Comment & Debate
Valery Perry. “The Republika Srpska Debate in Bosnia and Herzegovina”. April 2008 – The implications of the ultimate outcome of post-Dayton BiH’s stateness experiment should not be viewed as regionally limited or specific, for whether or not BiH continues to exist as a functioning, multinational state will send a strong signal to other weak, heterogeneous states. The alternative to successful, effective power-sharing within a democratic state is a system of continually fragmented, ethnically-defined statelets, and an increasing marginalization of social diversity and basic human and minority rights.5 Such an unwieldy world order would suit few. It could also have the perverse effect of generating an incentive to “create new facts on the ground” and “clean up the map.”