Peace-Building Efforts in the Western Balkans: Successes, Challenges, and Limits of a Multilevel Endeavour

Abstract

The Western Balkan countries currently display a very mixed record on stabilisation and inter-ethnic reconciliation. Local political elites recently reached some important objectives such as further progress in the EU accession process, the landmark agreement between Serbia and Kosovo and the first post-war census in Bosnia and Herzegovina. At the same time, they continue to resort to the same nationalistic rhetoric that kept them in power ever since the 1990s. European and international peace-building efforts are often criticized for contenting themselves with formal gestures of stabilization – as was the case for instance with the cooperation with the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) – when they could use their leverage to advocate for deeper societal reconciliation. On the ground, local civil societies have been struggling to push their views and agenda at the international level, while simultaneously trying to maintain their independence from international donors. This panel will look at peace-building efforts in the Western Balkans from a broad perspective in order to figure out how actors at the local, national and international levels contributed to produce this mixed record on peace and reconciliation. It will especially explore the advantages and problems that this multi-level, global effort brought about: Which were the most delicate issues to be bargained among these different levels? Which were the areas of most successful cooperation? Which unexpected side effects did international peace-building and transitional justice interventions have at the local level? In which cases did transitional justice and human rights discourses effectively advance peace and reconciliation? How and when did local politicians conversely use these discourses to advance their particularistic agendas? Both theoretical and empirical contributions are welcome in this interdisciplinary panel that cuts across the fields of peace-building and democratisation, transitional justice, memory politics and other related topics.

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