International statebuilding as contentious politics: the case of post conflict Bosnia and Herzegovina

Abstract

The post-conflict space in Bosnia and Herzegovina has been marked by a multiplicity of statebuilding projects: in addition to the much-analyzed internationally-led statebuilding process, parallel Bosniak, Bosnian Serb and Bosnian Croat statebuilding trajectories exist. They seek to undermine and challenge the international statebuilding venture by appropriating and adapting the liberal statebuilding processes. This is carried out through the institutions and processes of governance put in place by international statebuilders to subvert the statebuilding trajectory. Focusing on the local appropriation of processes and institutions of governance, the paper maps out the repertoires of contention entailing boycotts, walk-outs, protests and refusals to co-operate in an attempt to explain and understand how local contention vis-à-vis the international statebuilding trajectory is carried out.

Keywords:

• statebuilding
• liberal peace
• contentious politics

Acknowledgements

The author wishes to thank Soeren Keil, Bernhard Stahl and the anonymous reviewers for valuable comments, as well as the University of London Central Research Fund and the Department of International Relations at the LSE for funding fieldwork in Bosnia in 2009 and 2010.

Notes

“International statebuilding agencies” refer to the principal international actors involved since the 1995 peace agreement. Those actors are the Peace Implementation Council (PIC), the Office of the High Representative (OHR), United Nations (UN), the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), the European Union (EU) as well as individual governments taking active (albeit fluctuating) interest in Bosnia such as the United States, the UK, Germany, France, Russia and Turkey.

Liberal peace refers to the amalgam of “peace, democracy and free market” (Richmond 2006, 292).

Contentious politics also operate in the domestic level, entailing non-elite claim-making directed towards municipal and state authorities. This has particularly been the case in relation to cuts in pensions and other benefits demanded by the international financial institutions in exchange for loans. While these domestic forms of contention are not the focus of this paper and cannot be discussed in detail due to space constraints, they are noteworthy in the sense that they have the potential to create unrest in Bosnia. Arguably this discontent could be harnessed by local statebuilding actors in their efforts to frame the international involvement in the country as harmful to the people.

For detailed and extensive studies on the international involvement in Bosnia see for instance Martina Fischer's edited volume Peacebuilding and Civil Society in Bosnia-Herzegovina or McMahon and Western's Foreign Affairs article “The death of Dayton: how to stop Bosnia from falling apart”.

Office of the High Representative is the main implementation agency of the civilian aspects of the Dayton Peace Agreement.

This was particularly the case when both moderate and radical Serbs withdrew from the joint institutions of governance in 2002 in response to the OHR's change on the Law on the Council of Ministers and other changes in the structures of the central government that were seen to be detrimental to the Serb interests.

Russia was struggling with its own insurgency problem in the Caucasus and thus wished to see no precedents of independence set in the Balkans.

As shown above, parallel Croat institutions had existed since the creation of the Federation.

It is important to note that the Bosnian Catholic Church was split between moderates and radicals and it was mainly the more radical factions that supported the self-rule campaign.