When structural factors that cause interethnic violence work in favour of peace: The story of Baljvine, a warless Bosnian-Herzegovinian peace mosaic

Abstract

In this paper, we analyse the dynamics of interethnic relations in Baljvine, a village in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH), where local Bosniaks and Serbs did not resort to interethnic violence that otherwise marked most of BiH during the last war. Drawing on structural factors that shed light on the dynamics of relations in post-conflict societies where interethnic violence occurred, the aim is to explain why and how bloodshed was prevented in Baljvine during the last war. To achieve this, we employ a multi-method research approach, combining qualitative observation with participation and interviews with the villagers. The results show that intersubjective motivations and a set of smaller coincidences in Baljvine affected structural factors and resulted in avoidance of interethnic violence. This enabled us to coin the concept of “peace mosaic” to demonstrate how several smaller pieces have to align in a community to allow it to remain peaceful. The key contribution is in advancing the argument that the structural factors that explain interethnic violence can also work in favour of peace.

Introduction

The main goal of this article is to examine structural factors (e.g., socio-economic, spatial-strategic, historical, etc.) that contribute to interethnic violence, but with a specific focus on nonviolent settings. It proposes that these same factors, while typically associated with promoting violence, can also have an impact in non-war communities, albeit in an inverse manner. In other words, the article attempts to highlight how these structural factors, if they align, can also serve as key factors in preventing conflict by favouring peace. In doing so, the article moves away from the idea of not studying peace as the inverse of war/violence because peace is a distinct phenomenon with its own theories and explanatory factors (Diehl 2016). The analysis engages with the conceptual contours of peaceful societies and non-war communities; an important aspect of the contemporary ‘peace industry’ that provides valuable insights on innovative approaches to conflict prevention (e.g. Lund 2002; Ackermann 2003). Essentially, these societies and communities choose not to engage in warfare and refuse to be absorbed by any of the opposing sides by developing imaginative and innovative strategies (Saulich and Werthes 2018; Djordjević and Zupančič 2024). These innovative approaches demonstrate the local potential for peace during the ongoing war(s) amidst the (inter)national policies and interventions.

Such an approach follows the observation made by authors such as Diehl (2016), Stephenson (2017) and Mross et al (2021), who argued that IR scholars – while not abandoning discussions on war and violence¹ – should pay greater attention to peace. To achieve this, our overall conceptual argument is framed around the notion of positive peace – attitudes, institutions and structures that create and sustain peaceful societies (Institute for Economics and Peace 2016: 55; Morrow 2023). In this respect, positive peace, a concept developed by Galtung (1969, 1996), is inherently entrenched in international studies’ research agenda of Peace and Conflict Studies on war and security concerns.

Stemming from this, the article focuses on post-conflict Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH), a country where the instrumentalization of ethnicity (i.e., Bosniak, Bosnian Croat, and Bosnian Serb) not only fuelled the latest Bosnian war (1992–1995) but became a fundamental aspect of the post-war (everyday) reality set in stone with the Dayton Peace Agreement (DPA). Unsurprisingly, the challenge of understanding the nature of antagonisms that persist between the former adversaries lies at the core of scholarship in peacebuilding studies devoted to understanding post-war BiH; be it from the perspective of security (e.g. Becker 2022); justice and reconciliation (e.g. Abazović 2014; Zupančič et al 2021); social and economic well-being (e.g. Maglajic et al 2022) or governance and participation (e.g. Belloni and Ramović 2020). In most cases, the challenge of improving interethnic relations has been a dominant theme across the scholarly discussion (e.g. Brewer 2010).

