Why did peace fail in BiH?
To some extent, it is true that BiH is a country in which the aggressive militaristic and nationalistic strategies of its elites have resulted in a total blockade of the country’s institutions. But the truth of when, how, and why things went wrong with peacebuilding in BiH goes far beyond the sanitised analysis of mainstream media and in the political corridors of London, Brussels, Moscow, Istanbul, or Washington.
The story of BiH’s failing peace started the day the war ended and a peace agreement between the ethno-nationalist and international elites was agreed upon, with the people of BiH conspicuously absent from those negotiations. Everything that has happened since then—from corruption, militarisation and the strengthening of ethno-nationalist projects to massive post-war emigration—is an outcome of how this so-called peace was built and by whom.
Such an outcome was not inevitable. The failure of the peace process is a product of the international community’s colonial approach to “building peace” according to their needs, and of the feudal and autocratic behaviour of ethno-nationalist elites. A functional state could not have been built on structures that ensure eternal impunity and reign of corrupted elites, both domestic and international, as little as sustainable peace could have been built on an uncontested spread of neoliberal capitalism under the guise of implementation of a peace agreement.
Having lived in this neoliberal “experiment”, wrapped in the language of peacebuilding and recovery, we are very familiar with its insidious workings: reducing democracy to an election day, using reconstruction and recovery as a paravane for privatisation and onslaught on our public sector and commons, using the implementation of the peace agreement as a pretence for transforming our political economy without giving us a say in it, introducing fiscal consolidation and austerity measures and claiming those are socio-economic reforms, consolidating political and economic power in the hands of few and calling it progress, using the international loans under the pretence of investment in sustainable energy and infrastructure while at the same time destroying and polluting our ecosystem and pushing us further into debt. It is crystal clear that the current international peacebuilding efforts are a vehicle for spreading neoliberal capitalism, with an international peacebuilding industry in the driver’s seat.
Understanding this background, unpacking the reasons why neoliberal peacebuilding in BiH is faltering seems to us of utmost importance. No one is off the hook. In our work, we have been warning for some time now that we need to go beyond the mainstream and localised interpretations, narratives, and understandings of the peacebuilding in BiH to see the full consequences on the political, economic and social context in which we are trying to restore our lives, at an individual and collective level. It is essential that we reflect on how the war and the peace have been interpreted, applied, projected, and reproduced within the Bosnian and Herzegovinian society and how a process of peacebuilding, firmly grounded in neoliberal ideology, has generated results contrary to the very essence of peace.
The global failures of neoliberal peacebuilding
BiH is not the only country that has fallen victim to the neoliberal peacebuilding industry. It is, however, a particularly egregious example of how flawed this approach has been and continues to be. Other feminists have also been warning, in relation to Afghanistan, Lebanon, Iraq, Syria and many other places, that the actual consequence of the neoliberal approach to peacebuilding is militarisation, exploitation, deepening of inequalities and depoliticisation. Not peace. And this is a structural problem with global consequences.
As the invasion of Ukraine, along with militarisation of our societies and our everyday lives, is being normalised in the public debate, Bosnia and Herzegovina and the Balkans are again popping up as the next potential war zones in the never-ending opening of new fronts. Building peace by and for the people, rather than elites, should be at the top of the global agenda, but it is not.
Unless we start opening up discussions about and addressing the militaristic workings of neoliberalism, and start looking for other solutions, we are approaching the point of no return and risking the future of our planet. The first step is to recognise that peace and neoliberal capitalism are two mutually exclusive concepts and to look for alternatives. More than 25 years of failed peacebuilding in Bosnia and Herzegovina have made this painfully clear.
