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The exercise of international administration in Bosnia and Herzegovina dates from 1995, when a High Representative of the international community was established to oversee the implementation of the Dayton Peace Agreement. This chapter explores the international and domestic interactions in Bosnia, and highlights in detail how the international presence has combined with local forces to shape the country's political transition. The first section of this chapter provides an overview of the Dayton Agreement itself, and outlines the structure of the international mission in Bosnia. Subsequent sections examine international involvement in three key arenas of political transition, and explore the ways in which international authorities in Bosnia have shaped democratic development and contributed heavily to the development and evolution of Bosnia's complex political regime. The result has been a mode of transition in Bosnia that has at times entailed international and domestic cooperation and consensus, but that has also frequently been marked by international imposition in the face of domestic opposition. Democratic regime-building in Bosnia has been a contested process.

Assesses the success of the two humanitarian interventions in the Balkans – Bosnia in 1995 and Kosovo in 1999 – from the perspective of humanitarian organizations. It argues how, ironically, the effectiveness of organizations such as UNHCR can dissuade powerful states from taking the necessary steps to address the root causes of massive human rights violations. Slow and ambiguous action from the international community can raise false expectations on the part of suffering civilians, and embolden those who commit atrocities. The author argues that the political, military, and humanitarian strands of interventions are always closely interwoven, and draws a series of lessons from the Balkans experience: the need for the international community to act early, credibly, and consistently; the importance of preserving the identity of a humanitarian operation; the imperative to end the impunity of those who orchestrate and commit massive violations of human rights; and the importance of engaging the United Nations.

On 1 Nov 1994, the UN Trusteeship Council voted to suspend operations after Palau, the last remaining trust territory, attained independence. The sovereign state has emerged out of decolonization as the supreme form of political organization in post‐colonial international society—an international society in which dominions, colonies, principalities, free cities, and, of course, mandates and trust territories have all but vanished. However, the ostensible failure of this post‐colonial project—the fact that the promise of peace and prosperity held out by independent statehood is too often betrayed by appalling violence and absolute poverty—has reinvigorated interest in trusteeship as a way of responding to problems of international disorder and injustice. The purpose of this chapter is threefold: first, it examines the principal dilemma of decolonization that has resulted in a renewed interest in trusteeship; second, it considers this renewed interest in trusteeship in the context of international involvement in administering Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, and, until recently, East Timor; third, it reflects upon the normative implications that a resurrected practice of trusteeship carries for a society of states that is premised on the juridical equality of all its members. The five sections of the chapter are: The False Promise of post‐Colonial Independence; Innovation and Convention—the case for trusteeship in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, and East Timor; The New International Legitimacy—the resurrection of trusteeship; A Universal Society of States?; and Answering the Call of Humanity.

Secretary of State Christopher takes an active role in the negotiations during the third week, but progress is slow. A frustrated Christopher tells Holbrooke to get an agreement or shut down the talks. Milosevic gets the weak central government he wants in Bosnia but gives away Sarajevo and key territory at the last minute. The overall momentum of the negotiations and the concessions on territory produce a settlement that is signed in Paris in December 1995. The Dayton Agreement, at its core, is a peace deal that has serious flaws.

This chapter describes the situation in Yugoslavia, specifically Bosnia and Kosovo, when long-term peace was suddenly upturned by the fall of the Berlin Wall. The Dayton Peace Agreement (DPA) signaled the end of the war in Bosnia in 1995. This event followed intensive international efforts to reverse ethnic cleansing, which led one million people, including some 390,000 so-called minorities to return to their home countries. Despite the extensive promotion of a minority return program, the effort was largely in vain as the majority of the 390,000 only returned to reclaim their homes and promptly resell them. A very different return took place in Kosovo. The Kosovo War ended with massive “spontaneous returns” of Kosovars, and almost a million refugees returned. However, as the Muslim Kosovar refugees returned, many Serbs and Roma were attacked and an estimated 165,000 Serbs and 23,000 Roma fled Kosovo.

This chapter covers implementation of the Dayton Peace Agreement during the first two years of the peace process. It describes the peace accord, including the system of government envisaged for Bosnia, and assesses its shortcomings as well as the reality of the situation on the ground. It also analyzes peace implementation, including discussion of international strategy and whether reconstruction of multi-ethnicity or reinforcement of ethno-national partition would make for a more durable settlement, as well as attitudes to military deployment. It also examines the consequences of holding elections so soon after the end of hostilities that reinforced the control of ethno-national political parties on Bosnian society, leaving the country institutionally paralyzed and making the task of creating a self-sustaining settlement more difficult than it had been at the beginning of the peace process.