In the case of BiH, most of the above-outlined research streams were focused either on the institutional (macro) or (intra-)societal (micro) level, assessing the (antagonist) interethnic relations on: (i) state level (e.g. Basta 2016); (ii) (inter-)entity level (e.g. Torsti 2009); (iii) municipal level (e.g. Palmberger 2016). In an attempt to understand the underlying causes of how for example, institutional discourses in post-war BiH (state level), the socially constructed spaces such as Republika Srpska² (entity level) or ‘divided cities’ such as Mostar (municipal level) inform the antagonisms that underpin interethnic relations, scholars have categorized their findings around the factors that we label in this paper as structural: i) political-institutional (e.g. Banović et al 2021); ii) socio-economic (e.g., Šiljak and Nielsen 2022; Jelinčić and Knezović 2021); iii) spatial-strategic (e.g. Björkdahl 2018; Brennan and Marijan 2023); iv) historical (Lovrenović 2016); v) cultural (Walasek 2019); while the discourse (Kočan and Zupančič 2023) functioned as a means to interpret these factors, shedding light on their implications for both (inter)personal and (inter)group relations.

In most cases, the outlined structural factors have been scrutinized within the context of personal experience or exposure to violent conflict (notable exceptions are Armakolas’ (2011)³ and Moore’s (2013)⁴ articles on Tuzla City, Brčko and Mostar). This means that the starting point in analysing how and why antagonistic interethnic relations in BiH are sustained and/or instrumentalized on the societal and institutional levels is postulated on the assumption that most individuals and places in BiH have directly or indirectly experienced destruction, pain and trauma during the last war. Consequently, these factors are employed not only as a conceptual framework to explain the outbreak of violent conflict but also to understand its ongoing nature; be it the nature of interethnic relations in general (e.g. Sokolić 2022) or the nature of interethnic relations in specific places, such as the divided city of Mostar (e.g. Carabelli et al 2019).

But what happens with the explanatory potential of these structural factors supposedly contributing to interethnic violence in many places across BiH when they are scrutinized from the perspective of the village that went through the war without large-scale violence? More importantly, can they help to understand how one place and individuals living in it managed to avoid large-scale interethnic violence that otherwise marked most of the country in which this community is located? To answer these questions, this paper focuses on the case of Baljvine, a small ethnically mixed village – for decades inhabited by Bosniaks and Bosnian Serbs – near the town of Mrkonjić Grad in Republika Srpska, which managed to remain a “village of peace” during the last war.⁵ The paper draws on observational research in this village and applies a multi-method research design, combining interviews and participant observation to understand Baljvine’s unique “warless” state through the lens of structural factors previously discussed.

The article offers two important contributions. First, it advances the research agenda on post-conflict societies by (re)thinking the structural factors not only as elements that sustain or instrumentalise antagonistic interethnic relations, as is the case in many conflict and post-conflict communities (and well-elaborated in the current scholarship), but also as a mechanism that can prevent violence. This re-evaluation is achieved by contextualizing structural factors within the literature on peaceful societies and non-war communities that inherently pertain to the research agenda on positive peace. Secondly, the article advances the claim that for peaceful coexistence to occur during wartime, smaller stones have to align; particularly that the interaction between structural factors resulted in them becoming conducive to the drift towards preserving peace. This is achieved by engaging with the endogenous and exogenous components of the scrutinized structural factors, conceptualizing them as part of a ‘peace mosaic’.

The paper is organized as follows: After the introduction, the second section provides relevant background information on Baljvine, focusing on the dynamics of interethnic relations in the village before, during and after the Bosnian war. The third section outlines the structural factors epitomizing post-conflict societies that inform the nature of (antagonistic) interethnic relations by introducing the conceptual contours of ‘non-war communities’ and peaceful societies. The fourth section details the methodology for data collection and analysis. The fifth section presents the results of the analysis, while the sixth concludes the paper and suggests some avenues for further research.

“Amidst general enmity, amity prevailed”: Historical contextualization of interethnic dynamics in Baljvine

Located 15 kilometres from Mrkonjić Grad in Republika Srpska, there is a small village called Baljvine. Even though Baljvine – consisting of Lower (Donje Baljvine, populated by Bosniaks) and Upper Baljvine (Gornje Baljvine, populated by Bosnian Serbs) – is better known for its physical landmarks (i.e., tombstones),⁶ there has been a growing interest in its social environment. From 2010 onwards, when the Institute for War & Peace Reporting (IWPR) published a report on “the village where hate never triumphed” (Arnautović 2010), Baljvine sporadically received media attention (e.g. Balkan Insight 2015; Vujinović 2022). All of these articles focused on the “unusual peace” for the Bosnian context, specifically the (assumed) amity between Bosniak and Bosnian Serb villagers during the Bosnian war, that in turn contributed to the absence of large-scale violence in the village, as well as good interethnic relations after the war. These short journalistic pieces, however, did not extensively analyse the historical, geopolitical, cultural, economic and other contours of Baljvine that could shed light on how this amity among villagers was preserved and/or how it was established in the first place.

