Interlude

2020 ◽  
pp. 20-32
Author(s):  
Andrew C. Gilbert
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Peace Agreement ◽  
International Intervention ◽  
Post Cold War ◽  
Hierarchical Relations ◽  
Bosnian War ◽  
International Authority ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
Dayton Peace Agreement ◽  
Working Out

This interlude outlines the contours of international authority created in the response to the Bosnian war of the 1990s. The remaking of international institutions in response to Bosnia's war and its postwar peace heralded the coming-into-being of the “international community” as the dominant protagonist of a post-Cold War order structured around the values of peace, democracy, the rule of law, humanitarian solidarity, and the inviolability of human rights. This order was presented as more or less universally valid. The universal validity of this post-Cold War model bestowed two main roles and sets of hierarchical relations on the agents of intervention: that of mediator above and between conflicting parties, and that of civilizing missionary or educator of not fully modern people(s). Successfully occupying either role required a constant demonstration of neutrality. However, working out what it meant to be “neutral” in the everyday encounters of international intervention across relations of difference was often a vexing and unpredictable endeavor. The interlude then looks at postwar Bosnia's political settlement and explains why refugee return became such an important site of intervention encounters. It also considers the Dayton Peace Agreement.

A post-liberal peace: Eirenism and the everyday

2009 ◽  
Vol 35 (3) ◽  
pp. 557-580 ◽  
Author(s):  
OLIVER P. RICHMOND
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Critical Research ◽  
Double Standards ◽  
Post Cold War ◽  
Peace Processes ◽  
Post Conflict ◽  
Liberal Peace ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
Basic Goal ◽  
Hybrid Forms

AbstractThe ‘liberal peace’ is undergoing a crisis of legitimacy at the level of the everyday in post-conflict environments. In many such environments; different groups often locally constituted perceive it to be ethically bankrupt, subject to double standards, coercive and conditional, acultural, unconcerned with social welfare, and unfeeling and insensitive towards its subjects. It is tied to Western and liberal conceptions of the state, to institutions, and not to the local. Its post-Cold War moral capital, based upon its more emancipatory rather than conservative claims, has been squandered as a result, and its basic goal of a liberal social contract undermined. Certainly, since 9/11, attention has been diverted into other areas and many, perhaps promising peace processes have regressed. This has diverted attention away from a search for refinements, alternatives, for hybrid forms of peace, or for empathetic strategies through which the liberal blueprint for peace might coexist with alternatives. Yet from these strategies a post-liberal peace might emerge via critical research agendas for peacebuilding and for policymaking, termed here, eirenist. This opens up a discussion of an everyday ‘post-liberal peace’ and critical policies for peacebuilding.

The Essence of Analogy: Conflict Termination and State-building Lessons from Bosnia-Herzegovina to Syria

2020 ◽  
Vol 25 (2) ◽  
pp. 252-278
Author(s):  
Gorana Grgić
Keyword(s):  
Ethnic Conflict ◽  
Nation Building ◽  
State Building ◽  
Peace Agreement ◽  
Bosnian War ◽  
Economic Stagnation ◽  
Historical Analogy ◽  
Dayton Peace Agreement ◽  
Conflict Termination

Abstract From the perspective of Bosnia-Herzegovina (BiH) today, the legacy of the Dayton Peace Agreement (DPA) remains mixed. The dominant view is that the DPA is the origin of its political impasse, economic stagnation, and failed nation-building. Yet, it is indisputable that DPA has been successful in preventing the recurrence of a major violent ethnic conflict in BiH. More recently, the failures of Syrian peace talks to yield a durable settlement have evoked the lessons from the DPA. However, most analyses have concluded the parallels with the Bosnian war and its resolution are misplaced given the complexity and severity of the war in Syria. This article argues for a more nuanced approach to distilling the Dayton legacy, particularly when it is employed as a historical analogy. It highlights the usefulness of the DPA as an analogy for successful conflict termination, while offering lessons about the pitfalls of externally imposed consociational arrangements.

scholarly journals A genealogy of mediation in international relations: From ‘analogue’ to ‘digital’ forms of global justice or managed war?

