Inequality in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) is rampant, manifested not only through one of the highest Gini coefficients in Europe but also in unequal access to social benefits and services. We find this to be an outcome of BiH?s entitygovernment social policy, which has been created to serve ethnic clientelistic politics. As the country?s former social protection system adjusted in the immediate post-civil war period to a new asymmetric government structure made of two entities, Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina and Republika Srpska, it helped the main ethnic political parties preserve their power and ethnic divisions. This was achieved through a comprehensive system of status-based social benefits, most notably war-related social benefits granted on the basis of ethnic and military service affiliation. As such, in both BiH?s entities the system of social protection is an instrument of political control that generates inequality by treating certain social groups differently in terms of access to and level of benefits, while excluding much of the population. The process is found to be endogenous; in other words, maintaining inequality in access to social benefits is essential for preserving clientelistic policy, and vice versa.
The article identifies causal mechanisms that help explain why the city of Tuzla managed to reject and avoid inter-ethnic conflict and radical nationalism during the wars of the 1990s in the former Yugoslavia. Despite the overwhelming odds of being surrounded by vicious ethnic fighting and relentless nationalist attacks, the city of Tuzla protected and sustained peace in its borders. This research provides some explanations as to why Tuzla managed to survive radical nationalism and fragmentation during the disintegration of the former Yugoslavia. The article concludes that Tuzla's success was path dependent and its ability to reject violent nationalism revolved around Tuzla's identity of traditionally working class, anti-nationalist, anti-fascist forces around which Tuzla's citizens rallied. This helped elect the only non-ethnic political leadership in the country during the first multiparty municipal elections, and also actively protected citizens’ democratic choice against nationalist attempts to foster ethnic mobilisation and ethnic violence.
Beyond the mainstream conflict in former Yugoslavia, an incomplete research exists on the micro-military ethnic alliances and micro-conflicts on the local and regional levels particularly in Bosnia and Herzegovina. The article attempts to fill this knowledge gap through the examination of the theoretical frameworks, instrumentalism and primordialism as the two most frequently used frameworks in explaining the Yugoslav disintegration. In terms of instrumentalism, the article expands on the overreaching assumptions on the account of elitist capacity to instrumentilize ethnic violence in multiethnic societies. Article adds to the existing literature that instrumentalism can and often does inadvertently neglect identifying instances where the elitist’s instrumentalisation of the masses did not materialize. Conversely, primordialism an approach that fell out of favor and an unfit framework in regards to Yugoslav dissolution, was substantially and eagerly applied as an explanans, particularly in the first stages of the war. In principle, the primordialism erroneously characterized theYugoslav dissolution as the ancient ethnic grievances coming to the surface in the absence of strong central government and the primordialist never bothered to further that analysis. Hence, this article will go beyond the basic primordialistassumption, it confirms that primordialism, the genetically based argument, cannot adequately tackle conflicts in multiethnic societies as seen in Yugoslavia however, and omitted from the literature, the article posits that the approach has an inexplicably staunch and protracting capacity to linger and spread through the pores of society as a mechanism often utilized by nationalists elites to manipulate and sustain their radical views. This capacity in principle effectively protracts hostilities as attested in all former Yugoslav republics.
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