When discussing the historical trajectories of Baljvine, it is crucial to note the scarcity of sources that mention the village. Specifically, little is known about Baljvine from the perspective of ground-level research methods, such as the microhistorical approach, which is gaining ground in the studies of BiH (Bergholz 2019). Acknowledging Bergholz’s (2019: 955) criticism of the current political science literature on restraint, where the microhistorical approach is “deployed merely to illustrate what is usually the central analytical focus”, our contextualization involved: (i) contacting local historians and archivists to obtain the data;⁷ (ii) interviewing the inhabitants of Baljvine⁸, (iii) interviewing the officers of Army of Republika Srpska (ARS) and the police who were deployed to Baljvine during the last war.⁹ The historical contextualisation that highlights the dynamics of interethnic relations in the village before, during and after the Bosnian war starts during the Second World War (WWII). According to Samardžija (1983), Petrić (1985) and Đondović (1989), Baljvine served as a stop on the supply line for Yugoslav Partisan units operating in Central Bosnia. The route passed through the Vrhovine highlands from Prnjavor via Čečava, Klupe, Maslovare and Skender Vakuf¹⁰ to Baljvine and from there onwards to the entire Bosanska Krajina region. Samardžija (1983) showed that the route was especially useful for units of the 11^th Krajina Division of the Partisans, who used it as a logistics stop.

While the role of the Baljvine as a stop for recovery and consolidation of Tito’s Partisan troops does not offer significant insights, conversations with the (older) inhabitants of Baljvine illuminated the metanarrative that “the Bosniaks/Muslims protected the Bosnian Serbs against the Ustashas¹¹” (A1 2022). To contextualise this, literature that discusses the broader dynamics in the Bosanska Krajina region needs to be examined. When discussing the legacy of a shared (Partisan) resistance, Hoare (2002, 2006: 239–289) highlighted certain specific characteristics of the Bosanska Krajina region (western Bosnia) compared to eastern Bosnia. Hoare (2006) showed that Bosanska Krajina became not just the heartland of the Bosnian Partisan movement, but the centre of activities of the Yugoslav Partisans as a whole. The metanarrative outlined above is thus framed not only as the logic of the “Bosniaks/Muslims (allegedly) defending Bosnian Serbs against the Ustashas”, but also within the borader narrative of collective resistance (Us – Partisans) against the Other (Ustashas – occupiers).

This metanarrative is not only crucial for understanding of interethnic dynamics in Baljvine as part of the broader Bosanska Krajina region during WWII, but also in the recent Bosnian war (1992–1995). This is because the metanarrative referred to above consists of two interrelated framings; while the first one is about “Bosniaks protecting Bosnian Serbs against the Ustashas”, the second one is about “Bosnian Serbs protecting Bosniaks against ARS during the last Bosnian war”, highlighting that the metanarrative is postulated on the interethnic reciprocity and/or solidarity (e.g. A1 2022; B1 2022). Both the inhabitants of Baljvine and media reports corroborate the absence of armed violence in the village,¹² as well as the fact that the only mosque not demolished during the latest Bosnian war on the territory of Republika Srpska was the one in Baljvine (e.g. A1 2022; B1 2022). Both the inhabitants of Baljvine (A1 2022; B1 2022; A3 2022) and the ARS officers (E1 2023) recounted that at the beginning of the Bosnian war, the ARS commanding officer in the area (otherwise located in Mrkonjić Grad), the local elders from both parts of Baljvine (Bosniak and Bosnian Serb) and the local Muslim cleric held a meeting in the (elementary) village school in June 1992,¹³ where they outlined plans for maintaining everyday life in Baljvine amidst the ongoing war. The Bosniaks were disarmed by ARS without any resistance at the beginning of June 1992 (A3 2022), those wanting to leave Baljvine could do so, and arrangements were made for the distribution of basic necessities. In this respect, the villagers had the local pharmacy and a car, with local officers providing assistance if they needed anything outside the village. As emphasized by one of the inhabitants (B3 2022), the ARS officers even drove the Bosniak women in labour to the hospital. Reflecting upon the dynamics in Baljvine from June 1991 onwards vis-à-vis the broader (spatial-strategic) picture reveals a stark contrast. Villages only a few kilometres away from Baljvine (e.g. Liskovica and Vlasinje) experienced significant interethnic violence (‘ethnic cleansing’), which was used and legitimized in the name of military goals (e.g. Kalyvas 2006). In this respect, Baljvine was – as interviews with ARS officers (E1 2023; E2 2023) highlighted – somewhat isolated from the main strategically important communication line along the Vrbas river (the main road Banjaluka–Jajce).

