EU security sector reform in Bosnia and Herzegovina: Reform or resist?

ABSTRACT

Attempts to explain the failure to reform the security sectors in post-conflict countries have often resorted to two sets of explanatory factors: international and local factors. This article seeks to move from that unhelpful dichotomy to an explanation linking both factors. Drawing on a Foucauldian approach and the concept of “counter-conduct,” it examines the rationality and practices of European Union (EU) governmentality and how governing technologies are resisted and reversed by local elites involved in security sector reform (SSR). Instead of understanding power and resistance as binary opposites, this article argues that counter-conduct can be conceived as implicated in the very relations of power that it seeks to resist. To tease out these relations, the article analyzes the EU's efforts in SSR in Bosnia and Herzegovina, where it identifies four forms of counter-conduct: upholding European standards, using the local ownership trap, simulating reforms, and lowering the bar.

KEYWORDS:

• European Union
• security sector reform
• counter-conduct
• resistance
• governmentality
• Bosnia and Herzegovina

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the two anonymous referees, as well as Gilberto Algar-Faria, Filip Ejdus, Alex Prichard and the participants at the EWIS workshop “Technologies of Power: The EU's External Relations as Governmentality” (Cardiff, June 7–10, 2017) for their invaluable comments on earlier drafts.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Ana E. Juncos is a Reader in European Politics at the School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies, University of Bristol. Her primary research interest lies in European foreign and security policy, with a focus on the development of the EU's conflict prevention and crisis management capabilities and the EU's role in conflict resolution. She is the Consortium Co-ordinator of the Horizon 2020-funded project EU-CIVCAP (http://www.eu-civcap.net). Her previous research examined the EU's intervention in Bosnia since 1991 resulting in the monograph EU foreign and security policy in Bosnia (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013). She is also co-editor of EU conflict prevention and crisis management (London: Routledge, 2011; with Eva Gross).

ORCID

Ana E. Juncos http://orcid.org/0000-0002-6913-351X

Notes

1. The use of SSR programs is not restricted to post-conflict situations; they have also been launched in other developing and transitional countries to reform and strengthen the capacities of security institutions (Ansorg, 2017; Dursun-Ozkanca & Vandemoortele, 2012).

Additional information

Funding

Research for this article has received funding from the EU’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under grant agreement no. 653227. The content reflects only the author's views, and the European Commission is not responsible for any use that may be made of the information it contains.