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Richmond suggests that this volume illustrates the emergence of a new stage in the development of peacebuilding: strategic peacebuilding. Strategic peacebuilding goes beyond security-focused strategies that build on the lessons of liberal peace, focusing on sustainable peacebuilding at all levels of society. He synthesizes insights from the volume’s authors and from his own fieldwork in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Timor-Leste, and the Solomon Islands, focusing especially on the role of the “local” in strategic peacebuilding. From this volume, Richmond believes, emerges a vision of a postliberal justpeace that is more robust, inclusive, locally informed, and contextually sensitive than dominant conceptualizations of peace.

The first part of the chapter gives a brief account of the bloody fratricidal war fought in Croatia and Bosnia‐Herzegovina in 1991–5, which resulted from ethnic nationalistic revolutions aimed at destroying the multiethnic federation of Yugoslavia founded by the communists, and establishing independent homogeneous states. Further wars would continue in 1998 (between the Serbs and Albanians in Kosovo) and in 2001 (between Albanians and Macedonians in Macedonia). The main part of the chapter discusses religion and nationalism in these successor states – Islam and Muslim nationalism in Bosnia‐Herzegovina, Catholicism (the Madonna of Medjugorje) and Croatian nationalism in Bosnia‐Herzegovina and Croatia, and the Orthodox Church in Serbia (and Kosovo), Macedonia, and Montenegro. The remaining two sections of the chapter discuss saint making in Croatia in the late 1990s, and the role of religious organizations in the international peace process.

The beginning of the chapter briefly discusses the degradation of the Balkan successor states to Yugoslavia, and the despise with which they were held by the West (except for Slovenia) – Serbia and Croatia came into conflict with the West, while Bosnia‐Herzegovina, Kosovo, and Macedonia became Western protectorates. The two main parts of the chapter discuss the role of the Catholic Church in the return of Croatia to the West, and the role of the Serbian Orthodox Church in relation to the West and the failure of the Serbian revolution under Milošević. The last part of the chapter discusses the legacy of Yugoslavia, and current attitudes to Balkan nationalism, which has undergone heavy blows from demography (a diminishing population of children and young people) and migration to the West – which have replaced Marxism as the new key menace to the Churches.

Introduces the book by discussing the symbolic destruction of churches, monasteries and other monuments and sacred places of the Serbian Orthodox Church, the Catholic Church in Croatia and Bosnia‐Herzegovina, and the Yugoslav Muslim Religious Organization (Islamic community), and also in Albania that occurred during the various wars in the Yugoslav region in the 1990s. It then discusses myth in relation to the nation‐state. The last and main part of the chapter gives accounts of the four mainstream Yugoslav religious institutions (the Serbian Orthodox Church, Croatian Catholicism, the Muslim Religious Organization (Islamic community), and the Church and Nation of Macedonia), and also discusses the religious minority groups of the region (there are around 40, of which 14 are listed), and interfaith relations.

This chapter covers the period leading up to the birth of the Muslim national state of Bosnia‐Herzegovina within Yugoslavia in 1968, the frictions and difficulties associated with that birth, and the rebuilding and expansion of the new state up to the 1980s. The last part of the chapter discusses religious nationalism in Bosnia‐Herzegovina in the late 1980s and early 1990s and the role of the Bosnian and Herzegovinian ulema in this development.

This chapter discusses the cult of the Virgin Mary in Herzegovina as it developed from the vision of a Croatian‐speaking Madonna at Medjugorje, western Herzegovina (an overwhelmingly Catholic Croat area), in 1981. Attitudes to this Marian apparition and later ones at the same place are discussed, and the politics of the visions analyzed. The last part of the chapter discusses the Marian apparitions at Medjugorje and other places in relation to the Yugoslav crisis of the 1980s, when Catholic–Orthodox tensions were reignited. They are viewed as a prelude not to a peace and prayer movement but as a prelude to partition, war, and genocide in Bosnia‐Herzegovina.

This chapter examines Bosnia-Herzegovina's geopolitical setting in greater depth, most especially its status as a contested space between Serbia and Croatia. Both were not destined to fight over Bosnia-Herzegovina, yet the geopolitical cultures of both featured self-aggrandizing visions of national space that menaced the territorial integrity of Bosnia. All too often these visions were cartographic fantasies grounded not in geographical actualities but in nationalist idealizations. To underscore the implications of this deeply consequential disjuncture, the chapter then examines Bosnia on the eve of war. It contrasts the nationalist coloring of Bosnian space to the more complex human geographies evident from the 1991 census. Pace the maps that reduce Bosnia to a patchwork of national colors, it underscores the shared space, variable settlement geographies, and public culture of tolerance that characterized the actually existing Bosnia. The chapter ends with brief sketches of the three primary locations followed for the rest of the book.

