States of Conflict: A case study on conflict prevention in Bosnia and Herzegovina

This paper explores the effects of international state-building efforts on the Bosnian state. It addresses the central question of what happens when external ideas about what constitutes a ‘modern’ state conflict with local contexts.

The paper takes a step back from the exigencies and challenges of day-to-day politics and looks at the structural determinants of state-building beyond the practices of single actors. From this perspective, explanations of the setbacks of international state-building cannot be limited to local ‘spoiling’ or ‘corruption’. Rather, local resistance and informal practices have to be seen as evidence of structural limits to state-building whose results are much more ambiguous and less controllable than might be expected.