This chapter explores how the ICTY’s creation in the crucible of war shaped Bosnian citizens’ early expectations of Hague justice, and the early engagement of some Bosnians in establishing accountability for the crimes they survived. It revisits the “peace vs. justice” debate that played out among diplomats during the ICTY’s formative years in light of subsequent experience in Bosnia. The final section lays a foundation for later chapters by highlighting key features of the governance structures established in the Dayton Peace Agreement that have diminished the ICTY’s influence on social acknowledgment of wartime atrocities and, more broadly, on interethnic reconciliation.

This chapter examines the impact of territorial restructuring in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) and the context in which it took place. It first considers the context that accompanied the breakup of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia before discussing the period of constitutional engagement in the BiH. In particular, it highlights two major issues: the process (or lack thereof) of constitutional change and the centrality of territory. It then explores the role played by international engagement in the implementation of the Dayton Peace Agreement (which made the territorial reorganization of BiH possible), the activism of BiH’s Constitutional Court, and the influence of the European Court of Human Rights. Finally, it analyzes two important lessons from Bosnia with respect to how territorial cleavages ought to be handled in constitutional processes: state capture and citizen loyalties.

This interlude outlines the contours of international authority created in the response to the Bosnian war of the 1990s. The remaking of international institutions in response to Bosnia's war and its postwar peace heralded the coming-into-being of the “international community” as the dominant protagonist of a post-Cold War order structured around the values of peace, democracy, the rule of law, humanitarian solidarity, and the inviolability of human rights. This order was presented as more or less universally valid. The universal validity of this post-Cold War model bestowed two main roles and sets of hierarchical relations on the agents of intervention: that of mediator above and between conflicting parties, and that of civilizing missionary or educator of not fully modern people(s). Successfully occupying either role required a constant demonstration of neutrality. However, working out what it meant to be “neutral” in the everyday encounters of international intervention across relations of difference was often a vexing and unpredictable endeavor. The interlude then looks at postwar Bosnia's political settlement and explains why refugee return became such an important site of intervention encounters. It also considers the Dayton Peace Agreement.

This chapter provides a brief narrative of events in Bosnia from the collapse of Yugoslavia to the end of the war. It describes the country's postwar political institutions and presents an overview of the complex and evolving international peacebuilding mission in Bosnia from the end of the war to present. After three and a half years, in November 1995, the warring parties signed the Dayton Peace Agreement (DPA). The DPA established a complex consociational state in Bosnia, which made provisions for extensive postwar peacebuilding activities by various international actors. The international presence continues to this day, albeit in a much more limited fashion, making it one of the longest running and most intensive cases of postwar peacebuilding intervention to date. Bosnia represents a transition from international peacekeeping interventions with limited mandates and timetables, to more open-ended peacebuilding and statebuilding projects in the past decade.

This chapter covers the course of the wars in Slovenia, Croatia and Bosnia and international efforts to broker a peace accord that culminated in 1995 in the Dayton Peace Agreement. It considers the belligerents’ competing interpretations of self-determination, sovereignty and the meaning of “nation”, as well as the principles by which the international community sought to mediate. It also examines the European Community’s recognition policy and Bosnia’s disintegration and war, including the holding of an independence referendum, ethnic cleansing and the evolution of hostilities. It assesses international efforts to halt the fighting, including analyzing the various peace plans, as well as the Dayton peace process that succeeded in bringing the war to an end.

This chapter evaluates the (neo)liberal peace agenda in Bosnia-Herzegovina and the region, arguing that local politics and international intervention continue to be somewhat oppositional. The February 2014 protests have pointed to a range of issues which are not even on the international actors' agendas even though they are related to material and concrete issues across the country. This has thrown into question the Dayton Agreement, the legitimacy of intervention, and local ownership, foregrounding questions relating the objectives of politics and the nature of legitimate authority in Bosnian society as a more autonomous political framework than that imagined by the European Union or foreign donors. One which is not just critical of nationalists in the region and country but also the emancipatory claims of external actors where they do not directly speak to the concerns of the local populations and its many different groups.

Many Bosnians hoped the Tribunal would dispel denial and forge a shared understanding among their country’s ethnic communities about wartime atrocities. During a period of robust international engagement in the early years of the twenty-first century, there was significant progress in Serb acknowledgment of Serb atrocities, as well as acknowledgment by other ethnic groups that members of their in-group committed war crimes. Since 2006, however, there has been a sharp rise in nationalist rhetoric, which has included strident rejection of ICTY judgments. Moreover public opinion surveys reflect sharp cleavages among Bosnia’s major ethnic groups concerning beliefs about wartime atrocities. This chapter explores factors behind these trends, including the dynamics of competitive victimhood, the polarizing incentives of governance structures established in the Dayton Peace Agreement, and the retreat of the Office High Representative from robust engagement in Bosnia at a time of rising nationalism.