Peace Order and the Biopolitical Logic of Nationalism in the Western Balkans: A Study of the Reproduction of Nationalism in Bosnia and Herzegovina

Abstract

The peace-building endeavors in the Western Balkans led by the international community as a means of spreading the neoliberal international order to post-conflict societies have since the end of the Cold War been seen as a significant practice. However, almost 30 years since the signing of the Dayton Peace Agreement, the Western Balkan countries, whose interests are represented by Bosnia and Herzegovina (henceforth referred to as BiH), have not yet accomplished national integration. In order to explain this phenomenon, existing research has focused on the perspectives of institutional design, international intervention, and identity construction, but has not addressed the issue of why nationalism can be continually reproduced in times of peace and why it continues to define the post-conflict order. In this paper, the author presents a biopolitical view, where nationalism is viewed as a set of governance practices that organize themselves along the borders of the community, and develops a three-tier analytical model: Institutional structure-Social identity-International governance. Research has shown that the Dayton Peace Agreement incorporated ethnicities into the institutional structure of the state by utilizing mechanisms of power sharing, and other elements like educational systems, history and memory, language, and religion have continued to strengthen the boundaries of identity at the societal level. Through the relationship between institutional structure and social identity, nationalism has eventually gained the ability to reproduce itself constantly, and it has often brought state reforms, government, and institutional integration and returned them to a framework of ethno-national security. Consequently, there has developed a constant tension between the logic of national integration advocated by the international community and the logic of nationalist governance that has been one of the reasons behind the stagnation of peacebuilding in Bosnia and Herzegovina. The example of Bosnia and Herzegovina shows that post-conflict peacebuilding is not solely the process of institutional restoration but also the process of the restoration of the political community; peace institutions may put an end to violent conflict but do not necessarily erase the logic of ethno-national politics, or create a cross-ethnic identity.