What does it take to reverse forced displacement and ethnic cleansing? Should displaced individuals return physically, or should returning and compensating properties be sufficient? Should return require the reconstruction of prewar demographic patterns or should success be measured through more modest criteria? What are the end objectives among international actors and how do foreign intervention and norms matter? Rebecca A. Brubaker’s Reversing Ethnic Cleansing through Minority Returns provides an original and empirically in-depth account of these questions, focusing in particular on how the international community and local actors came to embrace the return of displaced individuals to their pre-conflict communities as the key policy objective in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
The book’s most important conceptual contribution is its concept of “unintended norm diffusion.” Brubaker challenges explanations that attribute the commitment to minority return either to moral guilt (i.e., the West’s failure to prevent the genocide of civilians in Srebrenica in July 1995) or the progressive evolution of international norms. Instead, the book aptly demonstrates how different political interests accidentally converged around the same policy, often in ways that were difficult to expect in the first place. EU states prioritized refugee and IDP return for domestic political reasons linked to their pervasive immigration fears while the Bosniak (Bosnian Muslim) leaderships fought for the unity of their country and restoration of prewar demographic patterns. Against the wishes of the latter, Dayton federalized Bosnia, granting extensive autonomy to the Bosnian Serbs. But against the wishes of Bosnian Serb and Croat leadership, Dayton also made commitments to the rights of returnees in its Annex 7. Meanwhile, the United States had strategic reasons for maintaining a multiethnic state—similar efforts have been made in Cyprus post-1974, Georgia and elsewhere. What initially emerged from political expediency nevertheless acquired independent normative force, institutionalized through policies enabled post-Dayton through the so-called Bonn powers, allowing the Office of High Representative (OHR) to introduce new legislation as well as dismiss local officials preventing the return process.
Fundamentally, Brubaker makes a novel and significant contribution to our understanding of norm emergence. Norms do not always originate with principled activists or leaders pursuing clearly defined moral objectives but instead emerge through institutional improvisation and often political expediency turned to normative rhetoric. More importantly, accidental origins do not preclude consequential outcomes. Actors may become constrained by their own rhetoric, while local actors, including returnees, can capitalize on political commitments and transform them into instruments of positive change.
The Bosnian experience is particularly important for research across divided societies. A central conclusion emerging from this work is that one needs to distinguish more carefully between different forms of return. The return of property is not the same as the return of individuals, while the return of individuals is not necessarily the restoration of communities, as returnees tend to be older in age and male in particular (for the demographics of return in Bosnia, see my 2016 article with Djordhe Stefanovic in International Migration). Moreover, demographic return does not automatically reconstruct meaningful coexistence among former enemies but could be a step toward reconciliation. These distinctions are essential in negotiating and implementing return rights, as well as building a broader normative consensus on the right of return. In other words, Brubaker does a fine job presenting return both as desirable and optional but also as a bundle of overlapping rights that could be (partly) accommodated or not depending on the local context.
Brubaker’s opening account of a displaced woman from Srebrenica captures these distinctions and relevant dilemmas particularly powerfully. Victims could recover properties but refuse return after becoming victims of mass atrocities. Such stories are common across divided societies and demonstrate why the right to return must not become an obligation to return. Yet they also raise larger questions: if individuals do return, what institutional conditions can make their return secure, sustainable, and meaningful?
This question connects directly with what I have described elsewhere as a politics of repair across post-conflict societies (see forthcoming The Politics of Repair: Ethnic Nationalism and the Peace Movement in Cyprus). Ethnic cleansing forces people to flee from ancestral territories but also destroys relationships between communities, even historically fragile ones. Repair, therefore, requires more than restoring property or physically relocating individuals. It requires institutions, movements and new ideologies beyond sectarian ethnopolitics.
This perspective also suggests a somewhat different reading of Bosnia’s mixed record. Minority return was extraordinarily difficult and often failed to restore prewar communities. Yet return did occur in areas where many had considered it impossible. That achievement should not be dismissed. Even incomplete reversal matters when the explicit purpose of violence was to make ethnic coexistence impossible. The critical question is not simply whether Bosnia was successfully “re-mixed,” but which forms of repair proved possible, under what institutional conditions, and with what consequences for the future of Bosnia as a united country.
The Office of the High Representative (OHR) embodies the central tension in this process. A positive interpretation emphasizes that extraordinary obstruction required extraordinary levels of intervention stipulated in the Bonn powers (plus generous donor funds and political support). Nationalist leaderships—here mostly on the Bosnian Serb side enjoyed at the start powerful incentives to consolidate the demographic results of wartime unmixing. International authority, including the OHR’s extensive powers, helped reverse ethnic unmixing and make property restitution and minority return possible. In this respect, the OHR functioned as an institution of repair externally motivated and resourced.
Yet there is an equally compelling negative interpretation. Extensive international authority can weaken democratic accountability, marginalize local agency, and create dependency on external intervention. Institutions designed to overcome nationalist obstruction may inadvertently inhibit the development of domestic coalitions capable of transcending ethnopolitics themselves. The deeper challenge is therefore one of institutional design: how can external actors provide sufficiently strong safeguards and backstops to make experimentation possible without permanently displacing domestic political responsibility? Transitional supervision, arbitration, and other backstop mechanisms need not be understood simply as substitutes for trust but as mechanisms that empower local actors capable of sustaining cooperation beyond international monitoring.
Brubaker’s book is particularly impressive empirically, drawing on more than 60 interviews, previously classified UNHCR archives, US diplomatic cables, congressional and European parliamentary records, and extensive secondary sources. One limitation, which the author acknowledges, is the relative absence of displaced people’s own voices from the central narrative. Yet this also identifies an important agenda for future research: understanding how returnees themselves distinguish between the return rights bundles and options and how they reconstruct memories, communities, and ultimately their lives across several places.
The broader lesson is that reversing ethnic cleansing should be understood not as a singular event but as a mechanism in the broader concept of what is conceptualized here as the politics of repair: a gradual and contested process involving property, individuals, communities, institutions, and political imagination. Brubaker’s outstanding book shows how the international commitment to such restorative processes unexpectedly emerged. The next challenge—for Bosnia as well as across divided societies—is to understand how carefully designed transitional arrangements can turn the unexpected and externally imposed into locally driven opportunities for renewed coexistence.
