The Politics of Peace and Conflict in Bosnia and Herzegovina

Abstract

Twenty years after the Dayton Peace Agreement an exclusive ethnic ideology, international tutelage and dependency characterize Bosnia and Herzegovina. Wrong political approaches by the international and local political actors in Bosnia and Herzegovina created permanent crisis, the status quo and a ‘case’ country. Conflict, furthermore enriched with exclusive ethno-cultural paradigm and the legacy of bloody crucible of the war, shape today’s political discourse in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Based on content analysis of leading newspapers, this paper examines the relationship between conflict and peace inclinations of main political leaders among Serbs, Bosniaks and Croats. In order to test the first objective on political discourse and political relationships based on the conflict vs. peace politics, using content analysis, the research analyzed media news on Bosnia and Herzegovina by considering only socio-political topics. We randomly selected 120 news from newspaper namely, Nezavisne novine, Glas srpske, Dnevni list and Dnevni avaz. For testing, the second objective on positive vs. negative political discourse of main political leaders we randomly selected 360 interview-based news about key political leader including Bakir Izetbegovic (Bosniak), Dragan Čović (Croat) and Miliorad Dodik (Serb). Research findings indicated that the conflict politics is deeply rooted in political discourse, media, among political leaders and the public.