KEY TAKEAWAYS
KEY TAKEAWAYS
Looking out from the town hall in downtown Sarajevo, you’d be hard pressed to find evidence of the nearly four-year-long siege that devastated the city during the Bosnian War. The surrounding area is clean and filled with new and repaired buildings — even the town hall itself is a restoration of the pre-war library that once occupied the space.
But just a few blocks away, many of the buildings are still covered in gunshots. Plaster walls are still fractured, bricks still crumbling. From this view, the debris of the war is impossible to ignore. And yet, it remains unaddressed. To some, it serves as a reminder of the violence that gripped the region nearly three decades ago. To others, it’s a symbol of pride in the city’s resilience. To all, though, it’s a testament to the country’s delicate and complicated peace.
Because while the Dayton Accords brought peace to what is now Bosnia-Herzegovina (BiH), they did not bring full democracy or political reform. Nearly 30 years on, the Dayton Accords now work less to freeze conflict than to freeze progress. They stand in the way of BiH’s accession into the EU and have prevented reform on multiple issues — such as desegregating high schools or economic integration with Europe — that continue to feed inter-ethnic and religious tension and poverty across the country.
The Dayton Accords, signed in Dayton, Ohio, in 1995, officially ended the war in Bosnia. The accords outlined a general framework for peace in Bosnia-Herzegovina by preserving Bosnia as a single state comprised of two autonomous entities: the Bosniak-Croat Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina and the Bosnian-Serb Republika Srpska. To govern this state, the agreement established a three-chair presidency consisting of one Croat, one Bosniak and one Serb, with the chair of the presidency rotating every eight months.
This arrangement allowed for peace to take hold. But the Dayton Accords were never meant to be a framework for a responsive and democratic federal government — they were a peace agreement, after all. Despite this, the accords have been used as the foundation for governance in BiH for almost 30 years.
With a presidency that rotates based on ethnic group, leaders in BiH are incentivized to act on behalf of sectarian interests while in power. The result has been a system that is sustained by fragile coexistence, and sometimes even outright power struggles, rather than cooperation or reconciliation. This approach permeates the whole of governance in BiH, and many federal institutions have been weakened to the point of inoperability. Instead of resolving the ethno-religious issues at the heart of the conflict, the Dayton Accords froze them in place with a system that disallows one group from dominating the others but inadvertently entrenches those divisions further.
Instead of resolving the ethno-religious issues at the heart of the conflict, the Dayton Accords froze them in place.
Today, there are places in BiH that are as tense as before the war, as separate as before the war, and as ready for small-scale inter-ethnic and religious strife as ever. Meanwhile, BiH remains one of Europe’s poorest countries due to the lack of structural economic reforms as well as a government system that lacks the cooperation required to implement them. These economic struggles have only fueled ethno-religious tensions, which in turn make comprehensive economic changes more difficult.
The deadlock created by the Dayton Accords is perhaps easiest to notice in the education system. There are currently 56 segregated high schools across the country that keep Muslim and Christian young people separate from each other. The segregated high school system was created immediately following the conflict — the need to get kids back in school was decided to outweigh the need for peaceful integration.
This system was meant to be phased out. But with the sectarian divides in BiH governance impeding efforts, it never was. Consequently, a large group of young people have gone through the education system without having to, in daily life, interact with people from different ethnic and religious backgrounds, further entrenching the already strong divides within BiH society.
With the West heavily involved in overseeing the implementation of the Dayton Accords, it seems only natural that Bosnia-Herzegovina would eventually begin considering EU membership — a notion that is reflected in public opinion.
In August, a poll released by the Directorate for European Integration showed that 71.2 percent of Bosnians support joining the European Union. It should be noted, though, that the majority of this bloc is from the Croat-Bosniak-led federation, with only 48.3 percent of people in Republika Srpska voting in favor.
For its part, the European Council decided to open accession negotiations with BiH in March 2024. However, issues with the Dayton Accords hinder BiH from making the necessary changes required for EU integration. EU accession requires prospective countries to demonstrate their promotion of democracy, judicial reform and efforts to combat corruption — almost all of which are extremely difficult given the previously noted ethno-religious segregation present throughout BiH society.
For a prospective EU member state, the Dayton Accords are a liability and rightly criticized by many as an undemocratic system of government. For BiH to move forward with the accession process, it will need to develop an alternative.
While the people of BiH are keen to join the EU, their opinion of the United States — the leading organizer of the Dayton process — is much more muted. In the IRI poll, Bosnians were also asked who they felt was the country’s closest ally. The United States came in fourth with only 12 percent, one percentage point behind Russia. And when respondents were asked about who they believed the greatest threat to the country was, the United States placed second with 20 percent.
The Dayton Accords may have ended the conflict, but lasting tensions and frozen progress have led some in the country to feel as though they have been forgotten by the United States and the West. Adversarial states such as Russia see this as an opportunity to undermine the United States’ reputation and legitimacy as a peacebuilder.
But Russian involvement in BiH is more likely to destabilize the ethno-religious tensions in country than resolve them.
Over the last couple of years, Russia has backed the Bosnian Serb separatism movement, headed by Bosnian Serb President Milorad Dodik, which seeks to unite the Republika Srpska with neighboring Serbia (a Russian ally). Dodik’s secessionist rhetoric has isolated him from Western support while garnering the sympathy of Russian President Vladimir Putin. And in 2021, after refusing to cooperate with his colleagues, Dodik announced that the Republika Srpska would withdraw from state-level institutions and move toward the creation of its own authorities.
For nearly three decades, BiH has been frozen while its leaders and the international community remained seemingly content with the Dayton Accords’ status quo. But there has recently been some energy injected into the frigid politics of BiH by the EU.
The EU currently views enlargement as a strategic priority due to new threats to European security: the ramifications of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, transnational challenges related to food and climate, and weakening multilateralism. This was best expressed in a joint French and German report, which sought to state the need for enlargement and identify reforms within the EU that could institutionally ease expansion in response to the threat of an insecure eastern Europe.
It’s clear now that BiH now has a need and incentive to envision a post-Dayton future. The Dayton Accords were created at a moment when regional powers were much weaker, reeling from the post-Soviet collapse. Decades later, the global status quo has changed, and regional powers are much stronger. The new context of geopolitics means Dayton is not an asset, but a liability, institutionalizing sectarianism that can be exploited by ambitious regional powers in Europe.
And at the Sarajevo Security Conference in 2024, the New Lines Institute announced a new effort to lead BiH toward a political reform process. Efforts like this — led by a new generation of thinkers from BiH — are vital to securing that future. Supporting efforts like these will be vital to ensure the success of a reform process.
While a reform process brings risks to an already fragile country, the only chance to make the country more stable is reform.
And while a reform process brings risks to an already fragile country, the only chance to make the country more stable is reform. The status quo may have delivered peace at first, but today it delivers the fear that BiH may lose the peace if they cannot deliver education, jobs and, in some cases, even drinkable water.
Preventing the risks related to reform would best be done through supporting the country’s small, thriving civil society sector, which has broad participation and is being led, in many cases, by an optimistic and younger generation that want to join the EU. That sector has tremendous reach in such a small country — the total population of which amounts to no more than a few million. With support from the international community, that sector could be engaged as the key group that could work for a post-Dayton future.
Many of the risks a reform process would face — the threat of spoilers, the difficulty of ethnic integration, the lack of trust in government — are issues that global experts have worked on already in diverse contexts and which have been overcome elsewhere. In the case of BiH, leveraging this expertise in coordination with civil society and young leaders may provide the new hope and energy needed to begin to move the country past the ethnic and political deadlock and toward a truly democratic, stable future.