Suchergebnisse

Bosnia & Herzegovina (B&H) is notoriously hard to govern. Scarred from a bloody war in the 1990s after the collapse of Yugoslavia, the country's constitutional order emerged in international peace talks in the United States. What later became famous as the Dayton Peace Agreement (DPA) might have stopped the war but, in our opinion, sowed the seeds for complex democratic problems today. As we will show in this text, the ECtHR's judgments represent a false hope for democracy in B&H, because ethnopolitical parties in B&H will not agree on how to implement the ECtHR's judgments and the Office of the High Representative will not take a more active role in this context. We therefore argue against an earlier contribution on this blog by Woelk (2023), who suggested that the solution for the implementation of the ECtHR's judgments should come from within the country, as we will show, ethnopolitical actors do not have a real interest in implementing these judgments. To put it bluntly, change from within is, alas, pie in the sky. It is much more likely that nothing changes and the powers that are remain the powers that will be.

Résumé L'accord de paix de Dayton qui mit fin la guerre en Bosnie-Herzégovine amena le pays vers une double transition, du socialisme à la démocratie et de la guerre à la paix. De manière à concilier les groupes ethniques et leurs projets en temps de guerre pour l'indépendance et l'organisation de la Bosnie-Herzégovine, l'arrangement proposait le projet d'un état unifié mais néanmoins très faible, avec deux entités conservant les compétences de gouvernance les plus importantes. Dans la première phase de sa double transition, la Bosnie fut paralysée par une société imparfaite et hautement divisé politiquement et économiquement parlant, un manque d'esprit constitutionnel et de justice indépendante, mais aussi une bureaucratie d'état divisée et corrompue. Avec une telle situation, le pays devint un semi-protectorat sous la direction d'un représentant international trop puissant et une pratique de la démocratie vide de tout contenu. La deuxième phase de développement du pays a par contre été marquée par d'importants développements pouvant mener à une Bosnie-Herzégovine stable et démocratique. Pendant que les divisions sur la mise en place de la Bosnie refaisaient parfois surface, le soutien de l'intégration à l'UE a fourni aux citoyens de Bosnie un projet commun pour le futur de leur pays. Avec la disparition graduelle d'un OHR à l'autorité élargie accompagné par un engagement et une influence grandissante de l'UE, les conditions sont réunis pour permettre à la Bosnie d'exercer un contrôle sur sa double transition. Dans ce contexte, un processus d'intégration ajusté à la double transition de la Bosnie garantissant à terme une adhésion à l'UE, est la condition fondamentale d'une Bosnie-Herzégovine stable viable et démocratique dans une région des Balkans Occidentaux elle aussi stable et viable.

Post-war identification is a unique ethnographic study of the remaking of post-war life in a small ethnically mixed town in Bosnia Herzegovinia. During the war in the 1990's the local Muslim population was expelled, but today has returned to live alongside former enemies. These people are trying to piece together a life from broken fragments that consists of war-related traumas, nationalist propaganda, ruined economies, disappointment, and memories of pre-war life. In this shattered world Torsten Kolind identifies an everyday based, anti-nationalistic counterdiscourse strongly rooted in pre-war life. This resistance is seldom outspoken, but consists rather of a steady insistence on not using ethnic or national categories in identifying oneself and/or others. In a world of despair, the Muslim everyday counterdiscourse gives hope for future coexistence, and points to the intriguing fact that reconcilement often develops from the bottom up, rather than in the political corridors of power. Torsten Kolind's focus on everyday resistance is a highly relevant contribution to contemporary anthropological discussions of the relation between discourse, power, nationalism, and violence.

"Human Trafficking is a phenomenon often observed in post-conflict environments and as such can be analysed from the stand of peace and conflict studies. Trafficking in women for the purpose of forced prostitution has been a serious problem in post-war Bosnia and Herzegovina. A prominent approach is to look at the international personnel as a factor influencing the fast growing sex industry. I argue that such a view is too short-sighted and that social factors play a vital role for the degradation of women to objects. The militarisation of society and a hatred of women before, during and after the war facilitated the trafficking in women. After having looked at the phenomenon of trafficking and reasons for women to migrate, I then examine the factors that helped to make Bosnia and Herzegovina a destination country for trafficked women. One factor that remains is the involvement of international personnel. The trafficking was facilitated by a weak juridical system and a corrupt police. Then I turn to the factors within the Bosnian society: I show that even though the communists declared the 'women's question' as solved, they could not change gender relations in former Yugoslavia to a true gender equality. During the break-up of Yugoslavia, traditional gender relations became part of the war strategy, using gender images either to form a group or dissociate it from the other. In this context, rape also aimed at humiliating the other groups and served as a tool of communication between men. This misogynist strategy laid ground for trafficking and trading women like commodities. The presence of international personnel is thus only one factor for the expansion of prostitution, albeit the most visible. The other factors are deeper embedded within society and its specific postconflictsituation." (author's abstract)

Im Februar 2014 befreiten Proteste und Versammlungen in Bosnien und Herzegowina die politische Klasse von einer korrupten Allianz von nationalistischen Eliten und internationalen Verfechtern des Neoliberalismus. Der Band veranschaulicht, wie Solidarität, Gleichheit und bürgerliche Werte spürbar wirksam sind im Kampf für eine neue Politik