Excavations of the Kopilo cemetery in central Bosnia in 2021 and 2022 have provided the first insights into Bronze and Iron Age burial practices in this part of Europe. We documented a total of 46 inhumation graves, with the variety of finds indicating supra-regional contacts of this population.

When hospitals are damaged or destroyed in armed conflict, the loss is far greater than the physical structures: safe spaces are lost, health outcomes worsen and trust in health institutions is undermined. Despite the legal protections afforded to medical units under international humanitarian law (IHL), attacks on hospitals are a recurring problem in armed conflict. In 2019, the Safeguarding Health in Conflict Coalition documented more than 1,203 incidents of violence against medical facilities, transports, personnel and patients in twenty countries. This article examines investigations of four post-Second World War incidents of attacks on hospitals in armed conflicts in Vietnam, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Palestine and Afghanistan, the role public advocacy campaigns played in bringing about these investigations, and how national and international authorities can work together to promote greater accountability for violations of IHL.

Premised on elite accommodation, consociations provide little consideration for citizens’ input on institutional change. Likewise, valuable analyses of cross-community political participation in divided societies have emerged in recent years, yet whether the relationship between the grassroot and formal political process has broader consequences remains to be fully explored. The article examines the conditions in which nonelectoral participation takes place and the ways in which actors involved therein negotiate constraints for continuous cross-community mobilization. The structure of political systems and the nature of deep divisions in Northern Ireland and Federation of Bosnia-Herzegovina invite a comparison of the consequences of nonelectoral political participation in these two illustrative case studies. The article concludes that while the formal political context shapes the likelihood of engagement on a cross-community basis, whether nonelectoral participation changes the structure of political decision-making depends on the willingness and ability of those involved to cooperate with formal institutional politics.

Tragedy is one of the oldest metaphorical lenses of International Relations. The tragic vision of politics, from Thucydides to contemporary realist theorists, lies at the core of classical realism. However, it is striking how rarely the concept of tragedy has been applied to the discourse of humanitarian intervention. This lacuna is a weakness on both the intellectual and political levels, as nowhere are clashes between competing ethical perspectives more glaring. An examination of the concept of tragedy, as conceived from its Greek origins, can illuminate an understanding of the morally contradictory imperatives created by armed intervention. Using the Bosnian War as a case study, Greek classical tragedy provides a framework to grasp the agonising choices and insoluble ethical dilemmas brought about by humanitarian intervention, in contrast to mere narratives of salvation. The argument conveyed in this article seeks to reconcile a tragic vision with the idea of progress and political action. It concludes by suggesting that the fundamental lessons that lie at the heart of tragedy should be associated with another major concept in Greek culture, namely, the Aristotelian idea of phronesis or ‘practical wisdom’.

This article examines the case of a Bosnian brother and sister at the center of a diplomatic dispute between Austria and the Ottoman Empire in 1852. Mara Illić had to cross the border into Austria in order to board a ship that would take her to Anatolia with the household of a paşa who had been banished. Milan called upon Austrian authorities to “liberate” Mara, whom he claimed had been enslaved when she was “forced” to convert to Islam as a young child. Austria's defense of its seizure of the girl and the Ottomans' insistence that she be returned reflect tension over sovereignty, jurisdiction, and personhood. The border brings into stark relief the conflict between different ways of conceptualizing categories like freedom and slavery, contract and coercion, confession and nationality.

This article examines the causes and repercussions of the flight of two-dozen Orthodox Christian merchants from Ottoman Bosnia to Habsburg Croatia in 1873. The seemingly minor event quickly escalated from an isolated border incident to a full-blown diplomatic crisis-defused only with the merchants' repatriation, the recall of a Habsburg consul, and the removal of the Ottoman provincial governor and other officials. After outlining the course of events and increasing Ottoman-Habsburg tensions, the article turns to the refugees' efforts to affect the outcome of emerging crisis. Although ultimately of little influence, the refugees' sophisticated invocation of international legal norms reflected a largely conservative trust in the international system's ability to rectify perceived violations of treaty terms-a belief that quickly vanished after the outbreak of the Eastern Crisis in 1875.

This article examines Austrian perceptions of the people and landscape of Bosnia-Herzegovina from 1878 to 1908. It traces Austrians’ fantasies about and encounters with Bosnian Muslims, whom they often categorized as “Turks.” Following the Congress of Berlin, Austrians claimed to be doing the civilizing work of “Europe” in Bosnia. The article investigates the meanings of border and borderlands between the Habsburg Empire and Ottoman Bosnia, focusing in particular on crossings of the Sava River. Drawing on the writings of soldiers, administrators, journalists and travel writers, the essay considers a number of mental maps, imagined geographies of what Habsburg authors thought they knew about the land and people they occupied. It contributes to a growing scholarship on the Habsburg-Ottoman borderlands.

