Bosnia: Building states without societies? NGOs and civil society

This chapter critically assesses the internationally-led statebuilding experience in Bosnia-Herzegovina (hereafter Bosnia). It shows how the structural contradictions embodied in the 1995 Dayton Peace Agreement (DPA), together with the related difficulties in implementing the agreement, led international actors to focus increasingly on the development of domestic civil society. This new effort, however, has been driven from the top-down, with international agencies providing the resources and often the blueprint for civil society development. As a result, rather than providing the space for a new social contract, civil society has become an arena for the implementation of a technocratic governance agenda. The gradual phasing out of bilateral donors, and the related growing role of the European Union (EU) in the country since the early 2000s, has not significantly altered this pattern of intervention.