Academic literature on the topic 'Protest movements – Bosnia and Hercegovina'

Earthquakes are one of the biggest hazards of humanity. Even today it is not possible to predict the exact magnitude, location and time of an earthquake, but, nevertheless, modern seismology and science are able to point to the potential danger and risk of earthquake-like movements in an area, at one time. Some of the signs that announce the earthquake are the changes in magnetic and electric field of the Earth, changes in groundwater levels, radon, ground deformation, tremors, changes in animal behavior, etc. ... In order to make any measurements in this direction, the location of seismic cracks in a particular area must be known. Here are given the locations of seismic cracks in the area of Bosnia and Herzegovina.

The article examines the recent protest movements in Bosnia (especially in spring 2014) and Croatia („For the family“) and tries to draw conclusions on societal development in the Balkans since the dissolution of Yugoslavia. Whereas in Bosnia the protesters were committed to democratic principles and represented an alternative to the official political system, in Croatia direct democratic means are more frequently used by right forces in order to discriminate minorities (such as homosexuals or the ethnic Serbs). Furthermore the article describes how these different types of protest in the given countries could emerge and asks for the limits and possibilities of the protest movements.

When do militias---whose power, riches, and legitimacy depend on the continuation of civil wars---accept negotiated settlements? An unexplored and crucial dimension of militia decision-making is the process of militia institutionalization. Militias create institutions to improve their odds of winning the war and project legitimacy internally as well as externally.
Militia institutions affect the strategic choice of decision-makers. They create financial and organizational interests that modify the preferences of the militia leadership. The modified preferences increase the win-set of militia leaders at the negotiating table. Militia institutions also change the decision-making context. Institutions unleash three dynamics that decrease a militia's ability to withstand fluctuations in the military balance of forces. Institutions can lead to factionalism, increased visibility (and hence vulnerability to attack), and strains in relations with patrons.
Using the logic of two-level games, I argue that leaders evaluate peace settlements with an eye on two boards. Externally, they evaluate their position vis-a-vis other protagonists in the conflict. Internally, leaders are concerned with their positions in power. Institutionalization results in a tension between "raison de la revolution" (ideological motivations) and "raison d'institution" (institutional preservation). Embattled leaders who increasingly find it difficult to withstand changes in the balance of forces find that their institutional interests are better preserved by peace. They agree to compromise on their ideological preferences thus opening a window of opportunity for the attainment of sustainable peace settlements.
Employing the comparative case-study method, the dissertation examines the attitudes of the Lebanese Forces and the Bosnian Serbs respectively toward conflict-resolution schemes that sought to bring the Lebanese and Bosnian civil wars to an end.
By focusing on leaders' incentives to settle, the research allows us to predict a priori which settlements are more sustainable. Theoretically, it refines the concept of "ripeness" for negotiations by specifying both its intra-communal and its extra-communal dimensions. In terms of practical policy implications, the research argues that militias are prime candidates for the role of spoilers. Thus, it is important not only to understand their incentives to settle but also to craft peace agreements that give even such radical factions a vested interest in peace.

Defence date: 21 October 2016
Examining Board: Professor László Bruszt, European University Institute (Supervisor) ; Professor Donatella della Porta, formerly EUI, Scuola Normale Superiore ; Professor Florian Bieber, University of Graz ; Professor Adam Fagan, Queen Mary University of London
This thesis examines the occurrence and spread of contentious collective action within a country, Bosnia Herzegovina, that historically does not bear a solid tradition of mobilization. In particular, the study focuses on the rise of mobilizations that transcend traditional ethno-nationalist cleavages, and involve individuals and groups that activate an identity other than the ethno-national one, still dominant in the Bosnian Herzegovinian society. I adopted the expression “beyond ethnicity” to label this type of mobilization, stressing that individuals and challenger groups involved in the protest overcame the centrality of ethnicity as social construct, privileging another commonality between individuals that deliberately superseded, and sometimes clashed with, the dominant ethno-national categories that had crystallized in the 1990s. This new, overarching identity is often grounded on feelings of deprivation. Informed by a five-year empirical research in the country, the study explores the variation in spatial and social scale of contention across three waves of mobilization that occurred between 2012 and 2014 and took divergent paths, despite similar socioeconomic structural conditions. Through a comparative case study approach, the thesis analyses three waves of protests, taken as manifestations of “mobilization beyond ethnicity”: “The Park is Ours” protests (2012), spawned from the defence of a public park of Banja Luka; the mobilization for civil rights of the children, which became known as #JMBG (2013); and the protests that erupted in Tuzla triggered by local workers, which turned into what activists defined as a “Social Uprising” (2014). The study explains why the waves of mobilization occurred between 2012 and 2014 spread unevenly across the national territory, involved diverse social groups, and entailed different degrees of disruption. The findings of this research demonstrate that a combination of factors both internal and external to the movements made the territorial and social shift upward more likely, and influenced the organizational patterns and action repertoires of the challengers. These factors are pre-existing networks among movement organizers; the resonance of “beyond ethnic” frames in certain cultural milieus; and a conducive political opportunity structure. In the conclusions, the thesis elucidates the implications of these findings for the study of social movements in the post-Yugoslav space.

Bosnia-Hercegovina was by mid-1942 effectively a patchwork of small fiefdoms. The Ustasha-held towns were islands in a hostile sea. Rebel Bosnia-Hercegovina was a world partitioned, militarily and geographically, between two antithetical movements: the Chetniks and the Partisans. Rural localities were held by Partisans, Chetniks or Muslim militias whose spheres of influence ebbed and flowed. In eastern Bosnia-Hercegovina, the Chetniks were triumphant, their Great Serb ‘state’ appearing to be born, based on their nationally and religiously exclusive, patriarchal and traditionalist rural values. In western Bosnia-Hercegovina, however, the cosmopolitan, internationalist, and modernist Communists, children of the towns, ruled a parallel ‘state’, the mass of whose peasant foot-soldiers were no different from those of its Chetnik counterpart, but whose governing ethos made it the polar opposite of the latter. As each movement consolidated its rule in its ‘own’ part of Bosnia-Hercegovina, the stage was set for a showdown between them that, at one level, represented the clash between modernist and traditionalist political values, and at another between the Bosnian and the Great Serb ideals.

The irretrievable breakdown of Partisan–Chetnik relations in Bosnia-Hercegovina and the beginning of open enmity between the two movements had profound consequences for the practices of both, as each moved away from the centre ground towards their respective political extremes. For the Chetniks, the break with the Partisans involved the progressive abandonment of all pretence at resistance to the occupying powers, the shift to outright alliance with the quisling regime in Serbia on a Great Serb nationalist basis, and the adoption of a more systematically genocidal policy towards the non-Serb population. For the Communists, the break involved the adoption of a more radical left-wing outlook that would have negative short-term consequences for the movement. But it also involved a shift from an essentially military strategy based on leading a predominantly Serb armed struggle against the Ustashas, to a political struggle aimed at building a genuinely multinational movement of Croats, Muslims, and Serbs against the ‘reactionary bourgeoisie’ of all nationalities. This shift would transform the Partisan movement from a Serb rebellion into a Bosnian Revolution: in other words, into a movement for radical political and social change on an all-Bosnian basis. Yet it would be many months before this policy would bear fruit for the Communists.