The Abyss of Ethnic Division: Two Decades of Discussing War in the Parliament of Bosnia and Herzegovina

Abstract

The article analyses over two decades of parliamentary debates in Bosnia–Herzegovina in order to understand the role of war past in the political reconciliation of Bosnian elites. We show that the discourse of war identified in the Parliament of Bosnia–Herzegovina structurally differs from the mainstream notion of Bosnian politics. The patterns detected in the parliamentary debates indicate that the central conflict exists primarily alongside Bosniak–Serb grievances, with Croat MPs being far less engaged. We argue that the three-sided conflict, often portrayed by literature as the major obstacle to reconciliation in Bosnia–Herzegovina, needs to be re-evaluated as a 2 + 1 model in which Croat MPs play a balancing role in maintaining the Post-Dayton status quo.

Supplemental Data

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed at https://doi.org/10.1080/17449057.2022.2120283

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The first postwar term (1996-1998) is not covered as only session minutes are available. The analyzed corpus covers only finished terms.

2 The corpus is freely available via Zenodo data repository at doi:10.5281/zenodo.6517697 (Mochtak et al., 2022).

3 Rather than assigning known or assumed ethnicity on the level of MPs, we do the modeling using party affiliations and their declared ethnic background. Multiethnic parties are excluded.

4 'Silos’ was a concentration camp operated by the Army of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina (ARBiH) (Balkan Insight, 2009; Oberpfalzerová et al., 2019).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by an ERC Starting Grant Number 714589 for the project ‘Electoral Legacies of War: Political Competition in Postwar Southeast Europe’ (ELWar). H2020 European Research Council