ABSTRACT
Categorizing Bosnian security is difficult. Bosnia’s recent history is shaped by controversies concerning the role of security in state formation, yet it is not clear whether Bosnian security is more than the sum of international and domestic security concerns. We do not know how the various horizontal and vertical relationships interact, or what the referent object of Bosnian security might be. Not only is security a contested concept, but also bordering the Bosnian state is controversial. For Bosnia is at once a former republic of Tito’s Yugoslavia with its own territorially defined reality, a nascent state establishing international borders in the face of regional cynicism, and an internationally managed composite state. It is a protectorate, and a de facto partitioned state riven by internal divisions and legacy issues that threaten to undermine the goals and objectives of the Dayton agreement. As a result, describing Bosnia’s security in terms based on Westphalian levels of analysis often seems contrived.