The International Relations (IR) literature has strongly criticised the invasive and top-down nature of liberal peace, facilitating a reinterpretation of the practice of international intervention in conflict-affected societies. Today, sustaining peace policy approaches advance longer-term missions, give a secondary role to external practitioners, and increasingly accept risks and failures. What is striking is that even when these policy discourses hold out the promise of liberating peacebuilding from dominant and top-down models of liberal intervention, the mood in the field is one of despair. By drawing on John Dewey's work on pragmatism and interviewing practitioners in Bosnia and Kosovo, the article reflects on the morass practitioners find themselves, diagnoses the source of the frustrations, and anticipates the direction of sustaining peace. Pragmatism adumbrates the idea of ‘peacebuilding without peace’, encouraging practitioners to experiment, give primacy to their doings and explore this world without hope of success and dreams of otherworldliness.

After a genocide, leaders compete to fill the postwar power vacuum and establish their preferred story of the past. Memorialisation, including through building memorials, provides a cornerstone of political power. The dominant public narrative determines the plotline; it labels victims and perpetrators, interprets history, assigns meaning to suffering, and sets the post-atrocity political agenda. Therefore, ownership of the past, in terms of the public account, is deeply contested. Although many factors affect the emergence of a dominant atrocity narrative, this article highlights the role of international interactions with genocide memorials, particularly how Western visitors, funders, and consultants influence the government's narrative. Western consumption of memorials often reinforces aspects of dark tourism that dehumanise victims and discourage adequate context for the uninformed visitor. Funding and consultation provided by Western states and organisations – while offering distinct benefits – tends to encourage a homogenised atrocity narrative, which reflects the values of the global human rights regime and existing standards of memorial design rather than privileging the local particularities of the atrocity experience. As shown in the cases of Rwanda, Cambodia, and Bosnia, Western involvement in public memory projects often strengthens the power of government narratives, which control the present by controlling the past.

The Umbilicaria polyphylla aggregate (U. polyphylla (L.) Baumg., U. subpolyphylla Oxner and U. iberica Sancho & Krzewicka) is discussed based on morphological, chemical and molecular data. Umbilicaria iberica is proposed to be a later synonym of U. subpolyphylla. The constructed nrITS + mtLSU phylogeny, which includes specimens with wide geographical ranges, shows that both U. polyphylla and U. subpolyphylla are monophyletic and closely related. Both species have the same type of thalloconidia and identical secondary metabolites. Umbilicaria subpolyphylla has prominent phenotypic differences when compared to U. polyphylla including the monophyllous thallus with a dull upper surface and an elevated, slightly wrinkled centre, often covered with white pruina, and a medulla of the ‘U. havaasii’ type. Phylogenetic evidence for the bipolar distribution of both U. polyphylla and U. subpolyphylla is provided. Sympatric speciation in one region followed by long-distance dispersal seems to be the most plausible phylogeographical explanation for the observed patterns. Umbilicaria subpolyphylla is found in southern temperate-subtropical (Mediterranean) mountains, at least in Europe.

This article examines how defendants on trial at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) appropriate the tribunal as a platform for national myth and group making. Specifically, the article analyzes Radovan Karadžić and Vojislav Šešelj's “performances” at The Hague in order to highlight the particular ways in which the defendants craft and mobilize the nationalist narrative. The article introduces the phenomenon of “the war criminal cult” and traces three stages of its production, including the defendants' collectivization of guilt, epitomization of The Hague as the ultimate enemy of the nation, and construction of “Serbs” as the biggest victims of international justice and of themselves as martyrs befallen with the task of defending the dignity of the nation. The “war criminal cult” is thus “made” in conversation with the “imperial West” in a collective narrative that contests the legitimacy and the intention of The Hague while disguising individual responsibility.

Recent unrest and the 2014 elections have corroborated the impression of Bosnia as a failing state, one that is constantly being undermined by the three-way impasse between constituent ethnic groups of Bosniaks, Croats, and Serbs. Major history museums in Bosnia, however, provide a more complex picture. This paper analyzes museums and exhibitions on twentieth-century history in Sarajevo, Banja Luka, and Jajce, with regard to their narrative strategies, their aesthetic appearance, and the commemorative practices in their respective locations. From this perspective, the use of history in building group identity in Bosnia is far from coherent. Although museums are one means to assert firmly entrenched national identities both old and new, they compete at the same time with nostalgic commemorations of socialist Yugoslavia and with equally nostalgic references to the Austrian occupation. Various civic groups struggle to assert their visions of belonging, mostly with rather modest financial means. Based on these findings, this paper will explore not only the underlying assumptions of what history and, in particular, museums are all about, but also how visions of the future of Bosnia and Herzegovina are inscribed in these uses of history – if indeed they are.

The theory and practice of referenda played an important role in the break-up of Yugoslavia, especially in Bosnia-Herzegovina (BiH), where two divisive referenda preceded the Bosnian War of 1992-1995. After the failure of constitutional reforms in April 2006, Milorad Dodik, then Republika Srpska's prime minister, suggested that Republika Srpska had the right to hold its own referendum, with separation from Bosnia an unstated (yet soon openly discussed) aspiration. This paper presents an account of the emergence of Republika Srpska referendum discourse and how it was articulated by Milorad Dodik to establish his SNSD party as the dominant force in Republika Srpska. It documents the dialogical context and rhetorical gambits used by Dodik to articulate the discourse, tracing how it evolved in response to regional events and elections. The paper concludes by considering the limits of interpreting Dodik as a demagogue and of a discourse-centered approach to political rhetoric.