Division and Democracy: Bosnia's Post-Dayton Elections

This paper will examine the three rounds of country-wide elections that have taken place in Bosnia in the first three years of Bosnia’s post-Dayton existence. It will suggest that given the poisoned political climate, as well as the absence of fundamental democratic institutions such as a free press and a dynamic civil society, it was entirely predictable that the real victors of Bosnia’s post-war democratic experiment would be the nationalists of all three sides. This result is also in large part the product of the flawed compromise at the heart of the Dayton peace agreement, which left the central issue of the Bosnian conflict unresolved, thereby guaranteeing that the central issues over which the war was fought would continue to be played out at the level of the ballot box.