Vesna Bojicic-Dzelilovic

Civil society and transitions in the Western Balkans

This book examines the ambiguous role played by civil society in state-building, democratisation and post-conflict reconstruction in the Western Balkans. In doing so, it challenges the received wisdom that civil society is always a force for good. Civil society actors have helped create the conditions for new, more constructive relations inside and between former Yugoslav countries. But, their agency has also rekindled nationalism hindering efforts to rebuild the region after the conflicts of the 1990s. The book demonstrates that diverse civil society effects cannot be captured without querying both the nature of civil society and the complexity of the ongoing transformation. So how can the emancipatory role of civil society be harnessed? This rigorous case study-driven reappraisal of the ability of civil society to support progressive transformation from an illiberal regime to democracy and from conflict to peace will be a valuable resource to scholars and practitioners alike.

Europeanisation and conflict networks: private sector development in post-conflict Bosnia–Herzegovina

Focusing on conflict legacy, this article contributes to the study of domestic mediating conditions as an explanation of “shallow Europeanisation” in the Western Balkans, defined as a disconnect between European rules and local practices. It critiques the prevalent neo-Weberian understanding of state capacity, which highlights rule-enforcement capability of state institutions, but reduces conflict legacy to a question of resources. The article argues that a relational approach to state capacity which attributes its strength to enduring ties among state and non-state actors better captures the challenge to European Union (EU)-driven domestic transformation in a post-conflict context. A case study of the Hercegovina Holding is used to unravel a Bosnian Croat network originating during the 1992–1995 Bosnian war. The empirical evidence of the networks operation illustrates how key EU benchmarks for private sector development can be undermined, making a case for a more rigorous conceptualisation of conflict legacy as a domestic constraint on the EUs leverage.

The missing link in human security research: Dialogue and insecurity in Kosovo:

The concept of human security continues to defy definitional clarity at the same time as it is being embraced by policymakers. This article proposes a practice-grounded approach that focuses on investigative method as a way of linking conceptual understanding of human security to the research process. Probing the ‘actorness’ of individuals in volatile contexts, a study of insecurity in Kosovo shows how dialogue can be applied as a research tool to access and assess human security in the field. Dialogue permits recognition of the power of the researched in the construction of knowledge of security, and accordingly reflects the conceptual shift represented by human security from states to communities and individuals. In the Kosovo study, dialogic research captured individual agency in the face of pervasive insecurity and revealed contradictory effects of such agency. This led to the formulation of the idea of the multidirectional security marker as a means of understanding experiences of insecurity in relation to strategies to combat it. Three such markers – self-reliance, informality and community solidarity – emerged and are analysed in the case of Kosovo. Simultaneously denoting restrictions on people’s security and possibilities for overcoming those very same limitations, the markers express the agential dimension of human security and show how agency and security interact.

Informality in post‐communist transition: determinants and consequences of the privatization process in Bulgaria

The article contributes to a scarce pool of academic literature on Bulgarian privatization. It reviews the process in its economic, political and social determinants and consequences and reveals the active participation and undue influence of particularistic networks enjoying exclusive access to power. In the circumstances of lacking conceptual and theoretical clarity no privatization alternative dominated on all grounds and considerations and enjoyed unequivocal popular support. This enabled the popular, and often populist, political discourse to determine outcomes that privileged mainly private interests. Networks of influential actors belonging to the political and economic elite of the country were key in turning privatization into a process contributing to the spread of informal practices, which have affected Bulgarian transition path.

Introduction: Civil Society and Multiple Transitions - Meanings, Actors and Effects

The overthrow of Communism by people’s revolutions in Eastern and Central Europe and the former Soviet Union in the late 1980s testified to the power of civil society against the totalitarian Communist state.1 The result of the demonstrable political power of the people was an intellectual rediscovery of the concept of civil society, alongside its escape from the constraints of national borders and its reconceptualisation as a global civil society. At the same time, a triple transition from Communism, as Offe described it famously, constituted by political and economic liberalisation, alongside in many cases from the Balkans to the Caucasus, violent reconstitution of nation states,2 shed light on the complexity of political change, and, with it, on multiple functions of civil society. Furthermore, the process has been transnationalised both within the scope of progressive and regressive globalisation. Civil society actors, especially in post-conflict zones the world over, have been intertwined in multidimensional partnerships, including international organisations, international NGOs (INGOs), international financial institutions, foreign governments as well as national and multilateral development agencies, and so on. Meanwhile, other segments of local civil societies have also linked up with global networks, often either as purveyors of illiberal identities or as partners in global criminal enterprise.

