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Between the Round Table and the Waiting Room: Scholarship on War and Peace in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo after the ‘Post-Cold War’

Review products

RobertM. Hayden, From Yugoslavia to the Western Balkans: Studies of a European Disunion, 1991–2011 (Leiden: Brill, 2013), €146.00 (Hardback), ISBN 978-9004241909.

RobertJ. Donia, Radovan Karadžić: Architect of the Bosnian Genocide (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), £22.99 (Paperback), ISBN 978-1107423084.

EltonSkendaj, Creating Kosovo: International Oversight and the Making of Ethical Institutions (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2014), $49.95 (Hardback), ISBN 978-0801452949.

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 February 2019

Catherine Baker*
Affiliation:
School of Histories, Languages and Cultures (History), University of Hull, Cottingham Road, Hull, HU6 7RX, UK

Abstract

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Type
Review Article
Copyright
© Cambridge University Press 2019 

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References

1 Glaurdić, Josip, The Hour of Europe: Western Powers and the Breakup of Yugoslavia (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011), 1 Google Scholar . This review refers to ‘Bosnia-Herzegovina’ as ‘Bosnia’ for ease of reading, though specialist literature would usually still refer to ‘Bosnia-Herzegovina’ or the abbreviation ‘BiH’. Contemporary European History’s dictionary, Chambers, spells ‘peace building’ as two words, although in the context of post-conflict reconciliation and international intervention, ‘peacebuilding’ is now written as one word as standard.

2 Power, Samantha, A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide (London: Harper Perennial, 2003), 314 Google Scholar .

3 Daddow, Oliver, ‘“Tony’s War”: Blair, Kosovo and the Interventionist Impulse in British Foreign Policy’, International Affairs 85, 3 (2009), 547560 CrossRefGoogle Scholar .

4 For broader studies of the history of humanitarian intervention, see, for example, Bass, Gary, Freedom’s Battle: the Origins of Humanitarian Intervention (New York: Knopf, 2008)Google Scholar ; Fassin, Didier and Pandolfi, Mariella, eds., Contemporary States of Emergency: The Politics of Military and Humanitarian Intervention (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010)Google Scholar ; Barnett, Michael, Empire of Humanity: A History of Humanitarianism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011)Google Scholar ; Simms, Brendan and Trim, D. J. B., eds., Humanitarian Intervention: A History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar ; Weizman, Eyal, The Least of All Possible Evils: Humanitarian Violence from Arendt to Gaza (London: Verso, 2012)Google Scholar ; Klose, Fabian, ed., The Emergence of Humanitarian Intervention: Ideas and Practice from the Nineteenth Century to the Present (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016)CrossRefGoogle Scholar .

5 Stokes, Gale, John Lampe and Dennison Rusinow with Julie Mostov, ‘Instant History: Understanding the Wars of Yugoslav Secession’, Slavic Review 55, 1 (1996), 136160 CrossRefGoogle Scholar .

6 See, for example, Pickering, Paula M., Peacebuilding in the Balkans: The View from the Ground Floor (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007)Google Scholar .

7 See, for example, Simms, Brendan, Unfinest Hour: Britain and the Destruction of Bosnia (London: Allen Lane, 2001)Google Scholar ; Coles, Kimberley, Democratic Designs: International Intervention and Electoral Practices in Postwar Bosnia-Herzegovina (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar .

8 Stephen Saideman, ‘Beware of Officers Carrying Reading Lists’, Saideman’s Semi-Spew, 18 Apr. 2011, https://saideman.blogspot.co.uk/2011/04/beware-of-officers-carrying-reading.html?m=0 (last accessed 24 May 2017).

9 Hayden, Robert M., From Yugoslavia to the Western Balkans: Studies of a European Disunion, 1991–2011 (Leiden: Brill, 2013)Google Scholar ; Donia, Robert J., Radovan Karadžić: Architect of the Bosnian Genocide (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015)Google Scholar .

10 Donia, Karadžić, 2–6. The ICTY is hereafter ‘the Tribunal’, though specialist literature is more likely to use the acronym.

11 Hayden, From Yugoslavia, 223. Hayden’s role was to offer testimony on the question of whether the Bosnian war had been a national or international conflict.