2018 ◽  
Vol 53 (3) ◽  
pp. 301-319 ◽  
Author(s):  
Oliver P Richmond
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Global Justice ◽  
International Intervention ◽  
Post Cold War ◽  
Contemporary World ◽  
International Mediation ◽  
Timor Leste ◽  
New States ◽  
Analogue To Digital ◽  
The Cold War

What does it mean to mediate in the contemporary world? During the Cold War, and since, various forms of international intervention have maintained a fragile strategic and territorially sovereign balance between states and their elite leaders, as in Cyprus or the Middle East, or built new states and inculcated new norms. In the post-Cold War era intervention and mediation shifted beyond the balance of power and towards the liberal peace, as in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Kosovo, and Timor Leste. In the case of Northern Ireland, identity, territorial sovereignty, and the nature of governance also began to be mediated, leading to hints of complex, post-liberal formulations. This article offers and evaluates a genealogy of the evolution of international mediation.

scholarly journals The Limits of Foreign Authority: Publicity and the Political Logic of Ambivalence in Postwar Bosnia and Herzegovina

2017 ◽  
Vol 59 (2) ◽  
pp. 415-445 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Gilbert
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Bosnia And Herzegovina ◽  
Popular Sovereignty ◽  
State Of Exception ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Transformation ◽  
Independent State ◽  
International Intervention ◽  
Post Cold War ◽  
The Comparative Study

AbstractThis article explores the ambivalent forms of authority and legitimacy articulated by the Office of the High Representative of the international community in postwar Bosnia and Herzegovina. The High Representative exercised quasi-sovereign powers that placed his position at the center of two contradictions: a democratization paradox of “imposing democracy,” that is, promoting democracy through undemocratic means, and a state-building paradox of building an independent state by violating the principle of popular sovereignty. I analyze the Office's use of mass-mediated publicity to show how the High Representative sought to legitimize his actions in ways that both sustained the norms of democracy and statehood he advocated and suspended the contradictions behind how he promoted them. In doing so, he claimed that Bosnia was caught in a temporary state of exception to the normal nation-state order of things. This claim obliged him to show that he was working to end the state of exception. By focusing on one failed attempt by the OHR to orchestrate an enactment of “local ownership” that was aimed at demonstrating that Bosnia no longer required foreign supervision, this article identifies important limits to internationally instigated political transformation. It offers a view of international intervention that is more volatile, open-ended, and unpredictable than either the ordered representations of the technocratic vision or the confident assertions that critique international intervention as a form of (neo)imperial domination. It also demonstrates the analytic importance of publicity for the comparative study of international nation-building and democratization in the post-Cold War era.

The Mulroney government and humanitarian intervention in the former Yugoslavia

2018 ◽  
Vol 73 (1) ◽  
pp. 49-67
Author(s):  
Misha Boutilier
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Humanitarian Intervention ◽  
World Order ◽  
Former Yugoslavia ◽  
International Intervention ◽  
Post Cold War ◽  
Secondary Sources ◽  
Leading Role ◽  
The Government

Based on primary and secondary sources, this article analyzes the policy of the Mulroney government on humanitarian intervention in the former Yugoslavia between 1991 and 1993. It finds that the Mulroney government chose to play a leading role in the international intervention in the former Yugoslavia, because doing so both allowed the government to implement its vision of a post-Cold War world order that aligned with its understanding of Canadian interests, and satisfied the demands and preferences of the Canadian public. At the same time, the Mulroney government stumbled into unanticipated situations in Yugoslavia, and failed to respond to them effectively. This led the government to reconsider the assumptions that had motivated its initial enthusiasm for intervention, and to commence a review of peacekeeping and intervention that it would not live to implement.

scholarly journals The international determinants of the Bosnian War

2017 ◽  
Vol 5 (3) ◽  
pp. 593-619
Author(s):  
Bruno Gomes Guimarães
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Ethnic Conflict ◽  
International System ◽  
Economic Status ◽  
Great Powers ◽  
External Support ◽  
Power Politics ◽  
Post Cold War ◽  
Bosnian War ◽  
Great Power Politics

This paper analyzes the international determinants that led to and triggered the Bosnian War in the 1990s. An overview of the Socialist Yugoslavia and its international stance up to its dismemberment is presented at first, focusing on the integration of the country in the international system (and its impact on Yugoslavia) and on its international economic status. Then, the onset of the war and the actions of the Great Powers — United States, France, Germany, United Kingdom, and Russia — are analyzed, looking at the undermining of the Yugoslav state's sovereignty and the empowerment of domestic actors through external support to belligerent groups. It is seen that after Yugoslavia's economic destabilization, foreign interference propelled the start of the war by making the belligerent groups in Bosnia confident because of their foreign support. Geopolitical interests were a determinant of the Bosnian War, which was characterized as an intractable ethnic conflict to hide political agendas at play.Keywords: Bosnian War; Yugoslavia; Post-Cold War geopolitics; Dismemberment of Yugoslavia;  Great power politics; Ethnic conflict.

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