Bosnia and Herzegovina between negative and positive peace: view from the local level.

• Author: Kriz, Zdenek
• Position: POLSCI PAPERS - Report

Introduction

This year, two decades will pass from signing the Dayton peace agreement, which had brought peace to Bosnia and Herzegovina (hereafter Bosnia) in 1995, after a long and bloody ethnic conflict. During these two decades, international community engaged intensively in the peace-building process, and the country has not witnessed any large-scale violence. However, can we simply conclude that once belligerent Bosnian peoples are now truly living in a sustainable peace? Can we assess the peace-building process as successfully completed? The world media, observers and analysts constantly refer to Bosnia as an unstable country, deeply divided along the wartime lines. Moreover, the country is trapped in the instability of the permanent political deadlock and the Euro-Atlantic integration process, which was supposed to become the ultimate tool for the stabilization of the country, but has been stuck for years. These are clear signs implying that the results of the two-decade long, unprecedentedly intensive and ambitious international peace-building process remain questionable. Hence, the international approach is often criticized and the most skeptical observers warn against an imminent disintegration of the country or even an escalation of a new conflict. (3) The enduring internal instability of the country has been confirmed last year when social unrests repeatedly spread through Bosnian towns and the High Representative Inzko called the general situation the "most alarming since the end of the war' (Kurier, 2014). Not only was the persisting necessity of the international engagement in Bosnia, but also the urgent need for its redefinition thus confirmed again by the recent crisis. (4)

Stalemate in the peace-building process reopened the question of how much success has been achieved by the international engagement and if, and in what manner it should be driven on. Such a question is extremely important not only for the future of the Bosnian people, still living in poverty and instability regardless of their ethnicity, but also for the international community in general, since it has been using Bosnia as a testing ground of conflict management strategies. From initial attempts to use the first generation peacekeeping, through the complex peacekeeping of second and third generation and peace enforcement, to the broadly defined peace-building--all of these approaches were applied one after another and often actually tested in Bosnia since 1990s.

In 1995, after a four-year long ethnic conflict, the multilevel international intervention culminating in the Dayton peace agreement terminated the Bosnian war and the new unprecedentedly ambitious approach of peace-building was introduced in Bosnia. The international community has not limited its intervention in Bosnia to the mere termination of the violence, but set itself much more ambitious goal-building a new state (Lyon 2007: 50; Chandler, 2000: 43). In the words of the first international High Representative in Bosnia, Carl Bildt: "The peace agreement for Bosnia is the most ambitious document of its kind in modern history [...] A traditional peace treaty aims at ending a war between nations [...], while here it is a question of setting up a State on the basis of little more than the ruins and rivalries of a bitter war." (Bildt 1998: 392)

The international community replied to that challenge with an unprecedentedly massive military, political and economic intervention comprising tens of thousands peacekeepers, thousands of diplomats and billions of dollars of economic aid. As emphasized by David Chandler (2000: 44), the authority of the international actors under the Dayton arrangement covered a wide range of responsibilities traditionally subordinated to the sovereignty of the state, including the control over the security, political, judicial and economic sphere. Thus, many authors characterized Bosnia and Herzegovina under the Dayton arrangement as a de facto international protectorate (i.a. Chandler, 1999; Donais, 2005; Pond, 2006). While the international engagement has undergone significant reductions and transformations since 1995, owing to the permanent reluctance of political representation to reach compromises in crucial issues, the international community further maintains its strong mandate. Robust international influence on internal developments in Bosnia has remained preserved to a great degree (see i.a. Kuperman 2006; Grevi, 2009; Szewczyk, 2010).

Even though there is peace in the country at present, the crucial question is whether we can speak of the stable and sustainable peace today or, two decades after Dayton, we are witnessing the peace only as a mere absence of war. Within the academic field, results of the Bosnian peace-building process have been frequently questioned. The recent academic discussion on Bosnian peace is largely based on the generally accepted assumption that the peace-building process has achieved only limited success owing to the discrepancy between its goals and strategies used to reach them. Most of the recent analyses of the peace-building process and its particular aspects are built around the common critical standpoint. Its fundamental argument is that the peace-building process has been successful in terminating the war and preventing its recurrence, nonetheless it has not achieved its ultimate goal--to build multiethnic country, since Bosnia remains generally divided along ethnic lines. (5) According to this standpoint, causes of the persisting division are identified in the international strategies that have served short-term objectives rather than long-term goals and thereby cemented the wartime division of politics and society (see i.a. Richmond and Franks, 2009; Chivvis, 2010b; Chivvis and Dogo, 2010; Berg and Solvak, 2011; Ruzic, 2012; Fleet, 2014; Howard 2012). Thus, the generally accepted standpoint assumes that building peace has failed in its ultimate goal due to the discrepancy between the ambitious, broadly defined goals, and the much narrower, short-term focused strategies.

From the theoretical viewpoint, we can find in such a discrepancy a distinct manifestation of theoretical opposition stemming from the conceptual dispute over the nature of peace and policies to achieve it, which has been conducted in the area of peace research. Its origins can be dated to the Galtung's pioneer works that referred to traditional understanding of peace based on mere absence of violence as negative peace, whereas he delineated as a counterpart the concept of a broadly defined positive peace based on absence of structural and cultural violence (Galtung, 1969: 183-184). The distinction between negative and positive peace can be generally understood as representative for the poles of the continuum between narrow and wide understanding of peace. If we return back to the Bosnian case and the general assumption of the critical standpoint introduced above, goals defined in terms of wide understanding of peace and integration have not been achieved due to strategies defined in terms of the narrower understanding of peace.

The main aim of this paper is to test this general assumption by assessment of the up to now results of the peace-building process and thus to find the answer to the question if Bosnia is rightly considered to be a divided country and, more generally, what kind of peace we are witnessing in the country. To reach that goal, we decided to utilize a research instrument, which remains rather an alternative to the mainstream tool in Bosnian as well as in general peace-building academic research. Instead of using the predominant state-level paradigm, we decided to assess the situation through a local level of analysis. We have carried out a comparative case study in the sample of 11 Bosnian municipalities representative of the country's political, historical and socio-demographic diversity.

Reasons that led us to examine the situation in Bosnia through the alternative optics of local actors and developments are twofold. We consider the local level to be regarded only as secondary and supplementary to the traditional state-level paradigm both within the political practice of peace-building as well as in its theoretical research, not only in Bosnian case, but also in general academic discourse. First, the practice of international engagement in Bosnia in last two decades has been permanently approaching the peace-building process through the state level paradigm by the top-down approach (see Chollet, 2005; Innes, 2006; Belloni, 2007; Grevi, 2009). Regardless of the main driving actor and instruments used, both the 'push of Dayton,' and the 'pull of Brussels' strategies have principally presumed the ability of nation-level political representation to work constructively on building a stable peace. While the former attempted to directly drive politicians to cooperation, the latter used the motivation carrot of integration profits to reach the same aim. Meanwhile, the local actors and channels have been mostly disregarded (De Gueavara, 2009). However, we are convinced that relevance of the local level developments is increasing especially with regard to the deadlocked state-level politics, which has been failing in the role of the peace facilitator. Thus, we argue that, if properly exploited, the local level could become an important alternative channel for international engagement in Bosnia. Second, in spite of the fact that the developments at the local level should be considered crucial for the future of Bosnian peace, they have only been rather rare points of interest for the authors analyzing the situation in Bosnia. The general critical assumption we are testing is based primarily on the state-level level image of the Bosnian peace. Most analyses have investigated the peace-building process through the state-level optics and only recently, particularly due to questionable results of the...