Bosnia's Post-Dayton Traumas

Abstract

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.. Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive, LLC is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Foreign Policy. fter nearly a year of fragile peace, Bosnia andHerzegovina remains a deeply depressing place, awash in bitterness and unresolved grievances. While the country's Serb, Croat, and Bosniac (or Muslim) communities are exhausted from fighting, their nationalist leaderships remain fundamentally at odds over the terms and conditions of multiethnic coexistence. Thanks to the Dayton accord, their struggles are now largely nonviolent, yet the resulting gridlock illustrates just how far Bosnia's realities diverge from the lofty goals established in the agreement.Peace settlements, by their very nature, often propel war-torn countries into fits of manic-depression. First comes the euphoria generated by the agreement itself. Large influxes of peacekeepers induce stability and buoy the local economy. Then, slowly, psychological deflation sets in. Common crime soars as the disengagement of armies creates a vacuum that bandits are quick to fill. Unhappy constituencies such as ex-soldiers, the wounded, and displaced populations become more obstreperous. Multiparty elections spawn tensions. An overabundance of weapons increases the lethality of civil violence, while land mines reduce freedom of movement and economic development. Reconstruction lags behind expectations. Peacekeepers begin to look like occupiers.

Peacebuilding and the Limits of Liberal Internationalism

“…81 In Ethiopia an attempt by the Tigrean People's Liberation Front to exclude other ethnic parties from participating in the June 1992 elections elicited renewed violence from the excluded parties.82 In Bosnia elections held in 1990 embittered ethnic relations and helped create the conditions that led to civil war. 83 The point is not that democracy is inherently violent, as some commentators have argued,@ but that the adversarial politics of democracy can sharpen confrontations and conflicts in divided societies, rather than fostering greater tolerance for different interests and opinions.85…”