ABSTRACT
One of the central dilemmas in the negotiation of the General Framework Agreement for Peace (Framework) was the need to arrive at terms capable of reversing the accomplished ethnic segregation of Bosnia with precisely the parties most responsible for-and most interested in maintaining-the end-of-conflict status quo. In order to attain a negotiated peace, international actors conceded a great deal of legitimacy to the Bosnian nationalist parties, including political control of territory they had taken during the war, subject only to notional interference from an almost risibly weak central government. In the eyes of many observers, the political provisions of the Framework conceded too much, allowing the nationalists to hold and even consolidate their wartime gains, in terms of both the territory they had won and the continued exclusion of ethnic “minority” populations that had fled them.1
