From the beginning of 2000 the European accession process was placed at the centre of peace-building in Bosnia and Herzegovina. The prospect of EU membership provided a common vision that encouraged different segments of society and the political elites to bridge ethnic divergences and engage in authentic post-war reconciliation. As pre-accession criterion the European Union required Bosnia and Herzegovina to unify its fragmented policing system at the level of the state. This requirement proved, however, to be a step too far, resulting in a protracted and ultimately unsuccessful process of political negotiations that lasted from 2004 to 2007. The European Unionś insistence on placing law enforcement authority at the state level came to be viewed as an identity threat, which affected interethnic group dynamics in a negative way. From this premise, this study assesses the impact of the negotiating process on the political discourse in Bosnia and Herzegovina and on public notions of societal security and illustrates the background and rationale of the European Unionś strategy.

Between April 1992 and December 1995, more than 100,000 people were killed in the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina. The terrible atrocities committed in this period have been much discussed and studied and many prosecuted as acts of genocide, war crimes or crimes against humanity. But so far, the academic scholarship has focused on the role of the military in these events. This has come at the expense of considering the police's role, which Nielsen here demonstrates as crucial. Nielsen traces the origins of the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina to the police and associated paramilitary groups. Nielsen makes this ground-breaking case by drawing on a host of confidential archival sources, academic research and practical experience as a widely cited expert witness in the most notorious of the war crimes tribunals. His innovative new history sheds light on wider issues regarding the dissolution of Yugoslavia, the Balkan wars and the region today.

State Building and Democratization in Bosnia and Herzegovina details the post-Dayton evolution of the country over the last two decades. Carefully evaluating the successes and failures the book explores the slow progress of the democratization process and how key elites initially took hold of the state and its institutions and have successfully retained their grip on power, despite heavy international presence and reform attempts to counter-balance this trend. Bosnia and Herzegovina offers a useful lens through which to view international state-building and democratization efforts. International engagement here incorporated significant civilian and military investment and has been ongoing for many years. In each chapter international scholars and field-based practitioners examine the link between post-war events and a structure that effectively embeds ethno-national politics and tensions into the fabric of the country. These contributors offer lessons to be learned, and practices to be avoided whilst considering whether, as state-building and democratization efforts have struggled in this relatively advanced European country, they can succeed in other fragile states.

The effort to improve state institutions in post-conflict societies is a complicated business. Even when foreign intervention is carried out with the best of intentions and the greatest resources, it often fails. What can account for this failure? In Institution Building in Weak States, Andrew Radin argues that the international community’s approach to building state institutions needs its own reform. This innovative book proposes a new strategy, rooted in a rigorous analysis of recent missions. In contrast to the common strategy of foreign interveners—imposing models drawn from Western countries—Radin shows how pursuing incremental change that accommodates local political interests is more likely to produce effective, accountable, and law-abiding institutions. Drawing on extensive field research and original interviews, Radin examines efforts to reform the central government, military, and police in post-conflict Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, Iraq, and Timor-Leste. Based on his own experience in defense reform in Ukraine after 2014, Radin also draws parallels with efforts to improve state institutions outside of post-conflict societies. Institution Building in Weak States introduces a domestic opposition theory that better explains why institution building fails and what is required to make it work. With actionable recommendations for smarter policy, the book offers an important corrective for scholars and practitioners of post-conflict missions, international development, peacebuilding, and security cooperation.

The Limits of Maritime Jurisdiction, edited by Clive Schofield, Seokwoo Lee, and Moon-Sang Kwon, comprises 36 chapters by leading oceans scholars and practitioners devoted to both the definition of maritime limits and boundaries spatially and the limits of jurisdictional rights within claimed maritime zones. Contributions address conflicting maritime claims and boundary disputes, access to valuable marine resources, protecting the marine environment, maritime security and combating piracy, concerns over expanding activities and jurisdiction in Polar waters and the impact of climate change on the oceans, including the potential impact of sea level rise on the scope of claims to maritime zones. The volume therefore offers critical analysis on a range of important and frequently increasingly pressing contemporary law of the sea issues.

