In 2002, in the midst of the most robust phase of international intervention in postwar Bosnia-Herzegovina, then-High Representative Paddy Ashdown launched an ambitious “jobs and justice” initiative. By simultaneously confronting mass unemployment and weakening the grip of corruption and criminality, “jobs and justice” was meant to deliver a long-delayed peace dividend while nudging Bosnia decisively along the path from fragility to prosperity and, in time, EU membership. Nearly two decades later, as Daniela Lai reminds us in Socioeconomic Justice, not only did those promised jobs never materialize but Bosnia still remains in the grip of ethnonationalist political forces whose fortunes continue to be tied to the absence of the rule of law. In this context, the “jobs and justice” initiative is memorable, along with a host of other failed development projects that litter Bosnia’s postwar landscape, mainly for its hubris.

Although “jobs and justice” could easily be the subtitle of Socioeconomic Justice, Lai’s project is both narrower and more ambitious than a dissection of the social engineering schemes of liberal peacebuilders. Situating itself at the intersection of Bosnia’s simultaneous transition from war to peace and from socialism to capitalism, Lai’s book is particularly interested in the political economy of transitional justice; more precisely, she wonders why socioeconomic issues have been “systematically marginalized” (p. 32) in both the theory and the practice of transitional justice. Starting from the perspective that the very notion of justice remains an essentially contested concept, Lai seeks not only to broaden the boundaries of transitional justice to include the socioeconomic but also to trace the consequences of failing to do so with regard to the ongoing project of reconstructing Bosnia in the aftermath of Yugoslavia’s bloody collapse. Although the most egregious of Bosnia’s ethnic cleansers—Ratko Mladic and Radovan Karadzic among them—ultimately found themselves on trial in the Hague, acts of socioeconomic violence, including shady privatization deals that transferred what was left of the prewar state’s productive assets into private hands, with lasting implications for postwar employment patterns, were met with a collective shrug of the shoulders by key international actors.

Without delving too deeply into the fraught relationship between capitalism and justice, Lai’s account of the missing socioeconomic dimension of transitional justice focuses on the curious manner in which economic reform processes have been bracketed off from the more overtly “political” dimensions of peacebuilding. Postwar and postsocialist transitions have been treated largely as separate phenomena, particularly in the mid-1990s when the principal tenets of post–Cold War technocratic neoliberalism went largely unchallenged. In the specific case of Bosnia, logics of fairness and justice—especially those betraying a nostalgia for the golden age of Yugoslav socialism—were ignored in favor of logics of efficiency. Indeed, the imperative of getting productive assets into private hands—premised on the assumption that private entrepreneurs would put them to use, generating jobs and growth in the process—led economic reformers housed in the offices of the World Bank and the US Agency for International Development to overlook procedural “irregularities” in their rush to recruit market forces in the service of postwar reconstruction.

Ordinary Bosnians, in contrast, were and remain acutely aware of the crucial interplay of the political and the socioeconomic, especially as it affected their prospects for regaining livelihoods in the postwar period. Indeed, the most impressive feature of Socioeconomic Justice is Lai’s detailed ethnographic research (further elaborated in an insightful methodological appendix) into local perspectives on socioeconomic justice across two Bosnian communities. Located on different sides of the inter-entity boundary separating Serb-majority from Bosniak-majority regions, Prijedor and Zenica enjoyed a symbiotic relationship during the Yugolav era: iron ore mined in the former was smelted into steel in the latter. Their fates diverged during the war, with Prijedor becoming synonymous with ethnic cleansing, mass graves, and concentration camps, whereas Zenica was largely spared the conflict’s worst depravities—yet both communities have endured protracted postwar, postindustrial depressions. Despite Prijedor’s far uglier wartime history, Lai’s interlocutors in both communities tell similar stories of socioeconomic injustice: wartime dismissals, waiting lists, questionable privatization deals, and progressive marginalization. If, as one interviewee states (p. 126), “everything comes from the economy,” there can be no meaningful conception of either peacebuilding or transitional justice that does not address the right of citizens to make a decent living.

Indeed, a key theme underpinning the entire book is “jobs as justice,” which in the post-Yugoslav context is inextricably tied to prewar conceptions of labor as a vital source of dignity, value, and solidarity. This understanding—part of what Lai describes as the temporal stretching of socioeconomic justice issues from the prewar past long into the postwar future—also helps explain the disconnect between ordinary Bosnians and international reformers on the responsibilities of the state vis-à-vis employment creation. While the international community has long fretted over Bosnia’s “bloated” bureaucracy—which still accounts for nearly half the country’s GDP—and its long-term impacts on economic growth, those who have lost their economic lifelines in the transition to a market economy still insist that the state has no more important responsibility than to provide citizens with jobs and the social benefits that accompany them.

Although this conception of what socioeconomic justice entails clearly conflicts with the neoliberal blueprint for postwar Bosnia—within which high unemployment is lamentable, but is not in and of itself a question of justice—it also competes with a third vision, one broadly shared by the country’s ruling elites. Within this view, always in the background if never fully articulated within Lai’s narrative, economic assets remain—25 years after the war ended—not only part of the spoils of war but also critical to the perpetuation of ethnonationalist rule, with jobs viewed first and foremost as a source of patronage to be doled out to loyal co-ethnics. It is here, ultimately, where Lai seems less assured in the implications of her analysis. Although her book makes an undeniable contribution in testing the conventional boundaries of transitional justice, and in posing difficult questions about the legitimacy of employment-based justice claims in the aftermath of violent upheaval, it is less clear what difference the early inclusion of such claims in the Bosnia case would have made to the country’s postconflict trajectory.

Indeed, instead of making the case that socioeconomic justice considerations would have, or even should have, necessitated even greater international intrusiveness in Bosnia’s postwar space—ensuring that war-displaced populations, for example, could reclaim not only prewar property but also prewar jobs—Lai turns her attention instead to the so-called Bosnian Spring of 2014, and the socioeconomic disenchantment that inspired it. Although remarkable in many ways, most notably for their grassroots, multiethnic character and unified opposition to elite-level corruption and criminalization, the protests comprising the Bosnian Spring had relatively little lasting impact, neither loosening the nationalist grip on political and economic power nor prompting a recalibration of international economic priorities. Lai clearly sees these events in a more optimistic light, as evidence of the beginning of a sustained, unifying, and potentially transformative social mobilization under the banner of socioeconomic justice. It is just as easy to see in these events, however, a cautionary tale about the inherent limits of “people power” in the face of deeply entrenched political forces with a ruthless allegiance to an unjust status quo (akin, perhaps, to how Egyptians might reflect on the outcomes of their own Arab Spring). Seen in this light, then, the reader is left to wonder just how significant the expansion of the transitional justice agenda to include considerations of socioeconomic justice might prove to be in advancing the cause of peace and justice.