ABSTRACT
In this chapter, we explore the first-ever civilian ESDP mission, which was launched in January 2003 and terminated in December 2005. After a brief overview of the war in Bosnia and the subsequent establishment of an international governance structure in the country, the chapter maps in detail the preparations for and actions of the EUPM. It is striking that in Bosnia, just as later in Macedonia, the decision to launch an ESDP civilian crisis management operation came at a point when the peacebuilding process was already well advanced. This brings into sharp relief the importance of problematizations through which international peacebuilding interventions are made thinkable as well as their contingent nature. As we argued in Chapter 2, rationalities of governance, in which problematizations are embedded, do not register an already always structured world but actively act upon it so as to make it governable. Here we shall show how ambivalence was mobilized out of the representation of the state of policing in Bosnia by international peacebuilders, including the EU, and how their reading licensed and conditioned the reordering of the local policing field. Our analysis of the construction of problems worthy of the attention of an
ESDP police mission is followed by an examination of the activities and challenges involved in the planning and deployment of the EUPM and the translation of its mandate into operationally useful benchmarks. This discussion leads up to what is arguably the main part of the chapter: the thick description of the manifold, mostly small-scale reforms carried out by the mission. Our chronicle of the work ofmission staff, which is the first thorough engagement with what the EUPM did in its three years of operation, is intentionally kept atheoretical so as to give the reader a flavour of its humble and mundane nature. In Chapter 6, we anatomize the activities of the EUPM and those of Proxima with the critical intent to bring into focus the workings of the generic political technologies they employ. Returning to this chapter, in the penultimate section we relate the EUPM to the other peacebuilding activities of the EU in Bosnia to highlight their sometimes conflictual relationship as well as the continuum between post-conflict peacebuilding and pre-EU integration. We end by briefly sketching out the rationale for and mandate of the EUPM follow-onmission, which was launched in January 2006.