This volume examines how European institutions, the European Union in particular through its policy of conditionality, have shaped the post-conflict reconstruction of the Western Balkans. From state-building to democratization and environmental policies, this book explores whether and in what ways the EU has been successful in consolidating states and democracy in the Balkans. In addition to requiring countries to be ready to join the European Union, the EU has also set new conditions in an effort to become the prime international organization involved in stabilizing the Western Balkans after the wars of the 1990s. Its record has been mixed: the conditions of the EU have often been haphazard and were frequently not followed through. In addition, enlargement towards the Western Balkans has been slow and marred by open questions over the stability of some countries in the region. This volume assesses the EU's struggle to transform the societies through conditionality and whether the offer of EU membership is enough to build stable democracies. This book was published as a special issue of Europe-Asia Studies.

This book examines the adverse impacts of liberal peacebuilding in conflict-affected societies. It introduces ‘peace figuration’ as a new analytical framework for studying the intentionality, performativity, and consequences of liberal peacebuilding. The work challenges current theories and views and searches for alternative non-conflicted research avenues that are suitable for understanding how peacebuilding intentions are made, how different events shape peace outcomes, and what are the consequences of peacebuilding interventions. Drawing on detailed case studies of peacebuilding in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo and Timor-Leste, the book argues that attempts to build peace often fail to achieve the intended outcomes. A figurational view of peacebuilding interventions shows that post-conflict societies experience multiple episodes of success and failure in an unpredictable trajectory. This book develops a relational sociology of peacebuilding impact, which is crucial for overcoming static measurement of peacebuilding successes or failures. It shows that international interventions can shape peace but, importantly, not always in the shape they intended. This book will be of much interest to students of statebuilding, peacebuilding, war and conflict studies, security studies and IR.

Support for security and justice institutions has become a crucial instrument of international engagement in fragile and conflict-affected states. In attempts to shore up security as a precondition for sustainable peace, international actors have become deeply engaged in reforming the security agencies and security governance institutions of states emerging from conflict. But despite their increasing importance in the field of international peace- and state-building, security sector reform (SSR) interventions remain both highly political and deeply contentious processes. Expanding on this theme, this edited volume identifies new directions in research on the domestic consequences of external support to security sector reform. Both empirically and theoretically, the focus lies on the so far neglected role of domestic actors, interests and political power constellations in recipient states. Based on a wide range of empirical cases, the volume discusses how the often conflictual and asymmetric encounters between external and domestic actors with divergent interests and perceptions affect the consequences of international interventions. By taking into account the plurality of state and non-state security actors and institutions beyond classical models of Weberian statehood, the contributions make the case for engaging more closely with the complexity of the domestic security governance configurations that can result from external engagement in the field of security sector reform. This book was published as a special issue of International Peacekeeping.

This comparative study harks back to the revolutionary year of 1989 and asks two critical questions about the resulting reconfiguration of Europe in the aftermath of the collapse of communism: Why did Central and East European states display such divergent outcomes of their socio-political transitions? Why did three of those states—Poland, Bulgaria, and Russia—differ so starkly in terms of the pace and extent of their integration into Europe? Rumena Filipova argues that Poland’s, Bulgaria’s, and Russia’s dominating conceptions of national identity have principally shaped these countries’ foreign policy behavior after 1989. Such an explanation of these three nations’ diverging degrees of Europeanization stands in contrast to institutionalist-rationalist, interest-based accounts of democratic transition and international integration in post-communist Europe. She thereby makes a case for the need to include ideational factors into the study of International Relations and demonstrates that identities are not easily malleable and may not be as fluid as often assumed. She proposes a theoretical “middle-ground” argument that calls for “qualified post-positivism” as an integrated perspective that combines positivist and post-positivist orientations in the study of IR.