Europe’s Waiting Room: Post-War Bosnia & the Simulation of Perpetual Peace

The Buffett Institute for Global Affairs has launched a yearlong initiative focused on international diplomacy in turbulent times. The series will explore key moments in recent diplomacy through lunchtime lectures throughout the winter quarter on the landmark peace processes of the last few decades. Lunch will be provided beginning at 12:15 p.m.

, Associate Professor of History at Loyola University Chicago, will give a lecture on the .

Amid the collapse of Communism in the late 1980s, nationalist forces in Yugoslavia targeted the multiethnic state of Bosnia-Herzegovina in an effort to violently “unmix” diverse communities. The resulting war and genocide in the 1990s ended with the American-led intervention, culminating in the 1995 Dayton Peace Agreement based on complex mechanisms of ethnic power-sharing. Ever since then, many foreign observers have touted Dayton as a “success story” of peace-building while downplaying the severity of problems that Bosnians continue to face. Does Bosnia have a future beyond the Dayton Peace Agreement? What broader insights into international affairs can we gain by approaching post-Dayton Bosnia not as a temporary transition out of war, but as an enduring apparatus that thrives on particular political and ideological tensions?

This event is co-sponsored by the Loyola University Chicago Rule of Law Institute.

Please note that 720 University Place is not an ADA-accessible space. Increasing physical access to buildings and facilities is a goal of the University, but not all buildings and venues have been updated.

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