Clash of Peacebuilding and Post-Conflict Democratization in the UN Peace Operations and Its Outcomes in Bosnia-Herzegovina

Abstract

The quest for understanding the democratic development in post-conflict societies made me choose the topic of peacebuilding and democratization. Not many people including practitioners of international organizations like the United Nations are aware of the internal collision between the strategies of peacebuilding and democratization that are pursued by these organizations. The main issue is that both of these processes, regarded not as steps, but as a single process, and they have different end results and, therefore, require various strategies to achieve them. The main goal of peacebuilding is implementing the bases for long lasting peace and stability. The main goal of democratization is building democratic state with its electoral institutions, free market economy, and civil society. However, the implementation of these processes simultaneously can jeopardize the end results and, thus, slow down the creation of fully functioning democracy and bring about a relapse into violent conflict. The first chapter is dedicated to unfolding the collision points and determining the detrimental value of them to the development of post conflict societies. In order to illustrate that clash of democracy and peacebuilding I have chosen to study conflict and post-conflict development of Bosnia-Herzegovina. The country that has been destroyed during the bloody civil war of 1992-1995 has become an arena of international experiment in peacebuilding and democratization. In spite of an extensive international involvement and prolonged money-consuming commitment Bosnia didn’t fulfill the expectations of international community. It is now an authoritarian state with a long-way to democracy. Bosnia is a good case study because it has three distinctive periods in its history in which the international community exercised different levels of power. The third chapter goes from the origins of conflict and the description of the conditions that existed in the aftermath of the conflict to an overview of the international peacebuilding mission and the activities undertaken in order to keep peace and build democracy in the country. The second part describes the conflicts between the strategies of building peace and trying to establish democracy under supervision of the United Nations. The conclusion proposes to leave the democratization part of the peace operations as a whole and focus exclusively on peacebuilding. It is better for democracy to wait to come after peace otherwise the post-conflict societies will never leave the cycle of conflict.