Book Review: Christopher Bennett, Bosnia’s Paralysed Peace
| DOI | 10.1177/1478929917718152 |
| Published date | 01 November 2017 |
| Date | 01 November 2017 |
| Author | Franco Galdini |
| Subject Matter | Book ReviewsEurope |
662 Political Studies Review 15(4)
the law, and free and fair elections. Alongside
this, the findings show that European citizens
are both democratic and demanding, and that
the real issue is not the attitudes of the citi-
zens, but the poor performance of democratic
systems in Europe.
While these findings show that European
countries are by and large legitimate, the real
issue lies in the non-procedural elements of
democracy; it is in the arena of social democ-
racy, such as protection against poverty, that
European countries are failing. Despite this,
there remains heterogeneity in attitudes, with
citizens in countries with poorer performing
systems more demanding than those in coun-
tries that perform well. Perhaps most inter-
estingly, the book seeks to explain this
variation, finding that both context and nor-
mative expectations of different elements of
democracy affect citizens’ evaluations (chap-
ter 10).
These findings culminate in a methodologi-
cal chapter on the commonly used ‘Satisfaction
with Democracy’ measure, finding that satis-
faction with democracy is reliable if one con-
trols for an individual’s prior conceptions of
democracy: importantly, not all citizens think
of the same feature of democracy.
How Europeans View and Evaluate
Democracy is a theoretically and empirically
excellent book, which draws on and contributes
to democratic theory, methodology and the sub-
stantive literature at hand, and makes its case
convincingly.
It would have been interesting for the book to
reflect on two features of contemporary politics.
First, is it possible that the context of European
democracy – namely, in the European Union –
alters these findings? Second, how does the rise
of anti-democratic political movements sit
alongside these largely positive findings? This
does not detract from the relevance of the book,
however. The extremely rich theoretical and
empirical content should be of interest to schol-
ars in a range of fields, and anyone interested in
the rapidly changing political context of Europe.
Daniel J Devine
(University of Southampton)
© The Author(s) 2017
Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav
DOI: 10.1177/1478929917712903
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Bosnia’s Paralysed Peace by Christopher
Bennett. London: C. Hurst & Co., 2016. 288pp.,
£16.99 (p/b), ISBN 9781849040549
In Bosnia’s Paralysed Peace, Christopher
Bennett offers an in-depth critique of the 1995
US-brokered Dayton Peace Agreement that
stopped the 3.5-year war ravaging Bosnia and
Herzegovina in the 1990s. After chronicling
the historical roots of Bosnia’s current divi-
sions into ‘three distinct ethno-national identi-
ties’ (p. 17), the descent of Yugoslavia into
conflict and the main phases of the Bosnian
war, the book turns to analysing two decades of
peacebuilding under Dayton.
Bennett argues that the international com-
munity’s liberal peacebuilding model via
‘democratisation [and] the construction of a
market economy’ (p. 172) has failed to achieve
self-sustaining peace in the country. Because,
under Dayton’s rule, power is allocated along
ethno-national lines, democratic elections have
regularly rewarded nationalist leaders catering
only to their own community and have pre-
vented the birth of moderate alternatives. In
turn, successive in-country international repre-
sentatives have broken the ensuing political
stalemate via the widespread use of executive
powers, effectively ‘treating symptoms rather
than addressing the underlying illness’ (p. 269).
The result has been dismal: ‘Bosnia is not a
self-sustaining democracy, and the political
system remains as insidious and virulent as it
was before the outbreak of hostilities’ (p. 255).
Prospective Euro-Atlantic integration has done
little to change the zero-sum calculations of the
country’s elites and, if the status quo is left to
fester, hostilities may resume once the interna-
tional presence in Bosnia ends. Bennett con-
cludes with his own blueprint for Bosnia to
break out of the Dayton impasse and build
peace and security for all its peoples.
While Bennett’s assumption about the his-
torical immutability of identity is problematic,
he makes a strong and detailed case for reform of
Dayton’s Byzantine constitutional arrangements
in clear prose. However, his reform proposal – to
introduce a ‘double confederation’ with Croatia
and Serbia (p. 260) and ‘a system involving mul-
tiple proportional voting’ (p. 262) – is only
briefly sketched, leaving open questions such as
how it would help Bosnia’s struggling economy
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