12 Ibid., 117, 140–1.

13 Ibid., 241.

14 See Bećirević, Edina, Genocide on the Drina River (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014)CrossRefGoogle Scholar .

15 Donia, Karadžić, 18.

16 Hayden writes: ‘that mass slaughter may have put, finally, some accuracy into the charges of “genocide” that had been made since the very start of the conflict, thus turning “genocide” from politically-inspired label to self-fulfilling prophecy’, in From Yugoslavia, 141.

17 Axboe Nielsen, Christian, ‘Surmounting the Myopic Focus on Genocide: The Case of the War in Bosnia and Herzegovina’, Journal of Genocide Research 15, 1 (2013), 2139 CrossRefGoogle Scholar , 21.

18 Hayden, From Yugoslavia, 387.

19 See Koenker, Diane P., ed., ‘Discussion: “Schindler’s Fate: Genocide, Ethnic Cleansing, and Population Transfers”’, Slavic Review 55, 4 (1996), 727778 Google Scholar , especially Hayden’s original article and the most critical response by Carol Lilly.

20 Hayden, From Yugoslavia, xii.

21 See, for example, Lilly, Carol S., ‘Amoral Realism or Immoral Obfuscation?’, Slavic Review 55, 4 (1996), 749754 CrossRefGoogle Scholar ; Cushman, Thomas, ‘Anthropology and Genocide in the Balkans: An Analysis of Conceptual Practices of Power’, Anthropological Theory 4, 1 (2004), 528 CrossRefGoogle Scholar ; Ramet, Sabrina P., Thinking About Yugoslavia: Scholarly Debates about the Yugoslav Breakup and the Wars in Bosnia and Kosovo (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005)CrossRefGoogle Scholar .

22 See, for example, Andjelić, Neven, Bosnia-Herzegovina: The End of a Legacy (London: Frank Cass, 2003)Google Scholar ; Mišina, Dalibor, Shake, Rattle and Roll: Yugoslav Rock Music and the Poetics of Social Critique (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013)Google Scholar ; Spaskovska, Ljubica, The Last Yugoslav Generation: The Rethinking of Youth Politics and Cultures in Late Socialism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017)Google Scholar .

23 Kurspahić, Kemal, Prime Time Crime: Balkan Media in War and Peace (Washington DC: US Institute of Peace Press, 2003), 99 Google Scholar ; Hayden, From Yugoslavia, xvii.

24 Hayden, From Yugoslavia, 77–8.

25 Donia, Karadžić, 250.

26 Ibid., 17.

27 Andjelić, Bosnia-Herzegovina; Marko Attila Hoare, How Bosnia Armed (London: Saqi, 2004).

28 Gow, James, The Serbian Project and its Adversaries: A Strategy of War Crimes (London: Hurst, 2003)Google Scholar ; Ashby Wilson, Richard, Writing History in International Criminal Trials (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar .

29 Hayden, From Yugoslavia, 215.

30 On Bosnia in this vein, see David Chandler, Bosnia: Faking Democracy after Dayton, 2nd ed. (London: Pluto, 1999).

31 See Mac Ginty, Roger and Richmond, Oliver, ‘The Local Turn in Peace Building: A Critical Agenda for Peace’, Third World Quarterly 34, 5 (2013), 763783 CrossRefGoogle Scholar ; Hughes, Caroline, Öjendal, Joakim and Schierenbeck, Isabell, eds., ‘The “Local Turn” in Peacebuilding: The Liberal Peace Challenged’, special issue of Third World Quarterly, 36, 5 (2015)Google Scholar .

32 See Mac Ginty, Roger, International Peacebuilding and Local Resistance: Hybrid Forms of Peace (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar ; Mac Ginty, Roger, ‘Everyday Peace: Bottom-Up and Local Agency in Conflict-Affected Societies’, Security Dialogue 45, 6 (2014), 548564 CrossRefGoogle Scholar ; McLeod, Laura, ‘A Feminist Approach to Hybridity: Understanding Local and International Interactions in Producing Post-Conflict Gender Security’, Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding 9, 1 (2015), 4869 CrossRefGoogle Scholar ; Mac Ginty, Roger and Richmond, Oliver, ‘The Fallacy of Constructing Hybrid Political Orders: A Reappraisal of the Hybrid Turn in Peacebuilding’, International Peacekeeping 23, 2 (2016), 219239 CrossRefGoogle Scholar .

