Peace and Security in post-Dayton Bosnia and Herzegovina

Abstract

Although it has been more than twenty years since the end of the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina, the country is still on its path to recovery, which has been very slow and very painful. The unemployment rate is staggering high, the brain drain presents a serious issue, and the country's political system looks like anything but sustainable. The Dayton Agreement may have stopped the war, but it also created a complex political structure that does not encourage the cooperation among the three constituent peoples on the scale as it was envisioned. The aim of this work is to investigate to what extent the Dayton Agreement has solidified the constructed divisions and hatreds between the ethnic groups in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Furthermore, the thesis seeks to examine in which ways the Dayton Agreement facilities and legitimizes the political elites' quest for securitizing the ethnic identity of the respective groups. It will also try to explain the reasons behind the rapid rise of nationalism that led to the brutal war as some of these motives may still reflect the current situation in the post- Dayton period. It does so by providing a theoretical framework, which reflects the constructivist approach that will be reflected upon when examining the empirical data from post-conflict situation in Bosnia and...