Empty nation: Youth, education, and democratization in post-conflict Bosnia and Herzegovina

My dissertation is an ethnographic investigation of the internationally directed postconflict reconciliation and democratization interventions in Bosnia and Herzegovina (B&H) and the response of local people, especially youth, to these efforts. The process of peacebuilding and democratization in B&H was instituted on December 14, 1995 by the Dayton Peace Agreement, which brought an end to the Bosnian war. While claiming its objective to be reconciliation, democracy, and ethnic pluralism, the Agreement inscribed in law the ethnic partition between Bosnian Serbs, Croats, and Muslims by granting rights to "people" based on their identification as "ethnic collectivities." This powerful paradox at the heart of "democratization" efforts has been central to what has transpired over the past 13 years. My account documents how the ethnic emphasis of the international integration policies and programs is working in practice to destroy the possibility for the emergence of common, cross-ethnic associations in the B&H state. Instead, so-called democratization has perpetuated what I call a stance of anti-citizenship and the materialization of an "empty nation" in B&H.;The international community made the integration of schools in B&H a crucial element of its reconstruction and peacebuilding efforts. Due to the unique link between education, nation-building and citizen-making in this post-socialist and post-conflict context, education and youth are productive domains within which to examine the working out of the paradox of ethnic pluralism in B&H democratization. I conducted 12 months of ethnographic research in the first reintegrated school in B&H, the Mostar Gymnasium, which has become one of the most important symbols of reconciliation and democratization in the country. In my dissertation I consider the multiple and conflicting layers of reunification that were taking place in the school and the practices of both cooperation and resistance involved in the processes of its integration.