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Bosnia and Herzegovina

Class at Faculty of Arts |
APOV50432

Syllabus

  3. Oct 2022

Introduction 10. Oct 2022

Bosnia after 1995: "Surviving the peace"

Key points: State of the country after the war; Dayton peace agreement; reconstruction; transitional justice; politics of memory

Lippman, P. Surviving the peace. The struggle for postwar recovery in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Vanderbilt University Press (2019), 377-413 17. Oct 2022

(Re) building state institutions 

Key points: refugee and property return, constitution, army and police reform, after-war elections

Readings:

Chandler, David (2005). “From Dayton to Europe,” International Peacekeeping 12 (3), pp. 336–349.

Soeren Keil & Anastasiia Kudlenko (2015) Bosnia and Herzegovina 20 Years after Dayton: Complexity Born of Paradoxes, International Peacekeeping, 22:5, 471-489, DOI: 10.1080/13533312.2015.1103651

Gerald Knaus and Felix Martin. 2003. “Lessons from Bosnia and Herzegovina: Travails of the European Raj”, Journal of Democracy, 14(3), 60-74   24. Oct 2022

Democratisation and ethnocracy

Key points: power sharing and institutional design; post-war elections; constitutional reform efforts and failure;

Reading: 

Chandler, David, Faking democracy after Dayton, Pluto, 2000, 111-199

Asim Mujkic,“We, the citizens of ethnopolis.”Constellations, 2007 14(1): 112-28   31. Oct 2022

Reading week 1

Students will pick one of the books from literature list and write a 4 pages review    7. Nov 2022

Reading week 2: review assignment

Book review due on November 12    14. Nov 2022

Religion and nationalism

Key points: return of nationalisms; religion and identity

Velikonja, M., Religious Separation, and Political Intolerance in Bosnia-Herzegovina, 2003, 235-287   21. Nov 2022

Transformation, state capture, clientelism

Daniela Lai (2016) Transitional Justice and Its Discontents: Socioeconomic Justice in Bosnia and Herzegovina and the Limits of International Intervention, Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding, 10:3, 361-381, DOI: 10.1080/17502977.2016.1199478

Divjak, Boris and Pugh, Michael (2008). “The Political Economy of Corruption in Bosnia and Herzegovina,” International Peacekeeping 15 (3), pp. 373–386. 

Bieber, f. et al, Illiberal and authoritarian tendencies in Central, Southeastern and Eastern Europe, 2018, 225-246   28. Nov 2022

Citizenship in an ethno-democracy

Nenad Stojanović, When non-nationalist voters support ethno-nationalist parties: The 1990s elections in Bosnia and Herzegovina as a Prisoner’s Dilemma Game,” Southeast European and Black Sea Studies, Vol. 14, No. 4 (December 2014), pp. 607-625.

Azra Hromadzic, “Bathroom mixing: Youth negotiate democratization in postconflictBosnia and Herzegovina.” PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review, 201134(2): 268-89

Aleksandar Hemon, “National subjects.”Guernica, 2012http://www.guernicamag.com/features/3410/hemon_1_15_12/ 5. Dec 22

Citizenship, citizen mobilisation and protest

Damir Arsenijević [Ed.] Unbribable Bosnia and Herzegovina. The Fight for the Commons. Nomos 2014, 45-64; 79-118   12. Dec 2022 

Bosnia and Herzegovina and the EU accession process

 Džankić et al, The Europeanisation of the Western Balkans A Failure of EU Conditionality? 2019, 63-110, 181-207 19. Dec 2022

Bosnia and Herzegovina between Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Russia and China

Bieber, F., Tzifakis, N., The Western Balkans in the World Linkages and Relations with Non-Western Countries, 2020, 17-58, 83-107; 187-240        2. Jan 2023

Bosnia after 24 February 2022

Recapitulations, feedback, key take-aways, class evaluation.    

Annotation

Bosnia and Herzegovina: State-building in a post-conflict society

The course will deal with the transformations of Bosnia and Herzegovina after 1995. The aim is to provide students with literature and debates about both the efforts to rebuild a functioning state and introduce a specific form of democracy, and about the obstacles of political transformation.

Bosnia-Herzegovina will be discussed as a case study of various externally and internally driven efforts towards building stable and accountable institutions and their unintended effects in a changing regional environment.