The war in Bosnia-Herzegovina (hereafter, Bosnia) ended in 1995, but as these authors demonstrate, the country is divided politically and largely territorially along ethno-national lines, and the central government barely functions at all, much less effectively. This is not a great surprise, because the Constitution that was part of the Dayton Agreement that ended the war could not actually structure a workable state; Christopher Bennett notes (p. 330) that my own “comprehensive analysis” of this agreement at the time it was written was “extremely skeptical” and holds up well nearly twenty years later. Both authors reviewed here see the fatal flaw in the Dayton Agreement as being its ethno-federalism, which divided Bosnia along ethno-religious lines, between Bosniaks (Muslim heritage), Serbs (Orthodox Christian heritage), and Croats (Roman Catholic heritage). Bosnia set up a consociational system, in which decisions can be taken only with the unanimous consent of the representatives of all three communities. It will not surprise any except those who actually believe in the chimera of “consociation” that decisions are not taken, since requiring unanimity is a device for blocking decisions, not for making them. The “paralyzed peace” that Bennett refers to is the effect of this consociation, and Azra Hromadžić agrees on this point. The two books are thus parallel presentations of the unworkability of the Bosnian state, and their arguments are mutually compatible.

The works use quite different methodologies in their analyses of Bosnia’s postwar divisions, however. Bennett was a very young reporter in Yugoslavia when the wars broke out there, in 1991. After they ended, he returned to Bosnia and has worked ever since in various intergovernmental and non-governmental organizations dealing with the region and specifically with Bosnia; he continues to reside there. His book thus draws very heavily on his detailed knowledge of the politics of Bosnia since the end of Yugoslavia, as written by a reporter who not only had access to the major political figures but himself played a supporting role in the political processes there. For her part, Hromadžić was born in Bosnia and lived there through the wars, going through high school in the town of Bihać, which was besieged by Serbs. She went to college and graduate school in the United States, becoming an anthropologist. Her book is a revision of her dissertation, on the Gymnasium (high school) at the other end of Bosnia from Bihać, in Mostar. The latter town was fought over and divided during the war and is now nominally shared, at least officially, by Croats and Bosniaks, though they live in different parts of the city. Although the Gymnasium is officially mixed, with both Croat and Bosniak students, students study separate curricula in separate classrooms. Hromadžić’s book is grounded on her ethnography of the Gymnasium, against a backdrop of the larger conditions of Bosnia’s divisions that Bennett writes about.

Hromadžić’s ethnography captures brilliantly the absurdities of division in a school in which everyone must grapple with two officialized registers of what all linguists not themselves from the former Yugoslavia regard as the same language, formerly Serbo-Croatian, now Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian (BCS). North American readers might imagine a school in upstate New York in which Anglophone Canadians are a separate ethnic group and must be taught in separate classrooms to a Canadian curriculum using the Canadian language, while Americans use the American language and an American curriculum. Her discussion of the language issues is perhaps the best concise account of this set of practices that I have seen. She also provides a very good discussion of the internationally-sponsored “integrated” schools, also known as “two schools under one roof,” but actually almost totally segregated in practice. Hromadžić rightly ties this segregated “integration” to the logic of the larger consociational model that underlies all of Bosnia’s official political and governmental structures. Yet she also notes that there was real resistance to integration by the minority Croats, who insisted on their separate curriculum and language. School leaders, who were compelled to speak of “integration” when dealing with foreign donors, had to avoid the same term when speaking to their own people. Long-term Bosnia watchers will be reminded of Pjer Žalica’s 2003 black comedy film Fuse (original title: Gori Vatra, “The Fire Is Burning”), in which Bosnian Serbs and Bosniaks fake unity after the war in order to gain benefits from foreigners.

The greatest strength of Hromadžić’s ethnography lies in her depictions of the interactions of students and teachers with each other and with her. The complexities of Bosnian identities are borne out in her statement that being from Bihać, where the war was between Serbs and Bosniaks and there were few Croats, she did not feel that the one between Bosniaks and Croats in (post)wartime Mostar was “her” conflict, and neither did she feel “Bosniak” as a primary identity even though her name marks her as such. She also did not feel at home in the increasingly Islamicized Bosniak society, yet even though her best friends in Mostar were Croats, she was excluded from Croat identity. Hromadžić thus exemplifies the liminality of the anthropologist, even when arguably native-born, as well as the exclusionary constructions of the Croats and Bosniaks of Mostar.

