ABSTRACT
This study has set out to explore the tensions and contradictions between the political and economic components of the international community’s post-conflict peacebuilding agenda in Bosnia. It has sought to explain why, nearly a decade after the fighting stopped, so little progress has been made towards the establishment of a functioning market economy, and to assess the implications of the stalled economic reform process for the country’s broader peace process. The central argument has been that much of Bosnia’s ongoing economic crisis can be explained by assessing the interactions of an inappropriate international economic reform model with the country’s particular post-conflict and post-socialist political economy. Implicit in this broader argument is the suggestion that the economic and political tracks of the post-Dayton process should have been much more closely integrated from the very beginning. The failure to do so has undermined both economic and political reforms, and has enabled Bosnia’s political economy of conflict to persist throughout the post-Dayton period with deleterious consequences for economic recovery and sustainable peace. Recovery and regeneration have been further complicated by Bosnia’s complex post-Dayton constitutional structures and the country’s unresolved stateness question, both of which have contributed to the perpetuation of a largely dysfunctional political system and reinforced the authority of the same nationalist power structures that remain the central obstacles to market reform.
