Local Agency and Peacebuilding

EU and International Engagement in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Cyprus and South Africa

S. Kappler

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781137307187
• eBook ISBN: 9781137307194
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Comparative Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Investigating local responses to EU peacebuilding, this book develops a relational and spatial concept of agency, helping to understand the processes in which peacebuilding actors engage and interact with one another. The focus on cultural actors reveals the contested nature of local agency and its potential to challenge institutional policies.

1

Introduction

In 2011, Dubioza Kolektiv, a popular music band from Sarajevo, produced a new single, titled Eurosong, in which they sing, ‘I’m sick of being European just on Eurosong’ (Eurovision Song Contest). This is a telling statement if one considers the decreasing popularity of the European Union (EU) in Bosnia-Herzegovina.¹ As the Early Warning Quarterly Report from July–September 2008 of the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) reflects, between March and September 2008 general approval of the EU’s work in BiH had decreased from 46.1% to 42.1%, while the general acquiescence to EU membership had declined significantly as well.²

From the perspective of the EU and other actors engaged in post-conflict peacebuilding in BiH, the situation seems to be getting worse. It looks like the international community has not been able to create sustainable peace, and its popularity is in steady decline. Furthermore there is an increasing dissatisfaction among the people with the work of the international community and the lack of engagement by local people in the peacebuilding project. Bosnians, in turn, are increasingly disappointed by the failure of international peacebuilders to improve the quality of their lives, to create employment and to provide a stable foundation on which peace can develop. At the same time, the international community feels that local elites are unable to bring about constitutional reform with the Dayton Peace Agreement (DPA) a major obstacle. Indeed, the Constitution introduced by Dayton has been reinforcing ethnic divisions and has led to further fragmentation of the political structure in BiH – mainly between Republika Srpska (RS) and the Federation. The situation looks hardly any better in the social realm with people increasingly disappointed by the peacebuilding process and sick of talking about it. Given that the EU used to be one of the few actors on which big hopes were placed, its decreasing popularity is particularly disappointing for all. Apart from its recent success in the context of visa liberalisation, the EU’s engagement in BiH has failed to produce many of the results it had envisaged earlier in the peacebuilding process. Although there seems to be much talk about future membership of BiH in the EU as the only way to solve the country’s problems,³ this seems to be very far off for the Bosnian people at the moment. This results in further frustration vis-à-vis the EU and the ways in which it is conceived in BiH.

This is the background against which this study takes an interest in examining the reasons for which the EU and international actors, more generally, have remained distant from local imaginations of peace and peacebuilding. It also investigates the reasons for which actors such as the EU have failed to connect to such local imaginations despite their ambitions of European integration and the associated, mostly implicit, peacebuilding efforts. The investigation conducted in this book ties in with the debates about international and local ownership of peacebuilding, as well as the connections and their hybridisation.⁴

Therefore, this book aims to look at how those actors still influence the EU and vice versa, not in a very obvious or direct way, but in a much more subtle and hidden manner. The EU and local grassroots actors may not talk to each other, at least not frequently, but they talk about similar things, similar topics, albeit in very different ways. The ways in which they talk and interact are therefore centred on a specific issue or subject field. Therefore, the interaction between EU and local cultural actors, that is, actors that are situated in an everyday context in BiH and channel their associated experiences, views and discourses into creative processes, is all but obvious. However, it helps us understand a lot about the successes and the failures of the EU’s peacebuilding and statebuilding ambitions. In fact, what seems to happen is that the EU is quite influential in some fields, while in other fields, there is hardly any impact on local dynamics, or a rather negative one that obstructs the original goals of the EU’s mission. The other way round, some of the EU’s efforts are perceived as supportive among the local population (the visa liberalisation process, for instance), while others are considered obstacles to local ambitions and imaginations, and are therefore resisted. This casts light on a tension between EU institutions and norms as against the contextual agency of local cultural actors to respond to and transform the former.

Interestingly enough, the ways in which both the EU as an institution and the vast majority of academics have conceptualised peacebuilding engagement, not only by the EU, but also by the international community in general, represent a belief in the visibility of power as well as relying on an actor-centred notion of agency. Mac Ginty has problematised this through what he calls the ‘liberal peace “silo” ’, referring to the assumption that there are chains of interaction between leading states, international organisations and institutions, reaching down to governments, ministries, municipalities, non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and so forth.⁵ The silo assumed that the direction of interaction is mainly downwards, while ideas and resources are believed to trickle down from top-level actors via national and sub-national policy agents to finally reach communities and individuals.⁶ This means there is an assumption that the main actors in control of the peacebuilding process are the institutions in power. In BiH and in many other places, these are often believed to be the institutions of the international community. This is, to a certain extent, similar to Cyprus where the United Nations (UN), the EU and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) have come to be considered as the main agenda-setters in any activity related to peace and its associated funding streams.

