Bosnia: moving on from the Dayton Agreement?

Election posters in Bosnia. Demotix/Mahir Vranac. All rights reserved.“Stable but stagnant.”

That’s one way to describe Bosnia-Herzegovina (Bosnia) almost 20 years after international actors stopped a brutal civil war in the region. The break-up of Yugoslavia in the 1990s strained relationships among Bosniaks, Croats, and Serbs, Bosnia’s three primary “constituent peoples.” Some 100,000 people were killed in the ensuing three-year land grab.

Though the Dayton Agreement vanquished military fighting, it’s since come under heavy fire: Ethnic self-identification hasn’t changed at all, and the peace deal set up what can only be described as an enormously dizzying government system, shrouded in international bureaucracy, that’s contributed to Bosnia’s being one of Europe’s most corrupt states.