The dynamic of everyday ‘war life’ in the village, which is situated far enough not to be directly threatened by an imminent occupation of Bosnian armed forces, was significantly disrupted in October 1995, just before the end of the Bosnian war, when the ARS started losing territory and word spread that Operation Southern Move¹⁴ was nearing the village (A1 2022). As argued by the eldest interlocutor, “the Bosnian Serbs started to leave Baljvine two days before the Bosniaks, who initially believed they would be spared from harm, but then heard that some other Serbian paramilitary fractions¹⁵ were coming to the village” (A1 2022). This prompted everyone to leave Baljvine and it wasn’t until after 1996/1997 that they started to come back, as stated by one of the villagers (A5 2022). When they came back – as he recalled (ibid.) – “most of the houses were looted”. The consensus among the villagers (A1 2022; B1 2022; A5 2022) was that the looting was carried out by members of the Croatian Defence Council (Hrvatsko vijeće odbrane – HVO) that, together with the Croatian Army, executed the Operation Southern Move. Again, it is worth noting the preservation of the Us (Bosniaks and Bosnian Serbs) – Other (Bosnian Croats) schemata by consolidating the narrative on the “long tradition of interethnic coexistence” despite a lack of concrete proof¹⁶ of who was behind the looting (A1 2022; B1 2022; E1 2023).

Before moving on to the next section, it is crucial to highlight an essential element that informs the interethnic dynamics in the village vis-à-vis coexistence and/or (alleged) amity. While relations between Bosniak and Bosnian Serb villagers may not be antagonistic, certain boundaries are never crossed – one of them being interethnic marriages. While it was not taboo for a Bosniak to marry a Bosnian Serb or vice-versa – if one of the partners was from elsewhere –, this was unheard of between a Bosniak from Lower and a Bosnian Serb from Upper Baljvine. When questioned about the reasoning, the inhabitants argued that “you don’t marry your relative”, suggesting that one of the potential reasons for non-antagonistic interethnic relations among them might also lie in not putting ‘individual desires/motivations’ before communal ‘norms’ (see the section on cultural factors). This underscores the idea that Baljvine was – and remains – a village inhabited by people with clear ethnic identities. This indicates that Baljvine does not fit within the ‘ethnicization process’ (Dragojević 2019) observed in several parts of the former Yugoslavia right before the start of the war(s) and after it/them (e.g. Golubović 2019).

Non-war communities and/or peaceful societies through the lens of structural factors: Towards a conceptual framework

To understand the origins of interethnic violence and why interethnic relations remain antagonistic years after the wars end, examination of the factors that epitomize such relations (e.g. Mac Ginty 2014) is required. In this respect, these structuring patterns – due to their focus on the dynamics and quality of interethnic relations – consist of the: i) politico-institutional factor (e.g. Banović et al 2021; Zupančič 2019); ii) socio-economic factor (e.g. Šiljak and Nielsen 2022); iii) spatial-strategic factor (e.g. Björkdahl 2018); iv) historical factor (Lovrenović 2016); v) cultural factor (Walasek 2019). The politico-institutional factor is invested in explaining how the development of vested interests within (political) institutions either fosters or hinders the possibility of interethnic coexistence; while the question of trust tends to reflect the broader legitimacy of these institutions, as they (could) become a trust-building mechanism among adversaries. Here, the politico-institutional factor is not only limited to political institutions (i.e., parliament, government) but also includes the institutions in the security sector (i.e., police and the military) (e.g. Arriola and Dow 2021).

