To be a Bosniak or to be a citizen? Bosnia and Herzegovina's 2013 census as an election

Abstract

Bosnia and Herzegovina's first post‐war population census, held in 2013, was accompanied by campaigns associated with each of the country's three main ethnic groups, which sought to maximise their share of the recorded population. These campaigns were challenged by a rival ‘civic’ campaign that instead stressed the right to freedom of self‐identification, however. This article compares the aims, methods and framings used by this civic campaign with those of the most prominent of the ‘ethnic’ campaigns – that of Bosniak ethnic entrepreneurs. It demonstrates that the two campaigns were each motivated by a combination of symbolic motives, centred on recognition and highlighting discrimination, and instrumental motives relating to the country's power‐sharing institutions. The limited success of the civic campaign in countering the messages of its rival ethnic campaigns demonstrates the difficulties that civic movements face in mobilising citizens in consociational democracies such as BiH.

Consociationalism and the politics of the census in Bosnia and Herzegovina and Northern Ireland

“…Some individual civic campaigners stated publicly that they would identify as 'Bosnian' or 'Bosnian and Herzegovinian' rather than as Bosniak, Croat or Serb. However, the overall message of the civic campaign was that international guidelines supported the principle of selfidentification and that respondents should not feel pressured to answer identity questions in any prescribed way (Perry, 2013, p. 15;Cooley, 2019). and identifying as such therefore assumed symbolic importance.…”

Census politics in Northern Ireland from the Good Friday Agreement to Brexit: Beyond the ‘sectarian headcount’?

“…While some critical attention has been paid to the politics of the census in Northern Ireland, it limits itself largely to the use of census results in political discourse (see Anderson and Shuttleworth, 1998; McEldowney et al, 2011). Research on censuses in other deeply divided societies, meanwhile, has mainly been concerned with contestation of the census and ethnic mobilisation around categories (see, for example, Cooley, 2019; Visoka and Gjevori, 2013), rather than the political and administrative processes involved in the census’s organisation or their constitutional implications.…”