Peacebuilding in Bosnia and Herzegovina : Resistance or Emancipation ?

Despite the EU’s longstanding engagement in the Balkans, Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) is in the middle of what some local actors think is its most serious constitutional crisis since the war, Chandler (2009: 74) is right to say that BiH is an ‘inverted state’, not representative of local interests, but of external agendas. It represents the EU’s ambitions in the field of peacebuilding (Björkdahl et al., 2009; Juncos, 2005) in the form of a slowly evolving EU Peacebuilding Framework (EUPF) (Richmond, Björkdahl & Kappler, 2009). This is based on the liberal peace model and is the sum of its generally uncoordinated constituent parts, including aspirations for 'normative power', member states’ individual interests, and the Union’s specific historical character in political, economic, and social terms. Such dynamics are closely related to its geographic sphere of influence. This is the background for the Union’s engagement in the Western Balkans, where the carrot of eventual membership provides a particular attraction for both elites and on the ground (Juncos, 2005: 98), for often different reasons not necessarily related to those the EU expects. Despite the promising prelude of the Stabilisation and Association process (SAp) in the region, which was greeted with much enthusiasm on both sides, the success of the EUPF has been very limited. Rhetorically it has had a major impact on hopes for accession, and it seems to have had an impact in material terms and on governance even if it has not reached the heady heights internationals expected. Yet the lack of progress regarding the accession process represents a stalemate in which neither the EU nor the partners of the SAp are willing to move forward. The EU, as with the OHR previously, perceives this as a result of a lack of progress from the local politicians and the fragmented state structure. This paper attempts to explore such dynamics in the context of the EUPF, although this does not imply that the EUPF is a single, static and coherent model: indeed it is rather fragmented, illcoordinated, and represents complex negotiating processes and even dissensus over its objectives. It is thus no surprise we argue that in response localized peacebuilding agency is often expressed as resistance in order to reclaim the state from external interests. Indeed, since the siege of Sarajevo from 1992-5, discussions of politics and peace in BiH have been replete with debates about culture, identity, resistance to national and international narratives, music, sport, religion and alternative forms of political association. This has been to avoid being coopted by local elites and increasingly to distance itself from national and international policies. In such processes, local agencies develop their own alternative peacebuilding strategies. Uncovering such approaches depend on an ethnographic approach to understanding the types of