Fertile land or mined field? Peace-building and ethnic tensions in post-war Bosnian football

Abstract

With the outbreak of the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH), each ethno-national group - Bosnian Muslims (Bosniaks), Bosnian Serbs and Bosnian Croats - set up its own football federation and began to organize its own competitions separately. Nevertheless, under strong pressure from FIFA, UEFA and the IOC, the three football establishments finally agreed to merge into a unified Bosnian Football Federation in 2002 and to organize the Premijer Liga, the first united Bosnian post-war championship. Drawing on ethnographic studies conducted in BiH since 2003, the paper examines the consequences of such a revamped inter-ethnic competition both in terms of the re-integration of the Bosnian population, on the one hand, and the possible exacerbation of ethnic tensions, on the other. It is concluded that the reunification of the Bosnian football's landscape helps to demonstrate how ethnicity is instrumentally used by the post-war élites to exploit the common good for private enrichment. © 2013 Taylor & Francis