Bosnia'S Civil War Origins And Violence Dynamics

he civil war in Bosnia has received heavy coverage in the popular press and in scholarly writings.The fact that the war took place in Europe,the extent of ethnic cleansing and killing, the investigations of the ICTY (the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia),the deployment of sev- eral large United Nations (UN) peace operations, and the use of an assortment of humanitarian assistance projects by nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) have all attracted attention to this civil war and have resulted in the accumulation of a large descriptive corpus on the war. Despite this wealth of information, we still do not know which theories of civil war best explain this war and what lessons might be drawn from Bosnia that could inform existing theories of civil war. There are many rival explanations of the onset of civil war in Bosnia.Most expla- nations cannot fit neatly in a theoretical framework that tries to explain more than just Bosnia. Reading case studies or reports on the war, it is hard to know what we might learn from Bosnia that we can generalize to other wars.We make an effort to integrate an analysis of the Bosnian war with broadly applicable theories by consid- ering the fit of the Collier-Hoeffler (CH) model to this case (Collier and Hoeffler 2001). In doing so, we consider alternative explanations and weigh them against the predictions of the CH model. We also analyze the patterns of violence in the Bosnian war and try to sort out the various competing explanations for the violence.The majority of works about the patterns of violence were written from authors whose main experience was lim- ited to Sarajevo.This city, a journalist points out (Loyd 2001, 179),"had an inordi- nate media prestige as the Bosnian capital,which distracted journalists from much of what was happening elsewhere." However, the war was mainly conducted in the countryside.Much information collected by NGOs has two possible problems.First, because it seeks human rights violations, it focuses on sites of mass violence rather than sites of nonviolence, thus generating truncated data.There is an abundance of studies on Sarajevo, Prijedor, Kozarac, and Srebrenica during the war, but very lit- tle on the rest of the country. Second, it tends to privilege acts of violence rather than nonviolent acts that precede and follow violent ones and may be essential in