Bosnia – voting for the devil you know

The Bosnian electorate failed to make a choice that would bring real change, in spite of signs throughout 2014 that the discontent for the current political set-up was about to reach a tipping point. “Voting for moderate parties, which would base their programmes on other than Dayton-linked demands, is simply too risky. People opt for the devil they know rather than the devil they don’t”, argues Jessie Hronesova

A flawed recipe for how to end a war and build a state: 20 years since the Dayton Agreement

On 14 December 1995, the Dayton Agreement was formally signed in Paris, bringing an end to the Bosnian War. On the 20th anniversary of the agreement, Jessie Hronesova assesses five key lessons on peace and state-building processes that can be taken from the Dayton experience. She writes that while inconsistencies and vague formulations in the agreement have done a great deal of harm to Bosnian governance, it would be unfair to pin all of the on-going struggles in Bosnia on to Dayton, with patronage, corruption and a lack of political willingness to reform being the root cause of many of these issues

‘The law comes first?’: the dynamics of victims’ redress in Bosnia and Herzegovina

What explains the existing varieties in victim-centric state policies of redress in postwar Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH)? Rather than analysing BiH as a special case of a divided ethno-national state, this article studies domestic victimhood politics as a phenomenon with wider comparative applications for postconflict contexts. Redress as a set of policies that legally recognize victims/survivors of wartime atrocities and provide them with in-kind and financial support has increasingly entered the demands of victims/survivors in BiH. Many have sought to expand their rights by new legal frameworks at the state and subnational level. However, only some have succeeded (or partially succeeded) with their demands. Why? Using fieldwork data and relying on literatures in transitional justice and peacebuilding, I argue that the differences go beyond ethno-national divisions and identity politics and are explained by how victims/survivors utilize their victim capital that combines mobilization resources, moral authority and international salience

Hidden politics of power and governmentality in transitional justice and peacebuilding:The problem of ‘bringing the local back in’

This paper examines ‘the local’ in peacebuilding by examining how ‘local’ transitional justice projects can become spaces of power inequalities. The paper argues that focusing on how ‘the local’ contests or interacts with ‘the international’ in peacebuilding and post-conflict contexts obscures contestations and power relations amongst different local actors, and how inequalities and power asymmetries can be entrenched and reproduced through internationally funded local projects. The paper argues that externally funded projects aimed at emancipating ‘locals’ entrench inequalities and create local elites that become complicit in governing the conduct and participation of other less empowered ‘locals’. The paper thus proposes that specific local actors—often those in charge of externally funded peacebuilding projects—should also be conceptualised as governing agents: able to discipline and regulate other local actors’ voices and their agency, and thus (re)construct ideas about what ‘the local’ is, or is not

Salience, authority, and resources: explaining victims' compensation in postwar Bosnia and Herzegovina

The aim of this thesis is to probe subnational varieties in compensation enacted for war victims in post-war Bosnia and Herzegovina. The current literature in transitional justice posits that mainly the nature of previous conflicts, democratic and economic development, international normative pressures, and the regional clustering of justice explain why only some post-war countries award material assistance to victims (Olsen et al. 2010; Kim 2012; Risse and Sikkink 2013; Powers and Proctor 2015). While these explanations provide critical insights into the processes behind compensation adoption across states, they do not explain why only some victim categories within a state secure compensation. Drawing on a large database of qualitative data ranging from interviews to newspaper articles collected during fieldwork in Bosnia, this thesis explores compensation for military and civilian war victims, victims of torture and sexual violence, and families of missing people. By zooming in on these victim categories in the Bosnian context, this thesis advances a new understanding of compensation for victims as an outcome of complex political, external, and economic influences exerted on the main domestic policymakers. This thesis uses a new analytical framework about the inter-category varieties in compensation that draws upon arguments about bounded agency of war victims who are constrained by the parameters of post-war political structures that to a large degree shape their strategies. I show that the different compensation outcomes can primarily be explained by the varying effectiveness of victims in convincing domestic political authorities that compensation is in their political interest by using framing and advocacy strategies at the domestic and international level. While such strategies are limited by the political and socioeconomic characteristics of the state, victim categories that are able to strategically frame their demands and access resources to mobilize are more likely to secure compensation adoption. Therefore, this thesis introduces three tools that victims can leverage â international salience, moral authority, and mobilization resources â that are shaped by both structural conditions and the victimsâ agency.</p