Radicalization as a Prop in Bosnia's Elections

Every second year is an election year in Bosnia and Herzegovina. For this “heart shaped land” in the center of the forever-stigmatized Western Balkans, local and general elections have become the ideal stage for nationalist leaders to not only remind citizens of the dangers that permeate their country, but also to lay out their plans for protecting their respective ethnic community – be it Croat, Serb, or Bosniak. Such rhetoric, of course, has only hardened ingrained neighborly tension. Until recently, this fear-turned-radicalization was cast aside as a Balkan problem. However, with the rise of ISIS and the growing fear that “foreign fighters” are out to spell doom across the continent, Bosnia’s elections have – for the first time in 20 years – become a European problem.

Once the field of four years of bloodshed, Bosnia and Herzegovina is now a young (and perhaps forgotten) democracy. It remains heavily endowed by the international community. Financial assistance, capacity building, and infrastructure repairs have proceeded haphazardly over the last two decades by a host of international organizations, donors, and NGOs. The band-aid approach to development, alongside the hastily brokered 1995 Dayton Peace Accords (which spawned the country’s notoriously dense and inefficient constitution) and the EU’s lethargic plans for accession, has unintentionally turned Bosnia into an international “Frankenstein.” While violence has quelled, tensions have only grown as each of the three ethnic groups stake claim to the morsels of assistance.