33 Mac Ginty, International Peacebuilding, contains chapters on Afghanistan, Iraq, Bosnia, Lebanon and Northern Ireland. Bosnia represents a case of ‘hybrid statebuilding’ (134), where the legacies of wartime and pre-war (socialist Yugoslav) state building projects can be said to have hybridised with peacebuilders’ intentions for Bosnia at Dayton.

34 Autesserre, Séverine, Peaceland: Conflict Resolution and the Everyday Politics of International Intervention (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014)CrossRefGoogle Scholar .

35 Skendaj, Elton, Creating Kosovo: International Oversight and the Making of Ethical Institutions (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2014)CrossRefGoogle Scholar ; Visoka, Gëzim, Peace Figuration after International Intervention: Intentions, Events and Consequences of Liberal Peacebuilding (London and New York: Routledge, 2016)CrossRefGoogle Scholar .

36 See Donais, Timothy, Peacebuilding and Local Ownership: Post-Conflict Consensus-Building (London and New York: Routledge, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar , which contains case studies of Bosnia (as ‘ownership by imposition?’), Afghanistan and Haiti; Paris, Roland, At War’s End: Building Peace after Civil Conflict (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004)CrossRefGoogle Scholar , which used the September 1996 national elections in Bosnia (less than a year after Dayton) as one of its main case studies to argue that early ‘local’ control of state institutions weakened rather than strengthened peacebuilding.

37 Skendaj, Creating Kosovo, 41.

38 Ibid., 49.

39 Moore, Adam, Peacebuilding in Practice: Local Experience in Two Bosnian Towns (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013)CrossRefGoogle Scholar .

40 Hromadžić, Azra, Citizens of an Empty Nation: Youth and State-Making in Postwar Bosnia-Herzegovina (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015)Google Scholar .

41 See also, e.g., Grodach, Carl, ‘Reconstituting Identity and History in Post-War Mostar, Bosnia-Herzegovina’, City 6, 1 (2002), 6182 CrossRefGoogle Scholar ; Vetters, Larissa, ‘The Power of Administrative Categories: Emerging Notions of Citizenship in the Divided City of Mostar’, Ethnopolitics 6, 2 (2007), 187209 CrossRefGoogle Scholar ; Mills, Richard, ‘Velež Mostar Football Club and the Demise of “Brotherhood and Unity” in Yugoslavia, 1922–2009’, Europe–Asia Studies 62, 7 (2010), 11071133 CrossRefGoogle Scholar ; Björkdahl, Annika and Gusić, Ivan, ‘Sites of Friction: Governance, Identity and Space in Mostar’, in Annika Björkdahl, Kristine Höglund, Gearoid Millar, Jaïr van der Lijn and Willemijn Verkoren, eds., Peacebuilding and Friction: Global and Local Encounters in Post-Conflict Societies (London and New York: Routledge, 2016), 84102 Google Scholar ; Djurasović, Aleksandra, Ideology, Political Transitions and the City: The Case of Mostar, Bosnia and Herzegovina (London and New York: Routledge, 2016)CrossRefGoogle Scholar ; Palmberger, Monika, How Generations Remember: Conflicting Histories and Shared Memories in Post-War Bosnia and Herzegovina (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016)CrossRefGoogle Scholar ; Connor, Andrea, The Political Afterlife of Sites of Monumental Destruction: Reconstructing Affect in Mostar and New York (London and New York: Routledge, 2017)CrossRefGoogle Scholar . Bieber, Florian, ‘Local Institutional Engineering: A Tale of Two Cities, Mostar and Brčko’, International Peacekeeping 12, 3 (2005), 420433 Google Scholar , had previously recognised the comparative potential of Brčko and Mostar and reached conclusions that would be borne out, after eight more years of contentious politics, by Moore’s research.