The socio-economic factor is focused on (social) exclusion, economic opportunities and poverty, particularly from the perspective of how these elements either foster or prevent interethnic violence. In this respect, economic development and privatisation (incentives) (e.g. Peterson 2014) fuel nationalistic strategies and exacerbate divisions when they fail to benefit the most disaffected groups. The spatial-strategic factor is premised on how individual and societal practices on one hand and the politico-institutional practices on the other enable the production of space. In this respect, Björkdahl (2018) shows how spatialization influences interethnic relations when politico-institutional practices overpower (interethnic) societal ones and become the predominant frame of ‘space-making’. This is possible due to the strategic (military-wise) operations – driven by the dominant politico-institutional practices – disrupting the existing societal practices (i.e., interethnic coexistence) and imposing new ones (i.e., identity building via Othering in a segregated area) (Murtagh 2017).

Lastly, the historical factor explains how historical memory and myths impede cooperation among hostile groups (e.g. Oberschall 2013). In this respect, the historical context of relations between hostile groups is at the forefront shaping historical memories and, in turn, fostering so-called ‘Othering’. However, the perpetuation of historical memories can be downplayed in smaller communities, where personal networks are strong (Dunbar and Sosis 2018). This factor can be operationalized within the final factor under examination, namely the cultural dimension. This factor can be understood within the framework of established (social) practices among hostile groups (Varshney 2002), including the role of interethnic friendships (Žeželj et al 2017) and marriages (Demarest and Haer 2021) in societies where interethnic relations are marked by antagonisms. Across all the factors examined, the role of the discourse is of vital importance. Specific discourse on factors (e.g. economic opportunities of the Others) generates specific meanings that, in turn, affect both (inter)personal and (inter)group relations (Katunarić 2010); in this case, it tends to instrumentalize the context in which interethnic violence (can) unfold.

Contrary to the structural factors that are most frequently employed to understand the origins of interethnic violence, there exists an alternative reading of the same structural factors from the opposite perspective: the absence of interethnic violence. In an attempt to understand why some communities do not participate in violent conflicts that surround them and refuse to be captivated by one or other of the opposing parties (Saulich and Werthes 2018), scholars have structured their results around three conceptual frameworks: i) peaceful societies (e.g. Fabbro 1978; Kemp and Fry 2004); ii) zones of peace (e.g. Hancock and Mitchell 2007; Mouly et al 2015); iii) non-war communities (Anderson and Wallace 2013). We will focus only on conceptual contours of peaceful societies and non-war communities, as the case of Baljvine falls somewhere between these categories: while ‘peacefulness’ among the villagers was not established in response to violent conflict because of a history of being oriented towards peace (Saulich and Werthes 2018: 4), their community is still considered as a local community that successfully avoided armed conflict amidst a broader war context.

In this respect, we operationalize the concepts of peaceful societies and non-war communities from the perspective of structural factors to establish a coherent analytical framework. Beginning with peaceful societies – introduced by David Fabbro (1978) –, it is defined as a society that has oriented its culture and cultural development towards peacefulness. In his seminal work based on several cases of smaller communities,¹⁷ Fabbro (1978: 80) established criteria on which peaceful societies are formed: i) they do not engage in violence against other groups (cultural factor); ii) they have no civil wars or internal collective violence (cultural and historical factor); iii) they do not maintain a standing military-police organisation (politico-institutional factor); iv) they experience little or no interpersonal lethal violence (cultural and historical factor); v) they lack certain forms of structural violence (politico-institutional factor). Furthermore, the author observed a common pattern among the scrutinized peaceful societies; they are typically small, face-to-face communities (cultural factor) based on an egalitarian social structure (socio-economic factor), meaning that their economy operates on generalised reciprocity, and they lack formal patterns of ranking and stratification (politico-institutional factor) (Fabbro 1978: 80–1). Fabbro’s work was later revisited by Kemp and Fry (2004: 185–197), who further engaged with the spatial-strategic factor, as they highlighted that societies can alter as a result of social decisions – either by promoting peace or violence.

