The delusion of coercive peacemaking in identity disputes: The case of the former Yugoslavia (Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia)

This study examines coercive peacemaking in the former Yugoslavia: Croatia (1991--1995), Bosnia-Herzegovina (1992--present), and Kosovo (1999). Coercive peacemaking is a form of conflict management that seeks to impose a peaceful conflict resolution in disregard for disputants' willingness to reconcile their differences. It affirms a normative, moral order over disputants' needs, and believes that peace rests with the international will rather than disputants' ownership of a peace process.; Coercive peacemaking has been portrayed as benevolent, viable, and desirable---supportive of a democratic, peaceful, and orderly world. Nonetheless, this study demonstrates that coercive peacemaking can display severe limits and mounting costs for both disputants and outside parties. Despite its assumptions about conflict prevention, coercive peacemaking can worsen disputes and precipitate violence, making weaker disputants more vulnerable.; A good side of coercive peacemaking is that it can mitigate conflicts and end humanitarian crises.; However, peacemaking requires some separation, and it produces "peace refugees." It also involves ambiguous peace settlements that capture disputants' competing demands, thus enabling conflicts to continue at another level.; Moreover, a precarious post-settlement situation can entrap third parties into coercive nation-building efforts. Entrapment is being facilitated by shifting, unrealistic goals tied to peacemakers' credibility concerns: peacemakers' goals may shift, for example, from Bosnia's peace and stability to creating a single, "multiethnic" state out of disputed national identities. The result has been Bosnia's autocratic regime free of control and accountability---an imperial regime that defies democratic traditions, denies the rights of the local people to self-government, and sets negative precedents for unrestrained interventionism worldwide.; Therefore, this study questions coercive peacemaking as being viable, benign, or desirable. It argues that, if undertaken at all in existential identity disputes, coercive peacemaking should support partitioning rather than seek to impose reconciliation and thereby prop up unviable "multiethnic" states. This risky interventionism should be limited to cases involving compelling security and humanitarian reasons: these cases alone can justify peacemaking efforts that can undermine the international system while carrying substantial risks and costs, both for disputants and outside parties.