This chapter reflects on the legacies of the double effort to remake Bosnia-Herzegovina since 1990 and outlines a qualified answer to the question of whether ethnic cleansing succeeded or not. Perhaps the most appropriate answer to whether ethnic cleansing has succeeded in Bosnia is that it is too early to tell. If Bosnia-Herzegovina is allowed to break apart by its neighbors, the European Union, and other major powers, we can say that ethnic cleansing has succeeded. But ethnic homogeneity—a condition often overstated and superficially claimed for states that are more heterogeneous than imagined—is no formula for stability. Certainly in Bosnia-Herzegovina, any independence for Republika Srpska (with the border drawn “on ethnic lines”) is likely to result in a new war. Bosnia-Herzegovina is still in the process of being made, its form an evolving one. While there are certainly grounds for being pessimistic about its future given its current ethnoterritorial arrangement, institutional burdens, and polarized politics, there is also some recognition among most of its divided political class that they are stuck together.

This chapter summarises the results of the Krajina Project, which was established in 1998 to investigate the archaeological remains, material culture and continuing ethnographic legacy of this distinctive late medieval/early modern frontier society. The project has focused on an area in the north-west corner of Bosnia-Herzegovina, between Kladuŝa and Bihać, known as the Bihaćka Krajina. This was one of the last districts in the region to be conquered by the Ottoman state, not falling to the sultan's forces until the late sixteenth century — a territorial high water mark. The ethnographic evidence provides significant insights into the continuing legacy of the Ottoman-Hapsburg frontier in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

This chapter takes the house as a prism to shed light on the transformation of the intimate topographies of belonging, care, and the material world in rural Bosnia and Herzegovina resulting from the “postsocialist” and “postwar” junctures. Ethnographically and historically grounded, this chapter shows how for village Muslims the house is first and foremost a container of hi/stories, trails of past lives, materialization of care across generations, materials of religious experience, and bundles of relations and exchanges that are enacted with and through them. These elements of intimate relations and belonging constitute the ground of one’s life. Yet this is a ground that is nowadays profoundly shifting for many villagers. In the postsocialist, postwar years, many families have been driven away from their houses due to ongoing economic marginalization, long-term unemployment, and heavy indebtedness. The story of the house in rural Bosnia and Herzegovina thus bears witness to the scale and pervasiveness of the push factors, and corrosive effects of the neoliberal restructuring on rural communities in the world today.

This chapter addresses a key theme in the debates on post-Ottoman societies: what does it mean to live together? And what does it mean to share a social space with others? What do these question mean in the face and memories of radical social and political ruptures? These questions are ethnographically explored through the idea of neighborliness (komšiluk), and ethics of proximity. Through detailed life histories and ethnographic case studies, ranging from the arranging of funerals and neighborhood hospitality to lending a hand, this chapter documents how the changing character of interpersonal relations in village neighborhoods commonly expressed through neighborhood-related idioms mirrors larger socioeconomic reconfigurations of Bosnia-Herzegovina, and in particular rising economic inequalities between the villagers that are felt and debated as newly emerged hierarchies between the “winners” and the “losers” of the postwar years.

This chapter focuses on how the peace process in the former Yugoslav republics was marred by continued violence. The road to peace was constructed almost exclusively by force, both of indigenous and external origin. The force employed affected the application of the right to self-determination, translating this right to territorial autonomy in Bosnia, self-government under international supervision in Kosovo and Metohia, decentralization and group rights in Macedonia, or nominal human rights without a right to territorial autonomy in Croatia. The magnitude of force and the international evaluation of the legitimacy of the use of force by the official authorities and the insurgents became crucial to the redrafting of constitutions to mandate stronger group rights, in some cases coupled with the redrawing of boundaries—albeit within the newly independent states. Self-determination, on its own and with the exception of a general insistence on respect for human rights, was irrelevant to the international community.

In each of the four case-studies, the peace agreements signed at the framework-substantive stage attempted to address the self-determination claims at the heart of the conflict, at least implicitly. Each deal involved an agreement between political elites of majority and minority populations on how to reconcile their seemingly incompatible demands for access to power, government, and territory. This required compromise not just on the issues of equality, sovereignty, territorial integrity, and secession-partition, but on the meta-conflict underlying these issues. This chapter lays out the nuts and bolts of how this was done.

This chapter begins with a brief history of the idea of succession, laying out the changing shape of legal discourse in the period prior to the project of codification in the 1960s. It then examines several features of the discourse as it developed during that time to identify the main theoretical, conceptual, and analytical ‘moves’ that have assisted in the formation of this particular field of international law, with a view to bringing to the forefront some of the quandaries that have tended to be ill-articulated in mainstream accounts. Some of the general ‘themes’ that appear to underpin approaches to the question of succession are discussed such as the differentiation between ‘de iure’ and ‘de facto’ succession and between ‘state continuity’ and ‘state succession’.

This introductory chapter discusses the goals and methodology of the book. The study addresses specific controversies surrounding the codifications of the four successor languages to Serbo-Croatian: Serbian, Montenegrin, Croatian, and Bosnian. The analysis is based on close readings of the recently published works on each of the successor languages. The types of consulted works can be categorized as instruments of codification; articles and monographs by linguists from Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia, Montenegro, and Serbia discussing specific linguistic concerns; blueprints for the new successor languages, or reinterpreting the years of the unified language; and articles from the popular press on language issues. The chapter also explains language as a marker of ethnic identity and language in the context of Balkan nationalism. Furthermore, the chapter expounds on Serbo-Croatian as a dying tongue.