Navigating Consociationalism's Afterlives: Women, Peace and Security in Post-Dayton Bosnia-Herzegovina

Abstract

This paper revisits the gendered implications of the Dayton peace settlement and assesses possibilities for the meaningful integration of the Women, Peace and Security agenda into the consociational structures and post-conflict political agenda. The context of Bosnia-Herzegovina illustrates longstanding gendered ramifications as a by-product of consociationalism, reaching beyond the rhetorical commitment to women's political representation and gender equality. The paper outlines how the reification and legitimisation of ethnonationalist power over two decades of Dayton has increasingly restricted the terrain for gender activism. A critical assessment of the post-Dayton governance reveals an unanticipated stratification of the agreement. Coupled with international pressure for the stability of the peace settlement, this outcome adds further constraints to the complex task of addressing the gendered legacy of conflict and conflict transformation. In this context, various local/international efforts to navigate Dayton's afterlives through gender activism act as a powerful reminder that the Bosnia-Herzegovina's unfulfilled peace must remain a priority in research, activist and policymaking agendas.

Feminist Security Studies in Europe: Beyond Western Academics’ Club

“…This is the case of the monograph Feminist Perspectives on Terrorism (2020) by a Polish academic Aleksandra Gasztold. FSS research is also gaining ground in Spanish (Romero 2021) and Portuguese academia (Deiana 2018;Palacián De Inza 2019). Among the studied issues is the question of nationalism in the adoption of WPS agenda in the Balkans (Subotić and Zaharijević 2018), Ukraine (O'Sullivan 2019), or the emergence of WPS policy out of hostile anti-gender setting in the Czech Republic (O'Sullivan and .…”

Drawing on the continuum: a war and post-war political economy of gender-based violence in Bosnia and Herzegovina

“…The Dayton Peace Agreement (DPA) entrusted the implementation of mandatory economic reforms to the former warring factions (Merdzanovic 2017). These actors were central to shaping the post-conflict order in which gender-based violence occurs (Pugh 2002;Belloni, Kappler, and Ramovic 2016;Deiana 2018).…”

“…While Bosnia is accurately described as a post-socialist and post-war country, scholarship on post-conflict processes has struggled to incorporate these two aspects of transition, especially in analyses of gender-based violence. These two transition trajectories are at the core of Bosnia's ongoing political crisis and paralysis (Belloni 2009;Kartsonaki 2016;Deiana 2018). Utilizing the concept of a continuum of violence and applying a political economy perspective, our study seeks to better understand the persistence of widespread gender-based violence against women in post-conflict contexts.…”

“…Pointing out that established understandings of sexed bodies and gender relations cannot simply be applied in all contexts of sexual and gender-based violence, scholars have suggested that the experiences of violence vary across time and space and according to various axes of difference (Carpenter 2006;Drumond 2018;Féron 2018). We take inspiration from this, and study women victims of violence as a contribution to emerging work on women, peace, and security that aims to make visible women's often marginalized experiences of war and of its aftermath in an effort to make changes to policy and practice (Deiana 2018;Doeland and Skjelsbaek 2018). In particular, we direct our attention to socio-economic and governance policies, and structures that produce the conditions for violence against women in its mutually reinforcing forms: structural, direct, and cultural/symbolic (Galtung 1969(Galtung , 1990.…”

Feminist reflections on discourses of (power) + (sharing) in power-sharing theory

“…1 For some feminist scholars working on women, peace and security themes, consociational models of power-sharing privilege ethnonational groups and male leadership (Racioppi and O’Sullivan See, 2006). In Deiana’s recent work on the 1995 Dayton Peace Agreement for BiH (2018), for example, she writes ‘the reification and legitimization of ethno-nationalist power over two decades of Dayton has restricted the terrain for gender activism’. Kennedy, Pierson, and Thomson find a ‘conceptual misalignment between gendered understandings of conflict and the consociational model as a means to create a stable peace’ in their work on Northern Ireland.…”