It has therefore long been assumed that local actors or the people on the ground are nothing more than recipients of what is being imposed on them by seemingly more powerful actors. Even more critical accounts of peacebuilding have focused their criticism on the ways in which institutions govern their subjects, often referring to ‘biopolitics’ and associated discourses.⁷ Against this background, it has often been neglected that the peacebuilding subjects are not just passive victims, but they may act as the creators of their own history, thus exercising their agency, although this is not always visible in the public sphere. In this context, Richmond has reminded us of the ability of local populations to make a difference in their everyday context, which has been depoliticised and indeed also often romanticised, partly because neither policymakers nor academics found ways of accessing this rather complex sphere.⁸ At the same time, an academic discourse is gradually emerging that is taking account of the importance of the everyday context of peace, its political nature as well as its central role in social life.⁹ However, this is not to reduce ‘everyday life’ to a notion of primitive localness, but to view it in the trajectory between ‘the particular and the universal, the local and the global’.¹⁰ It has now also been recognised as a sphere in which people find security¹¹ and (maybe as a result of this) voice their agency, which tends to be subtle and barely visible in public, but is full of content and substance, both of which the technical nature of peacebuilding operations have failed to connect to.

Against this background, the local will be considered as what is concerned with ‘everyday social reality’, reflecting the competing visions of peace within this reality. In this context, Richmond has claimed that

[t]he local can be thought in terms of everyday social reality. This includes customary processes and institutions, as well as indigenous forms of knowledge, traditional authorities, elders, chiefs, communities, tribes, and religious groups. Of course, it also includes the life of modernity, and the impact of liberal state institutions and markets.¹²

Here, the local is not viewed in necessary opposition to international actors, such as the EU, but as a broad range of actors in various segments of society and connected to the international system. At the same time, internationals can become locals, once they start connecting to everyday social reality rather than speaking from an ‘ivory tower’, or from an ‘air-conditioned room’.¹³ In that respect, the spaces of agency of diverse sets of actors presented in this book, whether local, regional, national or international, should not be read as necessarily oppositional, but rather as in situations of mutual constitution and hybridisation. The book therefore builds on what Pugh et al. have called a ‘new “geometry of power” ’ that feeds local needs into the policy process rather than seeing the local as isolated from the institutional.¹⁴

An approach that takes into account the subtle agency of local actors in turn requires a broad notion of agency in a certain structural context, which accounts for the multiple ways in which power can play out. This requires a rethinking of our conceptualisations of agency after the ‘visual turn’ towards a much more subtle analysis of the ways in which actors communicate and interact through imaginary spaces and spheres, which in turn represent the structural foundation of action, but are at the same time subject to continuous challenge. Against the background of an often invisible and romanticised ‘local’,¹⁵ this book aims to restore political agency to the seemingly powerless, situated within the structures of imaginary spaces. Interestingly enough, the assumption that ‘ordinary people’ cannot make a difference to the peacebuilding process seems to be a fairly common one in BiH as well as Cyprus, not only among the peacebuilders, but also in more general social discourses. Yet, as the work of numerous music groups, youth centres, cultural initiatives and arts festivals illustrates, there is a high degree of mobilisation and implicit political agendas to be found in such places. Often people are not aware of this agency, and this is certainly not very well explored by actors such as the EU, which lacks the institutional structures to be able to engage with dynamics beyond the political, public sphere. Problematically, the EU is constrained to focus on what is visible, public and formally political. At the same time, it is missing out on those alternative, fruitful discourses situated in an everyday life context which have the potential to create a locally sustainable peace and to constantly re-negotiate it in the trajectories between the particular and the universal, as outlined above. This is not least due to the fact that local agency in Bosnia has tended to protect itself by withdrawing from the public sphere to avoid censorship and state-led control. In Cyprus, we see a tendency for local agency to be either co-opted into dominant peacebuilding discourses, or semi-public ambitions to resist those. In contrast, South African agencies seem to be much more explicitly political and engaged in public spheres, aiming to increase the visibility of their activities.

