Hybrid political orders: the case of Bosnia and Herzegovina

The Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, once viewed as a successful example of peaceful, multi-ethnic state, turned into a site of devastating wars in the early-1990s. Among these wars that resulted in the country’s painful disintegration, the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina ended mainly with international mediation. The Dayton Peace Agreement signed in 1995 ended armed clashes. The Dayton Agreement, at the same time, provided the blueprint for establishing new sets of political and administrative structures as the basis of building the social conditions of durable peace. Preserving and enhancing the multi-ethnic, multi-religious and multi-cultural conditions in Bosnia and Herzegovina constituted a significant aspect of the construction of the new structures envisioned in the Dayton Agreement. The emerging political order in Bosnia and Herzegovina, according to some peacebuilding scholars, represents a hybrid structure where internationally introduced liberal democratic institutions, norms and practices are combined with existing traditional structures. In this thesis, I examine the roots of this hybrid political order in post-Dayton Bosnia and Herzegovina from the perspective of the “local turn in peacebuilding” scholarship that is premised on the ‘hybridity’ approach. I investigate the current conditions in Bosnia and Herzegovina, and hybridity patterns in the current political and societal order. Then, I investigate the periods in Bosnia and Herzegovina under the rule of the Ottoman Empire and the Austro-Hungarian Empire. I study the similarities of both historical periods with the current conditions. Thus, in this thesis, I tried to investigate the continuities in different historical periods of time and found that hybrid patterns in current conditions have their roots in the past, namely in the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian periods.