Contrary to the inherently neutral or pacifist orientation – as in the case of peaceful societies –, non-war communities tend to avoid large-scale violence through “strong local ownership and agency” (Saulich and Werthes 2018: 7). The concept of non-war communities, coined by Anderson and Wallace (2013: 10–1), tends to reflect upon local communities that have successfully avoided conflict by “setting out their terms for non-engagement and managing to maintain them”. In this respect, the authors contributing to the non-war communities framework particularly highlight the politico-institutional, cultural, spatial-strategic and historical factors. When discussing the politico-institutional vis-à-vis the cultural factor, Anderson and Wallace argue (2013: 95) that communities adopt a collective non-war identity not only to distance themselves from the warring parties but to foster internal cohesion. By doing this, they (re)establish “ (local) governance structures and internal order” (Saulich and Werthes 2018: 9-10) that allow the maintenance of services such as healthcare and education. Here, it can be observed how the contours of non-war communities conceptually align with the notion of positive peace, particularly in relation how attitudes and structures create and sustain peace.

This goes hand in hand with the cultural, spatial-strategic and historical factors. Anderson and Wallace (2013: 95) show how adopting a neutral stance towards divisive ideologies is possible because of the jointly determined (communal) strategies rooted in shared local values, perceptions, experiences and traditions. History or the historical context functions as a strategic enabler for ‘opting out of war’ (ibid.), stemming from collective decision-making processes in which communities jointly determine their strategies. Such collaborative decision-making process is both internally and externally enforced by local leaders; while internal enforcement is possible due to their embeddedness of action(s) in the community’s culture, history and tradition, external enforcement stems from their legitimacy vis-à-vis armed groups as ‘non-war leaders’ (Saulich and Werthes 2018). In this respect, the discourse as an epitomizing factor is postulated around shared local values, perceptions, experiences, traditions and history as strategic connectors, which in turn offers an (experiential) frame that prevents interethnic violence. Finally, research on the spatial-strategic factor in peaceful communities is crucial. Authors such as Rojas (2007), Mitchell and Rojas (2012) and Idler et al (2015) showed how peaceful communities can thrive if they are not considered strategic or how they can remain under threat if they occupy a strategic location or possess valuable resources (Table 1).

Table 1 Conceptualization of nonwar communities and peaceful societies vis-à-vis the structural factors

Note on data collection and analysis

The study took place over three years in the village of Baljvine. The extended duration of the research process was crucial to observe and understand the dynamics between the villagers across various occasions. Therefore, the data was collected at three points in time: in October 2021, April 2022 and February 2023 and in two phases. In the first phase, participant observation and informal discussions took place, followed by in-depth semi-structured explanatory interviews in the second phase. During the research visits, a total of 12 interviews were conducted with villagers, informal leaders and representatives of wartime institutions (i.e. the Republika Srpska police and the military). Out of ethical responsibility and in compliance with research standards, the role of the researchers was openly communicated and the villagers as the studied group were aware that they were being studied and informed of the main research objectives.

Initially, contact was established with certain key individuals (informal leaders) in the village and via e-mails and phone calls, which greatly facilitated access. The participant observation method enabled researchers to observe non-verbal and emotional expressions during discussions about wartime-related topics. This approach also allowed the observation of interactions between the villagers, including how they recalled war events during everyday conversations. By participating and observing the community, the researchers learnt how the villagers communicate with each other and how they accept the possibly different interpretations of wartime events and roles. In this way, this method offered an insight into inter-ethnic and interpersonal dynamics both during the war and in the present day. Furthermore, it provided an insight into the overall setting of the village of Baljvine (e.g. economic, social and demographic structure, prosperity), which would have been impossible to understand through an interview in a neutral setting.

