This book argues that the «international community» created and managed the dysfunctional state of Bosnia and Herzegovina by effectively rewarding ethnic cleansing, drawing up a transitional constitution which encouraged ethnification. It offers a radical new perspective on post-war state-building in the Balkans.

What happens to the citizen when states and nations come into being? How do the different ways in which states and nations exist define relations between individuals, groups, and the government? Are all citizens equal in their rights and duties in the newly established polity? Addressing these key questions in the contested and ethnically heterogeneous post-Yugoslav states of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Macedonia and Montenegro, this book reinterprets the place of citizenship in the disintegration of Yugoslavia and the creation of new states in the Western Balkans. Carefully analysing the interplay between competing ethnic identities and state-building projects, the author proposes a new analytical framework for studying continuities and discontinuities of citizenship in post-partition, post-conflict states. The book maintains that citizenship regimes in challenged states are shaped not only by the immediate political contexts that generated them, but also by their historical trajectories, societal environments in which they exist, as well as the transformative powers of international and European factors.

The disintegration of Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union in 1991 shed entirely new light on the character of their political systems. There is now a need to re-examine many of the standard interpretations of Soviet and Yugoslav politics. This book is a comparative study of the disintegration of Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union - as multinational, federal communist states - and the reaction of European and US foreign policy to the parallel collapses of these nations. The authors describe the structural similarities in the destabilization of the two countries, providing great insight into the demise of both.

Based on substantial fieldwork and thorough knowledge of written sources, Xavier Bougarel offers an innovative analysis of the post-Ottoman and post-Communist history of Bosnian Muslims. Islam and Nationhood in Bosnia-Herzegovina explores little-known aspects of the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina, unravels the paradoxes of Bosniak national identity, and retraces the transformations of Bosnian Islam from the end of the Ottoman period to today. It offers fresh perspectives on the wars and post-war periods of the Yugoslav space, the forming of national identities and the strength of imperial legacies in Eastern Europe, and Islam's presence in Europe. The question of how Islam is tied to national identity still divides Bosnian Muslims. Islam and Nationhood in Bosnia-Herzegovina places the history of ties between Islam and politics in Bosnia and Herzegovina in the larger global context of Bosnian Muslims relations both with the umma (the global Muslim community) and Europe from the late 19th century to the present and is a vital contribution to research on Islam in the West.

The violent disintegration of Yugoslavia and the cultural and economic dispossession caused by the collapse of socialism continue to force Muslims in Bosnia and Herzegovina to reconfigure their religious lives and societal values. David Henig draws on a decade of fieldwork to examine the historical, social, and emotional labor undertaken by people to live in an unfinished past--and how doing so shapes the present. In particular, Henig questions how contemporary religious imagination, experience, and practice infuse and interact with social forms like family and neighborhood and with the legacies of past ruptures and critical events. His observations and analysis go to the heart of how societal and historical entanglements shape, fracture, and reconfigure religious convictions and conduct. Provocative and laden with eyewitness detail, Remaking Muslim Lives offers a rare sustained look at what it means to be Muslim and live a Muslim life in contemporary Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Rwanda and Bosnia both experienced mass violence in the early 1990s. Less than ten years later, Rwandans surprisingly elected the world's highest level of women to parliament. In Bosnia, women launched thousands of community organizations that became spaces for informal political participation. The political mobilization of women in both countries complicates the popular image of women as merely the victims and spoils of war. Through a close examination of these cases, Marie E. Berry unpacks the puzzling relationship between war and women's political mobilization. Drawing from over 260 interviews with women in both countries, she argues that war can reconfigure gendered power relations by precipitating demographic, economic, and cultural shifts. In the aftermath, however, many of the gains women made were set back. This book offers an entirely new view of women and war and includes concrete suggestions for policy makers, development organizations, and activists supporting women's rights.

Two decades after the Dayton Peace Agreement came into force, Bosnia is not at war. However, the absence of war is not peace. Bosnia has failed to move on from conflict. Political processes are deadlocked. The country is in a state of political, social and economic paralysis. As the international community has downgraded its presence, conditions have deteriorated, irredentist agendas have resurfaced and the outlook is increasingly negative. War remains a risk because of myriad unresolved issues, zero-sum politics and incompatible positions among rival ethno-national elites.In the face of paralysis, international officials repeat the mantra that there is no alternative to Bosnia's European path and urge the country's leaders to see reason, to temper their rhetoric and to carry out internationally approved reforms -- to no avail. Despite international reluctance to recognise failure, the day will come when it is impossible to ignore the gravity of the situation. When that day arrives, the international community will have to address the shortcomings of the peace process. This, in turn, will involve opening up the Dayton settlement. Christopher Bennett presents a cautionary political history of Bosnia's disintegration, war and peace process. And he concludes by proposing a paradigm shift aimed at building ethno-national security and making the peace settlement self-sustaining.

The fourth edition of this critically acclaimed work includes a new chapter, a new epilogue, and revisions throughout the book. Sabrina Ramet, a veteran observer of the Yugoslav scene, traces the steady deterioration of Yugoslavia's political and social fabric in the years since 1980, arguing that, while the federal system and multiethnic fabric laid down fault lines, the final crisis was sown in the failure to resolve the legitimacy question, triggered by economic deterioration, and pushed forward toward war by Serbian politicians bent on power - either within a centralized Yugoslavia or within an 'ethnically cleansed' Greater Serbia. With her detailed knowledge of the area and extensive fieldwork, Ramet paints a strikingly original picture of Yugoslavia's demise and the emergence of the Yugoslav successor states.

This book describes the build-up to the Bosnian War, which took place from 1992-95, and the relation it had with the war in Croatia between 1991-95. The Bosnian war is viewed from two different angles. The first one is the perspective from inside the conflict area, describing the war in the field and its effects. The second one is the perspective of international high politics, where former Yugoslavia is just an object in the world power-game. It describes the Bosnian War's four phases (author's definition), the first phase being the Serbs' struggle to keep as much as possible of the disintegrating state, the second phase being the uncontrolled ethnic war, the third phase being that of corruption and stagnation where the war had a life of its own without much real fighting, and the last phase when the dividing lines were redrawn and formal fighting ended, almost like a pre-planned game of chess. The book concludes by a reflection on future developments and problems in the region.