Bosnia, 25 Years after the Dayton Accords
Bosnia, 25 Years after the Dayton Accords
A Virtual International Symposium
November 5 and 6, 2020
From November 1-21, 1995, the presidents of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, and Serbia met at the Wright-Patterson Air Force Base outside of Dayton, Ohio, along with high-level officials from the United States, France, Germany, Russia, and the United Kingdom. All were seeking an end to the war in Bosnia that had taken over 100,000 lives over the course of the previous 3+ years.
The peace agreement that resulted – known as the Dayton Accords – did exactly that, but were quickly recognized as flawed and problematic. Now, 25 years later, the costs of peace as spelled out in the Accords have become clearer. We take this opportunity to look back at the Accords and to consider the trajectory of Bosnian politics in the quarter-century that has passed since then.
Program (all times Eastern US (GMT-5))
View the full recorded event here.
Thursday, November 5
Panel I – Reflections on Bosnia since 1995 (10:00-11:30)
• Janine di Giovanni (Yale University; author; journalist)
• Peter Lippman (Independent human rights activist and researcher; author)
• Velma Šarić (Post-Conflict Resource Center, Sarajevo) and Chris Leslie (Photographer and filmmaker, A Balkan Journey)
Panel II – Transitional Justice I (1:30-3:00)
• Tanya Domi (Columbia University), “The long arm of sexual violence in BiH: Denial, impunity & silence”
• Jasmin Mujanović (Friedrich Ebert Stiftung - Dialogue Southeast Europe), “The politics of Bosnian genocide denial”
• Markéta Slavková (Institute of Ethnology of the Czech Academy of Sciences), “Srebrenica’s recipes for survival: Food as a weapon of war and a tool of transitional justice”
Keynote I (3:30 – 4:30)
• Hariz Halilović (Professor of Anthropology and Principal Research Fellow at the Social and Global Studies Centre, RMIT University, Melbourne)
“25 years after Dayton: Quo vadis Bosnia?”
Friday, November 6
Panel III – Transitional Justice II (10:00-11:30)
• Ena Kazić (International University of Sarajevo), “Reparation for war crime victims in Bosnia and Herzegovina”
• Kenan Ademović (International University of Sarajevo), “Justice and Reconciliation: A Bosnian case study”
• Aliye Fatma Mataraci (International University of Sarajevo), “War Childhood Museum in Sarajevo as a memorialization effort for transitional justice”
Keynote II (12:00-1:00)
• Valentin Inzko (High Representative, Bosnia and Herzegovina) [The text of High Representative Inzko’s remarks can be found here].
Panel IV – Memorialization (1:30-3:00)
• Tomislav Pletenac (University of Zagreb), “25 years of Bosnian political unconscious: Dayton as signifier of repression”
• Adna Karamehić-Oates (Director of the Center for Bosnian Studies at Fontbonne University), “Preserving old memories in a new life: Bosnian diaspora in St. Louis”
• David Pettigrew (Southern Connecticut State University), “The tragic legacy of the Dayton Accords: 1995-2020”
Moderated By Jasmina Besirevic Regan (Associate Dean, Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences)
Hosted by the Genocide Studies Program at Yale University, the Southern Connecticut State University Office of Academic Affairs and the Southern Connecticut State University Judaic Studies Program