In addition, semi-structured explanatory interviews were conducted based on the theoretical assumptions and informed by the observation results. The data collected were merged during the process of analysis and interpretation. At the interpretation level, they were integrated through the narratives (i.e. villagers' perceptions), as we interpreted the data thematically, i.e. covering the politico-institutional, socio-economic, spatial-strategic, historical and cultural factors. Throughout the process, the researchers were aware that openly discussing research objectives could lead to the members of the observed controlling the level of information disclosure. Therefore, the researchers deemed building trust within the community, especially through key informal leaders the research group has been meeting for a longer period, as a crucial task in the early phases of research as well as throughout the process.

Analysis and discussion

Outsiders and consolidation of internal order

Discussions with local interlocutors revealed remarkable complexities when considering the politico-institutional factor. A particularly nuanced discussion in this regard was held with the two villagers (A1 2022; A2 2022), who were part of the local (communal-led) structures in the village during the War. They explained that, approximately three months after the start of the War, Bosniak and Serb villagers established an ethnically mixed communal patrol (village guards) that was armed,¹⁸ while the Bosniaks additionally established a committee comprised of three members. The committee was in place after June 1992, when ARS came into the village, and primarily focused on maintaining everyday talks with both ARS officers and the local elder from the Upper Baljvine (A1 2022). According to the interviewees (A1 2022; A3 2022; B2 2022; B3 2022), the committee held various meetings at the primary school where the committee received assurances from the ARS commander “that nobody will be harmed, not even in the slightest”.”. This was then further contextualized during our interview with an ARS officer who was present in Baljvine at that time. He (E2 2023) emphasized that when ARS came to the village, they first spoke to the villagers in both Lower and Upper Baljvine and got the impression that there were no significant hostilities between them.

However, the ARS officers noticed some fear among the villagers, which was – as emphasized by our interviewee (E2 2023) – fuelled by “outsiders to be able to sell the arms”. In this respect, the officer (E2 2023) further explained this sense of fear:

“When we first came to Baljvine, we saw the blockades, one before entering the village and one between the Lower and Upper Baljvine, near the primary school. I came alone with the chief of police of Mrkonjić Grad. We left our arms before the blockades and started to talk with both Bosniaks and Serbs, who were frightened. Bosniaks started to explain to us that there were Chetniks in the village that are trying to kill them, and the Serbs argued that there were Mujahideens who wanted to cut down their heads. In an attempt to calm both communities in Baljvine, I said that I would come to the village every day in the afternoon to check if they had seen Chetniks or Mujahideens. After a few days or so, both Bosniaks and Serbs concluded that there were no Chetniks or Mujahideens either in or surrounding the village”.

While the example above illustrates the spatial-strategic factor, which will be analysed in the next sections, it shows how the sense of internal order still needed to be (re-)consolidated by an outsider, in this case an individual belonging to the military-police organization. However, this does not mean that the villagers’ local agency was somehow disturbed, as two of our interviewees pointed out (A4 2022; A5 2022). They emphasized that both the Bosniaks and Serbs” played their part in these horrible times”, and that they have “always perceived their role during that times as something that was imposed on them by the ARS”. One interlocutor explained (A5 2022):

“The Bosniaks from Lower Baljvine had to do forced labour, which was horrible, and Serbs from the Upper Baljvine had to join the ARS, but they never participated in any coercion of Bosniaks when forcing them to do the labour. We both perceived our role as something imposed on us by others, so there was never any tension between us.”

Finally, an important factor that solidified the internal order, local agency and joint strategies in the village was the trust among the villagers. Two of the villagers that participated in the meetings in the primary school said that “there was complete trust by the local elders on both sides, including in the assurances by the ARS commanding officer” (A1 2022; C1 2023). One elaborated further that this trust was based on the words of the local elders from both sides, as the Bosniak elder metaphorically said to the Serb: “You take care of your dogs, and I will take care of mine” (A1 2022). The allegorical use of ‘dogs’, of course, refers to potential perpetrators that were controlled primarily by their ethnic kin and would also face repercussions from them if they broke the rules. This highlights that the village community somehow developed a non-war leadership striving to maintain internal order in the village (positive peace). It also demonstrates that the presence of vested interethnic interest and local power-sharing mechanisms (elements explaining interethnic violence) served as cornerstones for the village to uphold its peaceful and/or non-war nature.

