Bosnia Remade: Ethnic Cleansing and Its Reversal

Bosnia Remade is an authoritative account of ethnic cleansing and its partial undoing from the onset of the 1990s Bosnian wars up through the present. Gerard Toal and Carl Dahlman combine a bird's-eye view of the entire war from onset to aftermath with a micro-level account of three towns that underwent ethnic cleansing and--later--the return of refugees. There have been two major attempts to remake the ethnic geography of Bosnia since 1991. In the first instance, ascendant ethno-nationalist forces tried to eradicate the mixed ethnic geographies of Bosnia's towns, villages and communities. These forces devastated tens of thousands of homes and lives, but they failed to destroy Bosnia-Herzegovina as a polity. In the second attempt, which followed the war, the international community, in league with Bosnian officials, endeavored to reverse the demographic and other consequences of this ethnic cleansing. While progress has been uneven, this latter effort has transformed the ethnic demography of Bosnia and moved the nation beyond its recent segregationist past. By showing how ethnic cleansing was challenged, Bosnia Remade offers more than just a comprehensive narrative of Europe's worst political crisis of the past two decades. It also offers lessons for addressing an enduring global problem.

Table of Contents:
Introduction: Ethnic Cleansing and Return as Geopolitics 1. Yugoslavia's Violent Dissolution 2. A Distinctive Geopolitical Space 3. Polarization and Poison 4. Ethnic Cleansing 5. Persistence Ambivalence 6. Early Battles Over Returns 7. Building Capacity 8. Rule of Law 9. Localized Geopolitical Struggles 10. Did Ethnic Cleansing Succeed? List of Interviews Appendix

About the Author :
Gerard Toal (Gearóid Ó Tuathail) is Professor and Director of Government and International Affairs at Virginia Tech's National Capital Region campus. Carl T. Dahlman is Associate Professor of Geography at Miami University.

Review :
"A book a long time in coming and yet absolutely timely...Toal and Dahlman are very effective at weaving together an analysis that takes into account global power relations, local (opstina) political dynamics, nationalist narratives and their everyday circulation, actual practices of ethnic cleansing and its reversal, and the specific experience of place. Methodologically, the book makes use of published and governmental documents, as well as interviews with both survivors, combatants, and political leaders in the towns of Zvornik, Doboj, and Jajce...extremely effective in its presentation."--Berfrois "Gerard Toal's and Carl Dahlman's Bosnia Remade: Ethnic Cleansing and its Reversal is the best book yet written on post-Dayton Bosnia."--Marko Hoare, Reader, Kingston University London, and author of The History of Bosnia: From the Middle Ages to the Present Day "This is the first comprehensive treatment of the Bosnian conflict and post-conflict eras as a continuous tale of those whose lives were destroyed or disrupted. The authors' unique advantages as political geographers are evident in the plethora of valuable insights that add greatly to our understanding of Bosnia's tumultuous last two decades and the international efforts to remake it. Toal and Dahlman employ to great advantage the testimony and judgments of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia in constructing their account of the war and ethnic cleansing. The book is an invaluable addition to the literature on the complex and contested events of the Bosnian conflict."--Robert Donia, Research Associate, Center for Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies, University of Michigan, and author of Sarajevo: A Biography "The authors provide a detailed and shrewd analysis of the effects of war on post-Dayton Bosnia. Drawing on extensive English-language literature and interviews with the various local actors, theirs is the most perceptive account of contemporary social and political dilemmas in Bosnia and Herzegovina."--Ivo Banac, Professor Emeritus of History, Yale University "Gerard Toal and Carl T. Dahlman have done an admirable job of providing background information about the war and its resulting many-layered displacement, as well as discussing the successes and failures of the postwar recovery period. With the benefit of more historical distance than that found in most books on that period, the book offers clarity anew through a dispassionate examination of the behavior and motives of those who destroyed Bosnia. Outside of polemical works, it is rare and refreshing to find such pointed analysis."--Transitions Online "Toal and Dahlman do an exceptional job of analyzing the successes and the more frequent failures of minority returns in Bosnia. This is a data-heavy study, providing more statistical information concerning minority returns than can easily be found elsewhere. The authors are innovative, moreover, in their case studies of three strategically critical towns that were hotly contested and saw waves of ethnic cleansing: Zvornik and Doboj in the Republika Srpska, and Jajce in the Federation."--Slavic Review "Bosnia Remade is a remarkable book that will speak to a number of audiences. To those interested in post-Cold War foreign policy the book provides the most sophisticated narration available of the nature of international interventions in Yugoslavia and subsequent state-building initiatives in BiH. To the geographer it illuminates the spatial characteristics of these processes, as the multifaceted nature of the Yugoslav Republic of Bosnia was reduced to a matrix of ethnic identification by both political leaders and subsequently intervening agencies. To the scholar of critical geopolitics the text provides a powerful reminder of the political and theoretical utility exploring the spatial characteristics of foreign policy as performances of power with plural outcomes."--Annals of the Association of American Geographers