Fragmented Democracy in Dayton’s Bosnia Herzegovina : Institutions, Political Parties and the Youth

The Dayton Peace Agreement signed in 1995 structured the state of Bosnia Herzegovina according to the consociational model of democracy. To the present day, however, democracy and its institutions remain weak, and the Bosnian society fractured along ethnonational lines. By trying to understand how threats to existing democratic systems elicit new definitions of democracy, the chapter uses empirical material collected in Sarajevo to show the different conceptions of democracy existent among various social and political actors. The chapter, while shedding light on the complexity of the Bosnian reality, seeks to represent an occasion to deepen the way various groups in society, both those challenging as well as those supporting the existing system, think about the nature of the democratic system and its fundamental characteristics.