Roberto Belloni: The Rise and Fall of Peacebuilding in the Balkans

With the end of the Cold War, the ideas of liberal democracy and market economy became dominant in many areas of international politics, including peacebuilding interventions in postwar societies. During and after the wars in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s, this region, and Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) in particular, became one of the first testing grounds for external peacebuilding that aimed to create sustainable peace by focusing on the development of liberal state institutions and a market economy.

Since the beginning of this intervention in the post-Yugoslav region, there have been regular discussions at the political and academic level about the approach taken and its successes, limitations, and failures. The year 2025, the 30th anniversary of the Dayton Peace Agreement, provides a welcome new opportunity to discuss the role of the international community and its current and future approach to Bosnia and Herzegovina and the Western Balkans, all the more so as the goals of building functional democratic states and sustainable peace have obviously not been achieved. Robert Belloni’s book, though published as long ago as 2020, will be an important tool for anyone wishing to take part in this discussion. The book offers a very useful and insightful assessment of the development and characteristics of international peace efforts since the mid-1990s, thus contributing to a better understanding of how the current situation came about. The book focuses mainly on Western peacebuilding efforts in and toward BiH, but occasionally touches on other parts of the post-Yugoslav region, especially Kosovo and North Macedonia. The author identifies three phases of international peacebuilding in this context: the rise, the stalemate, and the fall, which together cover the period from the mid-1990s to the end of the 2010s. These phases also form the three main parts of the book and each of them is associated with the name of a city symbolic of the period analysed.

The first part, “Dayton, or Liberal Imposition”, looks at the years following the signing of the Dayton Peace Agreement in November 1995, which ended the war in BiH and marked the beginning of large-scale peacebuilding intervention. The author exemplifies Western intervention policies in two areas: proactive efforts to build an anti-corruption agenda, on the one hand, and a domestic civil society, on the other. However, as the chapter shows, these examples also illustrate the limitations of the intervention policies: international actors favoured formal anti-corruption laws but ignored extra-legal structures and practices, and their civil society efforts focused on NGOs that did not address the fundamental needs of the population or challenge the nationalist elites.

The second part of the book, “Brussels, or the Power of Attraction”, looks at the growing role of the European Union (EU) in peacebuilding in the 2000s, a period during which it became the most important international actor in the Western Balkans. The promise of EU membership made during the 2003 Thessaloniki Summit was linked to the hope that this prospect would provide a strong incentive for the region to push ahead with reforms and address unresolved economic, political, and social problems. But it did not take long for “enlargement fatigue” and other issues within the EU to turn the prospect of European integration for the Western Balkans into an increasingly hazy mirage that failed to provide an impetus for reform and progress, and the expectations raised led to more and more disappointments.

The third part, “Tuzla, or the Local Turn”, takes up these frustrated expectations and growing dissatisfaction with EU policies and draws attention to the ordinary citizens – who had been largely ignored by the external peacebuilders – and their attitudes and reactions to liberal interventionism, especially in the 2010s. The protests in the city of Tuzla in 2014, which then spread to other parts of BiH, represented a key moment here, as they

testified to the presence of growing socio-economic grievances in the country, as well as the desire to articulate and implement political forms of engagement alternative to the Dayton peace building framework. In addition, they expressed the condemnation of the internationally led (neo)liberal focus on building democratic institutions and supporting a democratization and liberalization process which has not led to the creation of a responsive and accountable state. (223)

The three main parts, each consisting of two chapters, are preceded by two introductory chapters. The first provides an overview of the evolution of international peacebuilding practices and discussions since the 1990s, both worldwide and in the Western Balkans, while the second outlines the three above-mentioned phases, which are then developed in the parts and chapters that follow. A concluding chapter provides a general assessment of external intervention policies in the Western Balkans and emphasises the importance of rethinking the peacebuilding framework, for example by focusing on the needs, aspirations, and capacities of local communities rather than pursuing top-down approaches and working with nationalist elites.

Overall, the book provides a very convincing analysis of the evolution of the peacebuilding process in the Western Balkans in recent decades and contributes to a deeper understanding of why “internationally led liberal peacebuilding failed to live up to expectations” (3). Not only is the book a well-founded critique of the politics of international actors who are “driven by the attempt to manage the existing reality rather than transforming it, while experimenting with a variety of more or less intrusive intervention tools” (16), but it also opposes simplistic analytical approaches, for example when the author stresses “that the binary international/liberal versus local/illiberal is misplaced. Not only do international actors frequently compromise their liberal ideals […] but also, in an attempt to maintain stability, they can subscribe to unwritten pacts with local authoritarian elites” (21). Instead of sticking to their traditional policies, the EU and other international decision-makers would be well advised to take this book and its conclusions as an invitation to discuss the necessary changes in their approach to Bosnia and Herzegovina and the Western Balkans.

The quality of the book stems from several factors: the author, Roberto Belloni, Professor of Political Science at the University of Bologna (Italy), has studied international interventions in conflict zones, especially in the Balkans, for a long time, and he also knows the subject from a practitioner’s point of view, having worked for the OSCE in BiH in the late 1990s. His book is critical but not polemical, which does not prevent him from making clear statements about Western intervention in the Balkans and, more generally, about the “conceptual limitations of the liberal peacebuilding paradigm” (40). Moreover, while many texts have been written on peacebuilding in the Western Balkans, these tend to focus on a particular aspect or a limited time period. Belloni’s book not only paints a comprehensive picture of the 1995–2020 period, but also refers to and discusses the extensive literature that has emerged since the 1990s.

It might be considered redundant that the author explains the three phases of the peacebuilding process in the Western Balkans in several places throughout the book: in the first chapter, when he outlines the structure of the book; in the second chapter, where he goes into more detail about the three phases; and then in the three main parts, where he develops what he sets out earlier. On the other hand, this outline allows the reader to deepen their understanding of the subject step by step. All in all, Robert Belloni’s book is an important and stimulating contribution for those dealing with contemporary BiH as well as for those generally interested in the question of international peacebuilding in postwar societies – not only on the occasion of the 30th anniversary of the Dayton Peace Agreement.