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“Nonaligned Citizens”: Ethnic Power-Sharing and Nonethnic Identities in Bosnia Herzegovina. The Case of Sarajevo

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 March 2020

Arianna Piacentini
Arianna Piacentini*
Affiliation:
Institute for Comparative Federalism, EURAC Research, Bolzano, Italy
*
*Corresponding author. Email: [email protected]
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Abstract

Bosnia Herzegovina is a consociational democracy grounded on three ethnic constituencies. The postwar implementation of power-sharing mechanisms ended to favor ethnocracy and ethnopolitics, eventually compromising an inclusive democracy untied from ethnonational issues. This contribution explores the positive potential held by political parties and ordinary citizens “nonaligned” with the ethnopolitical scaffolding—therefore and consequently not explicitly included in the power-sharing system—because they hold and promote “alternative,” civic, and nonethnic forms of identification. Drawing upon interviews performed in Sarajevo, this article argues that citizens’ political disappointment and dissatisfaction are among the reasons contributing to the existence of a small, yet potentially critical, mass of citizens able to help adjusting an ethnically exclusive model of democracy.

Keywords

Bosnia Herzegovinanonalignedethnopoliticscivic identitiescitizens
Type
Article
Information
Nationalities Papers , Volume 48 , Special Issue 4: Special Issue on Migrant Rights, Agency, and Vulnerability , July 2020 , pp. 707 - 720
Copyright
© Association for the Study of Nationalities 2020

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