Thursday, December 10 –
Friday, December 11, 2015
Joukowsky Forum
This workshop convenes a group of practitioners and scholars whose careers/lives were decisively shaped by their experiences in Bosnia-Herzegovina, to reflect on the armed conflict of 1992-1995, the way in which that armed conflict ended, and the nature of the "post-conflict" order, within and beyond Bosnia-Herzegovina.
We consider (largely along the lines laid out by Ivo Daalder in Getting to Dayton, 1999) that Dayton marked a reinvigoration of "coercive diplomacy" that was then wielded in other settings (not always with the same success), as well as a reassertion of US leadership/engagement in Europe. We also recognize the iterated criticisms of the Dayton Accords's impact on Bosnian sovereignty, especially with regard to their "wishful legality" (Robert Hayden, Blueprints for a House Divided, 1999); their unworkability without a sizable international presence, thereby serving to create a "European Raj" (Knaus and Martin 2003); their creation of a "dysfunctional constitutional architecture" (International Commission on the Balkans, 2005); and their role in bringing into being "a series of squabbling ethnocratic territories" (Adam Moore, Peacebuilding in Practice, 2013).
We are also mindful of the effects of implementation in the wider context of international relations, demanding new forms of military-civilian cooperation, and generating new approaches and technologies in diverse fields, affecting election monitoring, systems of justice, reconciliation and accountability, constitutional engineering, and policing and peacekeeping in multi-ethnic societies.
With these fields in mind, and with an eye to the positive impacts of Dayton--noted, for example, in Richard Holbrooke's typically direct "report card," in an Op-Ed from April 2008, we ask participants to respond to the questions: Does Dayton still matter, and why? What lessons for the peacemakers, peace-enforcers and peacekeepers of today does it hold? What are Dayton's legacies for the region, the U.S, and the global system?
Download workshop papers here.
More information on the workshop here: http://watson.brown.edu/news/explore/2015/Daytonat20.