42 See, for example, Jeffrey, Alex, ‘Building State Capacity in Post-Conflict Bosnia and Herzegovina: The case of Brčko District’, Political Geography 25, 2 (2006), 203227 CrossRefGoogle Scholar ; Dahlman, Carl and Tuathail, Gearóid Ó, ‘Bosnia’s Third Space?: Nationalist Separatism and International Supervision in Bosnia’s Brčko District’, Geopolitics 11, 4 (2006), 651675 CrossRefGoogle Scholar ; Natalya Clark, Janine, ‘Bosnia’s Success Story?: Brčko District and the “View from Below”’, International Peacekeeping 17, 1 (2010), 6779 CrossRefGoogle Scholar , argues based on interviews with ten residents of Brčko in 2009 that the institutional ‘success’ of peacebuilding had not in itself produced the bonds of everyday inter-ethnic trust that one might have expected to find in a less ‘thin’, socially meaningful reconciliation (73).

43 See, e.g., Armakolas, Ioannis, ‘The “Paradox” of Tuzla City: Explaining Non-Nationalist Local Politics During the Bosnian War’, Europe–Asia Studies 63, 2 (2011), 229261 CrossRefGoogle Scholar .

44 Moore, Peacebuilding in Practice, 6.

45 Ibid., 144–5.

46 Ibid., 156–7.

47 Ibid., 83.

48 Autesserre, Peaceland, 118.

49 Andrew Gilbert, ‘Foreign Authority and the Politics of Impartiality in Postwar Bosnia-Herzegovina’, PhD thesis, University of Chicago, 2008; Autesserre, Peaceland, 118.

50 Footitt, Hilary and Kelly, Michael, eds., Languages at War: Policies and Practices of Language Contacts in Conflict (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar .

51 Jones, Ian P. and Askew, Louise, Meeting the Language Challenges of NATO Operations: Policy, Practice and Professionalisation (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 2 CrossRefGoogle Scholar .

52 Jones and Askew, Meeting the Language Challenges, 23.

53 Ibid., 45.

54 Ibid., 57, 75.

55 Ibid., 80.

56 Jansen, Stef, Brković, Čarna and Čelebičić, Vanja, eds., Negotiating Social Relations in Bosnia and Herzegovina: Semiperipheral Entanglements (London and New York: Routledge, 2017)Google Scholar .

57 Cécile Jouhanneau, ‘The Discretion of Witnesses: War Camp Memories Between Politicisation and Civility’, in Jansen, Brković and Čelebičić, eds., Negotiating Social Relations, 31–45; Karla Koutková, ‘“The King is Naked”: Internationality, Informality and ko fol State-Building’, in Jansen, Brković and Čelebičić, eds., Negotiating Social Relations, 109–21.

58 Bougarel, Xavier, Duijzings, Ger and Helms, Elissa, eds., The New Bosnian Mosaic: Identities, Memories, and Moral Claims in a Post-War Society (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007)Google Scholar ; Jansen, Brković and Čelebičić, ‘Introduction’, 10.

59 Jansen, Brković and Čelebičić, ‘Introduction’, 10.

60 Ibid., 11–15.

61 Ibid., 16.

62 Ibid., 17.

63 Hayden, From Yugoslavia, 343–4.

64 See Jansen, Stef, Yearnings in the Meantime: ‘Normal Lives’ and the State in a Sarajevo Apartment Complex (New York: Berghahn, 2015)CrossRefGoogle Scholar .

65 Jansen, Stef, ‘The Privatisation of Home and Hope: Return, Reforms and the Foreign Intervention in Bosnia-Herzegovina’, Dialectical Anthropology 30, 3–4 (2006), 177199 CrossRefGoogle Scholar ; Jansen, Stef, Yearnings in the Meantime: ‘Normal Lives’ and the State in a Sarajevo Apartment Complex (New York: Berghahn, 2015)CrossRefGoogle Scholar .

66 See Majstorović, Danijela, Vučkovac, Zoran and Pepić, Anđela, ‘From Dayton to Brussels via Tuzla: post-2014 Economic Restructuring as Europeanization Discourse/Practice in Bosnia and Herzegovina’, Southeast European and Black Sea Studies 15, 4 (2015), 661682 CrossRefGoogle Scholar .