The main case study: Bosnia in transition

BiH has a long history of international involvement and cannot be seen in isolation either from its neighbours or from various great powers on a global level.¹⁶ Bosnian culture and society have therefore always been hybrids of Eastern and Western influences, shaped by the rule of different empires (Ottoman, Habsburg) and the associated flows of migrants.¹⁷ Sahović points to the different elements that those influences brought to the country, suggesting that Turkish rule was mainly shaped by a tendency of withdrawal from public life and repression, although this became more relaxed in the later stages of Ottoman rule.¹⁸ In contrast, the Habsburg Empire was characterised by its ambitions to modernise and ‘civilise’, while struggles emerged with respect to national identity and the predominant ethnic nationalism.¹⁹

The fact that the country was tired of foreign dominance and governance became evident when, after the emergence of Socialist Yugoslavia, Tito broke with Russia in 1948 to develop his own distinct model of socialism. In the context of the Cold War, this meant the expulsion from the Soviet Bloc, whereas Western powers started considering Yugoslavia as a potential ally to be instrumentalised for their goals. This represented the beginning of the provision of military and economic aid from the West and established a link to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) through the Balkan Pact with Greece, Turkey and Yugoslavia in 1953.²⁰

Although, before and after the war, Yugoslavia was still an agrarian society, based on egalitarian village communities and working classes submissive to state power, the 1960s were shaped by market-oriented reforms and integration into the international division of labour.²¹ It was thus part of global and regional economies and developed its role in a bigger context. The World Bank started to get involved in the region, which was deemed as strategically important in the balance of power game, so the first World Bank loans were given out in 1951.²² Generally, during his rule and particularly in the 1970s, Tito received a lot of support from Western states, which kept the system going. At the same time, this strategy, appreciated by some, accused of its repressive features by others, served to uphold the Western alliance. It was in 1981 that the International Monetary Fund (IMF) approved the biggest loan ever in order to tie the country more closely to the Western financial system as well as attaching conditions relating to the creation of market socialism and facilitating import liberalisations.²³ Not only did those reforms lead to the fragmentation of the country’s economic and political structures in terms of countering the egalitarian features inherent in the centrally organised economic system, but the constitution passed in 1974 had already reinforced centrifugal tendencies by arranging for economic modernisation and political decentralisation. Combined with the reforms imposed by the International Financial Institutions (IFIs), this led to a deep transformation of societal structures. It was particularly in the 1980s that Yugoslavia had to face huge obligations to Western donors, with the IMF calling for radical fiscal measures, while Western countries exerted pressure for further liberalisation and decentralisation. This resulted in a growing gap between richer and poorer regions and therefore undermined the development or maintenance of a common Yugoslav identity.²⁴ According to Likić-Brborić, this led to the macroeconomic transformation crisis in 1991/2, a period of privatisation with high restructuring costs and unemployment,²⁵ which can, amongst others, be viewed as one factor for the accumulation of social grievances and finally the outbreak of fighting in Slovenia, Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina.

Generally, the interest of the international community in the conflict was rather weak at the outbreak of the war, but gradually increased when its proportions could no longer be easily assessed and represented a potential danger to the stability of the wider region. This was accompanied by increasing public pressure, particularly when the media started to report the humanitarian consequences of the conflict. Various strategies for possible international involvement were developed over the duration of the conflict with the EU assuming a central role that will be explored in detail below.

It was mainly the UN that were criticised for the failure to put an ending to open violence. Apart from the fact that its peacekeeping force, the United Nations Protection Force (UNPROFOR), hardly managed to control Sarajevo airport and was a rather weak and powerless body, UN sanctions imposed on the conflicting parties turned out to be inefficient, failing to have a substantial impact on the war and even strengthening Milosević’s position, while weakening the Serbian opposition.²⁶ Equally, the air presence of NATO did not prevent major incidents of violence, such as the massacre of Srebrenica in 1995, which Malcolm refers to as the blackest moment of UN involvement in Bosnia and a humanitarian disaster.²⁷ Generally, international engagement was hampered by tensions between the different external parties, with major disagreements emerging between the UN and European countries,²⁸ as well as among European countries themselves. Several attempts to find ceasefire agreements were made, but they were broken as that they did not manage to...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• 1. Introduction
• 2. The Framing of Peacebuilding Agency – From a Monodimensional Towards a Spatial Understanding of Agency
• 3. Why Culture?
• 4. The EU’s Spaces of Agency in the Bosnian Peacebuilding Context
• 5. Local Spaces of Agency in Bosnia
• 6. Spaces of Agency to Analyse Political Transformation: Cyprus and South Africa
• 7. Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index