From Weakness to Strength: The Political Roots of Security Sector Reform in Bosnia and Herzegovina

Damaging democracy? Security provision and turnout in Afghan elections†

“…In conflictprone and transitioning societies, citizen participation in elections is widely understood to strengthen emergent democratic institutions and solidify regime legitimacy (Norris, 2014). Governments and international donors have therefore invested heavily in ensuring that elections can be safely held, including assigning police to safeguard polling stations (Doyle & Sambanis, 2006;Fortna, 2008) and carrying out broader security sector reforms (Berg, 2014;Perito, 2009;Sedra, 2006). Despite such efforts, election cycles in these settings are often associated with an increased probability of conflict (Hafner-Burton, Hyde, & Jablonski, 2014).…”

What attachment to peace? Exploring the normative and material dimensions of local ownership in peacebuilding

“…Louis-Alexandre Berg suggests that this is not least a result of the fact that the underlying political landscape remains ethnically divided and thus the Bosnian police force not amenable to profound reform. 67 In that respect we can argue that the persistence of ethnically-orientated policies in BiH represents a serious obstacle to the extent to which liberal peacebuilding can operate. It puts into question the effort of the liberal peace to achieve crossethnic reunification and de-ethnicisation.…”

EU security sector reform in Bosnia and Herzegovina: Reform or resist?

“…In this case, NATO and the High Representative took a leading role in defense matters through the launching of the Defence Reform Commission in 2002, whereas the EU has supported defense reform by providing capacity-building through EUFOR Althea. While defense reform was often considered a successful case (see Aybet & Bieber, 2011;Berg, 2014), in recent years progress has stalled. Moreover, while opposition to police reform has been more overt, resistance to defense reform was mostly hidden, yet it has become more overt in recent years.…”

“…We see this problem also in the case of Bosnia, where some scholars have sought to explain the slow progress of reforms by focusing on the role of external actors (Aybet & Bieber, 2011;Collantes Celador, 2005;Muehlmann, 2008;Tolksdorf, 2014;Vetschera & Damian, 2006) and how these initiatives have failed because of the lack of intra-or inter-institutional coherence, lack of adequate capabilities and expertise, or lack of local ownership, among others. Others have explained SSR in Bosnia as the outcome of internal power games (Berg, 2014). This article seeks to move beyond this dualism by seeking to explore how international and local dynamics are mutually interconnected and, in this way, undermine and reinforce each other.…”

“…Yet, an increasing body of literature has explored the role of domestic actors in the outcome of SSR, either by identifying how domestic actors are able to undermine or support international reform efforts, by showing how domestic structures shape the actual implementation of the reforms or the role of non-state actors (see, for instance, Sedra, 2017;Valters, Van Veen, & Denney, 2015). More attention has also been paid to the outcomes of interactions between international and local actors in SSR, for instance, as the outcome of a rational choice game (Berg, 2014).…”