ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the city of Mostar in Herzegovina, one of Bosnia-Herzegovina's (BiH's) five largest urban centres, and the chequered history of internationally engineered power-sharing there from the mid-1990s through 2015. Mostar is an important case study for assessing the governability of power-sharing in post-war BiH because it reflects, in microcosm, its larger Bosnian context. Mostar was the first place in BiH to come under an international peacebuilding regime. Mostar was viewed by the international community as vital to shoring up the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina (FBiH) and to the statebuilding agenda for BiH as a whole. The goal was to reintegrate and eventually reunify Mostar, and fostering power-sharing between the political leaderships of west Mostar and east Mostar was crucial. The 1996 city statute tried to balance devolution with reintegration and the 2001 Election Law sought to create a bottom-up structure for the city's governance.