‘It’s not just the economy, stupid’. The multi-directional security effects of the private sector in post-conflict reconstruction

Abstract Using a human security lens, this article explores the interface between transnational corporations (TNCs) and post-conflict, post-crisis societies. It demonstrates how TNCs influence political and economic transition, through impacting the everyday experience of security, creating multiple and ambiguous effects on individuals and communities. Examples of two foreign corporate engagements: carmaker Fiat’s investment in Serbia and steelmaker ArcelorMittal’s takeover in Zenica in Bosnia-Herzegovina are used to illustrate the density of relationships between global companies, host governments, civil society and local communities whose effects extend beyond economics to broader aspects of the conflict space, and have a bearing on the transition and reconstruction agenda. Our findings question the quality of development and industrialisation policies championed by post-conflict reconstruction approaches, and challenge the assumption that economic growth and investment, by foreign companies in particular, will necessarily deliver peaceful transition. The article contributes to the scholarly debate about the connection between security and development, and to policy discussions about appropriate means for reviving economies within externally led peace-building and conflict prevention initiatives.

External Statebuilding and Transnational Networks: The Limits of the Civil Society Approach

With its focus on networks1, Ghani and Lockhart’s (2008) book adds a new perspective to the actor-centred literature on post-conflict state-building. Accounting for the challenges of external efforts to build sustainable states in the aftermath of conflict in war-torn regions from the Western Balkans through to Iraq, to Afghanistan and East Timor, scholars have studied the role of local elites as opposed to civil society. Most recently, the scholarship on actors operating in post-conflict environments has expanded its reach to include private business and multi-stakeholder partnerships. We argue that the network perspective, which brings to the forefront the reality of multiple actors and their complex relationship in the post-conflict environment, poses a particular challenge for the scholars of statebuilding.

Human security in a weak state in the Balkans: globalization and transnational networks

Is the international community’ s post-conflict reconstruction effort in the Balkans a success or a failure? Is the glass half-empty or half-full? Recalling the hundreds of thousands killed, the streams of wounded refugees and the homes destroyed during the last decade, optimists will say it is definitely half-full. By contrast, the critics who have dismissed external efforts in the region as nothing else but self-interested imperialism, will beg to differ. Their pessimism is grounded in the doubtful and fragile sustainability of the political, economic and security processes the international community has assisted in putting into place. Indeed, the pundits are no longer concerned with a state failure and large-scale violence in the Balkans. Instead, talk of the Western Balkans ‘navigating’, albeit with difficulties, along the ‘European path’ (as opposed to post-conflict transition) is all embracing. This, however, does not diminish the fact that the region’s inability to consolidate demo cracy remains an enduring cause of insecurity for its citizens and a source of non-traditional security threats to its neighbours and other states.

Wholly local? ownership as philosophy and practice in peacebuilding interventions

ABSTRACT This paper engages with the theme of local ownership in peacebuilding from a practice-based perspective which suggests that the way in which the external actors reach out and work with local constituencies shows conceptual and practice gaps that limit the applicability of local ownership in day-to-day peacebuilding operations. We examine how, in the case of EU peacebuilding policies, such gaps impair the potential for effective, inclusive and sustainable peacebuilding. Using a whole-of-society (WOS) lens, the paper demonstrates how current modalities of EU engagement fail to embrace the diversity of local society and its authentic forms of mobilisation and action in order to pursue peacebuilding objectives that resonate with locally relevant forms of peace. The paper further reflects on how WOS perspective can provide pointers for enhancing peacebuilding practices in this area.

Introductory article: Mind the gaps. A Whole-of-Society approach to peacebuilding and conflict prevention

ABSTRACT External peacebuilding interventions have moved towards comprehensive strategies to tackle the complex problems of peace, security and development. This paper proposes a ‘Whole-of-Society’ (WOS) approach which seeks to enhance the effectiveness of externally led peacebuilding and conflict prevention through recourse to the social contexts within which they are implemented. The aim of WOS is to see complexity, both within local society and in the relations between external peacebuilders and local society, as an opportunity to be grasped, as much as an impediment to effective outcomes. A WOS approach adds a practice dimension to debates on ownership, local peace and hybridity, trust-in-peacebuilding and their conceptualisations of local agency and dynamics. It seeks to address the operational gaps that emerge within a societal perspective to peacebuilding, in particular by suggesting ways of achieving appropriate configurations of external and local resources, agency and initiatives.