct capable and legitimate Bosnian state institutions. Political corruption substitutes private interests for public interests and in so doing undermines trust in public institutions, which depends on the fair and equal treatment of all citizens. In prioritizing anti-corruption and good governance initiatives, the international administration in Bosnia reflects an increasing international focus on these aspects as crucial to state-building initiatives. This paper considers the anti-corruption policies developed in the past decade and assesses the extent to which anti-corruption and good governance practices, developed by Bosnia's international administrators, have, in fact, rebuilt trust in Bosnia's public institutions. (Ethnopolitics)

Defence date: 21 October 2016 ; Examining Board: Professor László Bruszt, European University Institute (Supervisor) ; Professor Donatella della Porta, formerly EUI, Scuola Normale Superiore ; Professor Florian Bieber, University of Graz ; Professor Adam Fagan, Queen Mary University of London ; This thesis examines the occurrence and spread of contentious collective action within a country, Bosnia Herzegovina, that historically does not bear a solid tradition of mobilization. In particular, the study focuses on the rise of mobilizations that transcend traditional ethno-nationalist cleavages, and involve individuals and groups that activate an identity other than the ethno-national one, still dominant in the Bosnian Herzegovinian society. I adopted the expression "beyond ethnicity" to label this type of mobilization, stressing that individuals and challenger groups involved in the protest overcame the centrality of ethnicity as social construct, privileging another commonality between individuals that deliberately superseded, and sometimes clashed with, the dominant ethno-national categories that had crystallized in the 1990s. This new, overarching identity is often grounded on feelings of deprivation. Informed by a five-year empirical research in the country, the study explores the variation in spatial and social scale of contention across three waves of mobilization that occurred between 2012 and 2014 and took divergent paths, despite similar socioeconomic structural conditions. Through a comparative case study approach, the thesis analyses three waves of protests, taken as manifestations of "mobilization beyond ethnicity": "The Park is Ours" protests (2012), spawned from the defence of a public park of Banja Luka; the mobilization for civil rights of the children, which became known as #JMBG (2013); and the protests that erupted in Tuzla triggered by local workers, which turned into what activists defined as a "Social Uprising" (2014). The study explains why the waves of mobilization occurred between 2012 and 2014 spread unevenly across the national territory, involved diverse social groups, and entailed different degrees of disruption. The findings of this research demonstrate that a combination of factors both internal and external to the movements made the territorial and social shift upward more likely, and influenced the organizational patterns and action repertoires of the challengers. These factors are pre-existing networks among movement organizers; the resonance of "beyond ethnic" frames in certain cultural milieus; and a conducive political opportunity structure. In the conclusions, the thesis elucidates the implications of these findings for the study of social movements in the post-Yugoslav space.

El acuerdo de paz para Bosnia-Herzegovina fue concertado, en Dayton (EE.UU.), el 21 de noviembre de 1995, y firmado, en París, el 14 de diciembre de 1995, por los presidentes, respectivamente, de la República de Bosnia-Herzegovina, de la República Federal de Yugoslavia y de la República de Croacia. Dicho acuerdo pusofin a las hostilidades en el territorio de ex Yugoslavia.El acuerdo de paz consta de un acuerdo marco general de paz en Bosnia-Herzegovina y de varios anexos. En este voluminoso acuerdo figuran algunos artículos que incumben directamente a las actividades del Comité Internacional de la Cruz Roja en ex Yugoslavia. Reproducimos, en la Revista, el texto de esas disposiciones.

Examines why it took so long for the international community to develop a coherent Bosnia strategy. Discussion begins with a look at 1992-1995 diplomatic overtures & peace initiatives preceding Dayton. In 1995, the UN peacekeeping force transformed shifted its mission to peace enforcement in response to Bosnian Serb provocations, while the success of Croat & joint Croat-Bosnian government campaigns resulted in significant territorial losses for the Serbs. With the escalation of NATO military intervention, the 1992 international commitment not to endorse militarily gained territorial gains was jettisoned in 1995, & with it, a moral price was exacted in the form of reverse ethnic cleansing against the Serbs. The shuttle diplomacy of Richard Holbrooke & his negotiating team conducted in this radically different environment are described; the death of American negotiator Robert Frasure in a road accident is noted. Holbrooke's rather unilateral seven-point framework strategy is delineated; his shuttle diplomacy yielded several important milestones. Attention turns to detailing the negotiation of the Dayton peace agreement. Some remarks are offered on whether the US government's forceful, unilateral endgame approach was appropriate. J. Zendejas