The Difference Place Makes

Peacebuilding and Bosnia’s Arizona Market

Adam Moore

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Year: 2026
• Print ISBN:
  9781503646582
  9781503645707
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781503646599
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Eastern European History
• Index: Politics & International Relations

How do places shape peacebuilding interventions? Put simply, they are eventful. Geographers have long argued that places are constituted by relations with the wider world, relations that are always in flux. In this theoretically and empirically innovative book Adam Moore argues that the inverse is also true: places are generative of relations. People and institutions are constituted by their relations with places, relations that extend beyond a particular place in question itself. Drawing on relational and processual perspectives across the social sciences, Moore analyzes the effects that an infamous black market in postwar Bosnia—the Arizona market—had on peacebuilding projects and actors, and sociopolitical relations across the country more generally. Through encounters with, and narratives about, the market, the relations and politics of various actors in Bosnia at the time—from the UN to ordinary citizens—were transformed. Arizona's effects also radiated across time and space, even after it was dismantled, influencing political and social relations in Bosnia and further afield up to the present day. Bringing together scholarship in geography and peace and conflict studies, this book is a must-read for both fields and beyond.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures and Maps
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Introduction Arizona Dream
• One. Placing Peacebuilding
• Two. Dayton Bosnia and the Birth of Arizona
• Three. Arizona as Model
• Four. Arizona as Menace
• Five. Arizona as Means
• Six. How Arizona Was Won
• Seven. Afterlives
• Eight. Researching the Difference Place Makes
• Notes
• Index