In February 2014, citizensâ protests were being held in the streets of Sarajevo and other cities in Bosnia, such as Tuzla, Mostar, and Zenica. Together with other episodes of popular upheaval in 2012 and 2013, the protests had seen unprecedented popular mobilization since the end of the war. The mobilization involved the organization of citizensâ assemblies , plenums, as instruments of radical democracy. Another event coincided with the protests in Sarajevo. Under the auspices of the Womanâs International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), women activists from Syria travelled to Sarajevo as prospects about a second round of UN-led peace talks with the Assad government emerged. WILPF was keen to lobby the UN for the inclusion of womenâs groups in the negotiation process and to bring activists together to strategize (Rees 2015; Enloe 2017). In Sarajevo, the Syrian women met fellow Bosnian and international activists who shared their experiences of outliving conflict and tirelessly demanding to be acknowledged as co-architects in their respective peace processes and peace negotiations . Reporting from these series of encounters, Cynthia Cockburn points out how similar concerns animated the Bosnian women activists and protesters in their common dissatisfaction with two decades of so-called peace (Cockburn 2014). They shared anger and frustration at how the peace process had worked to entrench the power of ethno-nationalist elites through a highly complex system of multi-level governance and group rights provisions that marked ethnicity as the all-encompassing dimensions of post-conflict and post-agreement politics, at the expense of addressing living conditions and social justice. A sign held by young protesters stating âGlasni smo na tri jesikaâ âWe are hungry in three languagesâ perfectly encompasses the distrust and discontent of Bosnian citizens. While successful in ending the war, the internationally brokered consociational agreement has impoverished local citizens, both politically and materially, creating a highly complex bureaucratic system removed from everyday needs in the name of protecting ethnic groups rights.
Contrary to mainstream narratives that view the Dayton model as a success story of conflict resolution which could be replicated in other conflict scenarios, this book shares the concerns expressed by local Bosnians and long-time observers on the darker implications of Daytonâs promises of peace. Critical interventions have long spotlighted the pitfalls of international intervention in Bosnia-Herzegovina (Paris 2004; Chandler 2006a; Hozic 2014) foregrounding ambivalent implications for post-war/post-agreement politics (Chandler 2006a; Hozic 2014) in relation to a wide range of aspects, such as democracy, inclusion and local participation (Chandler 2000; MujkiÄ 2007; Belloni 2008; Kappler 2013; Donais 2017), gender and womenâs empowerment (Lithander 2000; Chinkin and Paradine 2001; Pupavac 2005, 2010; True 2016; OâReilly 2016), transitional justice (Baker and Obradovic-Wochnik 2016; Lai 2016; OâReilly 2016), reconciliation (Helms 2010; Kostovicova 2013), everyday life and citizenship (Mansfield 2003; Guzina 2007; SarajliÄ 2010; HromadĹžiÄ 2015; Jansen 2015). Emerged in the midst of post-Cold War euphoria as dominant narrative for the resolution of conflict through the global promotion of liberal democracy, international statebuilding and peacebuilding has evolved to encompass complex and multi-layered top-down interventions targeting institutions , electoral systems and governance, market liberalization and internationally assisted post-conflict reconstruction, as well as encouraging participation through bottom-up approaches (Paris 2004; Jeong 2005; Chandler 2006b; Richmond and Mac Ginty 2015). Following this framework, over two decades of international intervention in post-conflict Bosnia have involved extensive scale of resources, energies and expertise in the deployment of such measures, sparking reflections over the efficacy of the liberal peace project in making a difference (Donais 2017). Andrew Gilbert and Jasmin MujanoviÄ caution against well-trodden narratives of international self-congratulation that posit Dayton as a success story. While the agreement is undeniably associated with the end of the war and achievement of a form of negative peace, for most people in BiH it has also âushered in a political-economic order of inequality and dispossession, not only of the means of dignified livelihood, but of a future and the agentive capacities to shape that futureâ (Gilbert and MujanoviÄ 2016). A deeper critical intervention on Daytonâs afterlives calls into question not only international responsibility in creating and exacerbating the very problems post-conflict solutions had sought to address, but also the reverberations of these failures into citizensâ lived experiences.
In this book, I develop a critical engagement with Daytonâs aftereffects through feminist lenses by foregrounding womenâs experiences in navigating the pernicious interaction between the unintended consequences of Daytonâs consociational regime and the gendered exclusions reproduced in various stages of the peace process . Since the signing of UN Security Council Resolution 1325 in 2000 (UNSCR1325), the articulation of gender concerns in the context of international peacebuilding and peacemaking has been framed in relation to the development of the Women, Peace and Security Agenda (WPS) . Comprised of UNSCR1325 and its sister resolutions, the agenda marks international commitment to mainstreaming gender in all aspects of security, conflict management and peacebuilding. 1 The agenda acknowledges the necessity to employ gender -sensitive approaches and expresses a commitment to the inclusion of women as key agents in the context of peace-making and peacebuilding. Welcomed as a landmark moment for womenâs and peace activism , the institutionalization of the agenda into the architecture of international peace-making has become the focus of intense critical scrutiny (for an overview, see: Cohn et al. 2004; Shepherd 2008; Otto 2009; Puechguirbal 2010; Pratt and Richter-Devroe 2011; Cook 2016; Kirby and Shepherd 2016a). Since its emergence, extensive research has highlighted a number of policy failures and tensions, ranging from implementation and national ownership, to international peacekeeping, security and conflict management practices , which continue to undercut WPSâ more ambitious and transformative claims in the present (Coomaraswamy 2015; Kirby and Shepherd 2016b). Crucially, despite the diffusion of this international framework, a reluctance to see women as co-architects of peace is still at play. 2 Furthermore, and as the context of Bosnia indicates, gendered exclusions , stereotypes and insecurities in post-conflict scenarios have proved to be resilient, as these are reproduced or emerge anew at different stages of a peace process in spite of institutional commitment to implement WPS (Deiana 2015; George and Shepherd 2016). A number of scholars suggest critically examining WPS applicability to widely different conflict and post-conflict scenarios and in relation to its relevance to womenâs activism and everyday life in these contexts (Swaine 2004; Farr 2011; McLeod 2011; Hoewer 2013; Basini and Ryan 2016).
This book foregrounds Bosnia-Herzegovina as a specific site of tension between the commitment for transformation and inclusions set out in WPS and the post-conflict consociational settlement. It argues that by entrenching ethnonationalism as the dominant political discourse, consociational formulas work to sideline gender dynamics of conflict and conflict transformat...