Bosnia Remade: Ethnic Cleansing and its Reversal. Gerard Toal and Carl.T. Dahlman. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2011. xiii and 463 pp., maps, photos, diagrams, illus., notes, bibliog., index. $39.95 cloth (ISBN 978-0-19-973036-0).

Powerful and elegantly written, Bosnia Remade illuminates the violence and contestation over space that has characterized the conflict and postconflict periods in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH). The authors trace the construction of political territory in BiH, from the dissolution of Yugoslavia, the “ethnic cleansing” enacted by those loyal to ethno-national causes, through to attempts by local and international agencies to cultivate the return of refugees and displaced persons over the subsequent years. The book is richly researched and demonstrates scholarship of the highest order; the arguments emerge from a series of periods of primary fieldwork in BiH and analysis of a wealth policy documentation conducted over a number of years.

The 1995 General Framework Agreement (GFA) that marked the end of the conflict in BiH has been an object of scrutiny for some time by political geographers. The significance of the GFA, also known as the Dayton Agreement after the location of its negotiation in Ohio, lies in its curious temporal and spatial ambiguities. Richard Holbrooke (1999, 335), chief negotiator of the GFA, expresses a common refrain of those responsible for intervening in the conflict in BiH when he describes the GFA as a “good agreement on paper” because it “ended a war and established a single, multiethnic country.” But in the subsequent years this triumphalism has seemed increasingly misplaced, as BiH has politically stagnated and ethno-national political parties have entrenched their power. As Toal and Dahlman argue, the GFA “was more an armistice agreement than the blueprint for a sustainable state” (308). This temporality is reflected in the rather instrumental invocation of multiethnicity, as the GFA solidified ethno-territorial claims by partitioning the BiH state into two territorial entities, the Bosnian Federation (including ten Cantons, eight of which have an alignment toward Bosnian Croat or Bosnian Muslim interests) and the Republika Srpska. But paradoxically, alongside the creation of such ethnically aligned territories, Annex 7 of the GFA stated “refugees and displaced persons have the right freely to return to their homes of origin” (OHR 1995). Addressing a significant absence in the study of BiH, Toal and Dahlman explore this tension between the right to return and the solidification of ethnic governance.

Bosnia Remade innovates at a series of scholarly and political frontiers. Gerard Toal has been at the forefront of retheorizing geopolitics over the past thirty years, and this book sets a new standard in this field. The precise deconstruction of the policies of international intervention in the fragmentation of Yugoslavia could perhaps be expected, but this is married with a meticulous exploration of the ensuing political effects of these spatial imaginaries. It breathes new life into the study of critical geopolitics, by illuminating the political implications of specific foreign policy prescriptions. For the authors, ethnic cleansing “is a form of geopolitics. The ‘geo’ and the ‘politics’ can be parsed to signify two interrelated practices: first the attempt to produce a new ethnoterritorial order of space, and second the attempt to build an ethnocratic political order on that space” (5). This separation is broadly reflected in the structure of the book, where the first five chapters explore the fragmentation of Yugoslavia and the subsequent entrenchment of ethnoterritorial logic within the GFA negotiated. The following five chapters examine a more localized geopolitics, where the return process for refugees and internally displaced persons is subjected to historical and geographical analysis. This two-stage analysis allows the reader to trace how particular spatial accounts of the violence in BiH have shaped the postconflict political landscape. The argument is structured around the Bosnian municipalities of Zvornik, Doboj, and Jajce, three areas that have been underexamined in literature on postconflict Bosnia. The authors demonstrate how returns vary over space and time within and between these municipalities, for example illustrating how minority returns to Zvornik differ between rural and urban areas, the role of an individual housing officer in blocking returns to Doboj town, and the specific case of Serbs displaced from Jajce to Br ko. These arguments illustrate how geopolitical discourse is performed through the bodily interactions of local agencies, embedded in specific material and immaterial contexts. Consequently even as Toal and Dahlman illuminate the role played by local power brokers, they remain attentive to the significance of wider geopolitical dramas such as the NATO intervention in Kosovo or the changing nature of European enlargement. In some senses this is a textured illustration of Kuus's (2007, 84) point that geopolitical discourses do not “cause” particular policy outcomes but are rather generative of certain “conditions of possibility,” which, as Bosnia Remade illustrates, play out in various embodied and situated ways.

Beyond the study of critical geopolitics, Bosnia Remade also advances area studies of the aftermath of violence in BiH, where too often accounts have resorted to a simplistic binary between ethnonational wardlordism and international neo-colonialism. These characterizations of governance do not capture the intricacies of the nature of the state of BiH, and Toal and Dahlman's patient academic engagement serves as a valuable corrective. Although “ethnic” identification plays a significant part in political discourse in BiH, the authors are clear throughout that these imagined distinctions mask wider political and criminal sensibilities. As they argue, “ethnic cleansing is never straightforwardly ‘ethnic’ or motivated only by a desire to ‘cleanse’ localities through the murder and expulsion of ethnic others. Criminal opportunism, local grievances, revenge and nihilism fuelled by alcohol and drugs are also elements of the practice” (13). Rather than seeing straightforward power geometries between internationally sponsored return and forms of local obstructionism, Toal and Dahlman outline more intricate political economies of return, where the regional variations and local specificities of internationally sponsored programs such as the United Nations High Commission for Refugees Open Cities Initiative are brought into sharp relief. This allows the authors to provide a textured response to the question of whether ethnic cleansing has succeeded in the final chapter of the book. Rather than relying on simple macrostatistics of return, the authors sketch the uneven outcomes of the returns processes across BiH.

In the past studies of critical geopolitics have been criticized for being theoretically obscure or being unclear on their moral commitments. Neither of these criticisms can be easily leveled at Bosnia Remade. The final chapter examines how we understand ideas of success or failure, questions that confront directly the normative nature of both intervention and scholarly critique. Theorization is deftly articulated, it is not a text that seeks to necessarily advance conceptual debates within critical geopolitics, although close readings suggest it could. Perhaps it does not reflect back to theorizations of the state or concepts of territorial integrity in the wake of humanitarian interventions, but other texts exist that undertake such academic labor, either in the former Yugoslavia or elsewhere (see Chomsky 1999; Elden 2009). It is written in an accessible style, but not at the expense of erudition.

Bosnia Remade is a remarkable book that will speak to a number of audiences. To those interested in post–Cold War foreign policy the book provides the most sophisticated narration available of the nature of international interventions in Yugoslavia and subsequent state-building initiatives in BiH. To the geographer it illuminates the spatial characteristics of these processes, as the multifaceted nature of the Yugoslav Republic of Bosnia was reduced to a matrix of ethnic identification by both political leaders and subsequently intervening agencies. To the scholar of critical geopolitics the text provides a powerful reminder of the political and theoretical utility exploring the spatial characteristics of foreign policy as performances of power with plural outcomes.