Social practices of exclusion are another topic. The heart of Hromadžić’s ethnography focuses on the interactions of the students in the Gymnasium, who intermingle in the bathrooms even when their classrooms are segregated via “integration.” They talk about their identities, their views of the other groups and of friendships between them, and—inevitably among adolescents—of romantic relationships, or the potential for them. Experiences, though, run counter to internationalized ideologies of integration, because there is “an ethnonational logic that assigns the labels of ‘danger,’ ‘impurity,’ and ‘tragedy’ to cross-ethnic dating and mixing,” so that “mixing practices and subjectivities” are “powerful abjects: socially marginalized, subversive and politically untrustworthy” (p. 154).

Considering that Mostar in general and its Gymnasium in particular have been the foci of some of the most intensive international efforts to rebuild Bosnia and forge an integrated nation, this is a discouraging conclusion. Hromadžić sees Bosnia as an “empty” state, in that the Dayton-defined political institutions cannot function; but also as an empty nation, since there are almost no spaces (physical, as in classrooms in an “integrated” school, and mental) for the expression of any common Bosnian identity. Her study thus reinforces Bennett’s pessimistic analysis of Bosnia’s political and social paralysis, especially since Bennett also places the blame for this sad situation on the consociational post-war political structures set in place by the Dayton Agreement. Indeed, Bennett’s close following of the various political machinations both of Bosnian politicians and the various internationals who have been involved in running the country, is superb. It might be seen as a post-war follow-up on Steven L. Burg and Paul S. Shoup’s detailed analysis of the politics that led into the Bosnian war, the war itself, and international intervention up to Dayton (The War in Bosnia Herzegovina: Ethnic Conflict and International Intervention, 1999).

Bennett’s analysis, though, is hardly promising for the future of a functional Bosnian state. After detailing the failings of the Dayton system and of those running it, he comes to the conclusion that Bosnia is not yet suited for full sovereignty and must be administered by outsiders if it is to avoid a new conflict. He is not the first well-intentioned foreigner to make such an observation, based on the fact that only foreigners have been able to force system changes aimed at integration on the recalcitrant Bosnian politicians. Yet his own analysis, like that of Hromadžić, indicates that even twenty years after the end of the war, and the benefit of so much international effort, the members of each of the peoples (plural!) of Bosnia still regard the other Bosnian peoples as the primary threats to their own security.

The most innovative part of Bennett’s analysis is thus a proposal to cut the Bosnian knot by having the international community rule directly and impose a new system instead of the Dayton institutions. This new system would involve a “double confederation” with Serbia and Croatia, to be imposed on those states via “strict conditionality” by the EU—an odd suggestion in 2016, since Croatia is a member of the EU since 2013 and has been mainly interested in imposing obstructionist conditionalities on Serbia. Anyway, the electoral system would be reformed, still based on ethno-national constituencies but with central governmental figures elected by the Parliament, not directly. Elections would be structured according to some variant of Donald Horowitz’s “centripetalism,” not recognizing that an effort to do just that in the non-Serb part of Bosnia—the Federation—backfired, delegitimizing the Croat representative to the tripartite state Presidency among Croats, since he was elected with almost no Croat votes. In any event, Bennett acknowledges that the major steps he recommends would be rejected by the major Bosnian political players, which makes the exercise largely academic, in the pejorative sense.

Bennett and Hromadžić both demonstrate that Bosnia does not really exist as a common state in the minds of many, probably most, of its putative citizens, and blame this sorry condition on the structure of the Dayton Agreement, supposedly imposed by the international community on the Bosnians. Yet neither acknowledges fully that the internationals were responding to the political realities of the self-partitioning of Bosnia’s population into what most people there consider separate peoples, nor that such self-partitioning has a long history in Bosnia. For example, in 1876, at the very end of Ottoman rule, the Serbs and Croats both objected to the Ottoman state’s insistence that even though Christians outnumbered Muslims in Bosnia, the Bosnian representatives to the first Ottoman Parliament would have as many Muslims as non-Muslims. Further, every time the larger polity that contained Bosnia collapsed or withdrew (1878, 1919, 1941–1945), the Bosnian population largely self-partitioned, and fought each other, along the same lines as occurred at the end of Yugoslavia in 1991–1992.

What these books demonstrate, then, is not so much the fault of the Dayton consociational system to create a workable state, but rather the failure of the idea of a single Bosnian state to gain acceptance by most members of two of its three largest constituent peoples. This is the simplest explanation for the findings of both authors: Bosnia is an empty nation because so few of its people have accepted it as a common state, and its elected politicians have paralyzed the consociational institutions because so many of their constituents prefer the empty shell of the Dayton dysfunctional state to having a real Bosnian government that would have authority over them.