ABSTRACT
A decade ago a straw-poll on the question would have elicited predictably polarized answers, depending on the respondents’ views on several interconnected issues – the historical character of Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) as a society and the nature of relations between its three major peoples, the relative importance of external instigation as opposed to internal conflict in the causation of the 1992–95 Bosnian war, and the legitimacy and efficacy of international intervention in the most representative and most broken of the former Yugoslavia’s federal units. By the late 1990s, the ICG’s reports, while often well researched and informative, had acquired a monotonous, predictable quality, filled with prescriptions for international action that looked like a radical interventionist’s fantasy.