Absence of a water supply system as an enabler of generalized reciprocity

Before delving into the issues of economic opportunities, poverty and social exclusion vis-à-vis generalized reciprocity, it is essential to outline some general observations from the fieldwork. To this day, the majority of the villagers make a living from farming, even though there are also a small-scale cheese production facility and a small shop in the village. Additionally, some residents reported they have jobs in the towns nearby. While the lack of economic activity beyond farming is by no means surprising for a small village, it is worth noting that the local grocery store is the focal point of the village, particularly for men, who can be seen in front of the shop at almost every time of the day. The local shop owner, who was our most important interlocutor and opened almost every door in the village, at one point told a very telling joke: “During the war, only me and the local imam were employed, and the others were unemployed; today, only me and the local imam are unemployed, while everyone else is employed” (B1 2022). Besides highlighting the significance of both the local shop owner and the local imam during the war, he also underscored that the villagers had to rely on each other¹⁹ during that time, and that without developing a generalized reciprocity, their means for survival were scarce indeed.

This was confirmed by most interviewees, who cited the example of absence of a water supply system to illustrate their communal reciprocity and solidarity (B2 2022; E1 2023). The oldest interviewee went even further back in history and said that “they have always relied on each other to bring water to the village for those that could fetch it themselves, no matter if they were a Bosniak or Serb” (A1 2022). During the war, faced with resource shortages, they also developed a joint strategy for supplying the village and ensuring that the basic needs of the villagers were met (A2 2022). As argued by one interviewee (A1 2022) – and confirmed by the interviewed officer – a car was stationed in front of the primary school to be used in case of emergencies. Furthermore, ARS officers in the village intervened when needed, particularly if any of the villagers required a hospital visit (A1 2022). Additionally, as argued by two of our Bosniak interviewees (A2 2022; A4 2022), the officers also provided basic goods, such as flour, bread and oil, when needed – including for Bosniaks, which was atypical for BiH. The results imply that the villagers already had a longstanding tradition of egalitarian social structures (i.e., water supply system), which further solidified during the war, as they continued to help each other. It is also worth pointing out that they were occasionally assisted by ‘outsiders’ (i.e., ARS officers), meaning that the opportunity for maintaining generalized reciprocity was in part also created by ARS officers.

Isolation as a deterrent against military or police intervention

To understand the dynamics linked to the spatial-strategic factor, one has to start with the interviews with the ARS officer and the chief of police of Mrkonjić Grad (E2 2023; E3 2023). When discussing broader strategic and spatial dimensions during the war, they said: “when Operation Vrbas in 1992 was finished, we only had to make sure to maintain the existing situation”. This indicates that Baljvine is situated far enough from the strategically important line along the Vrbas River (the Banjaluka–Jajce road) to not be under threat of an imminent attack from Bosnian or other armed forces. Here, it might be worth noting the broader context of war, which often served as a catalyst of interethnic violence even in areas perceived strategically unimportant, as was the case in many places throughout BiH. To understand this strategic (ir)relevance of Baljvine within the broader dynamics of interethnic violence during the war, it is necessary to examine intersubjective motivations of both ARS officers and the chief of police of Mrkonjić Grad during the war. The ARS officer, who was mobilized as a part of reserve forces, emphasized on many occasions during the interview that he was away from home for a very long time and really missed his daughter, and “as a mathematics teacher, [he] really tried to think logically amidst the general chaos” (E2 2023). Because Baljvine held little strategic importance military wise, the ARS officers had relatively high agency on the ground. This was evident throughout the interview, as the officer showed many times how he tended to downplay the fear and show both Bosniaks and Serbs that they were not under any threat (see the section on politico-institutional factor). Such conduct was also corroborated by one of the villagers, who said that “the ARS officers never harmed any of the villagers, as they then went behind the village only to hold the line” (A1 2022). However, it should come as no surprise the fear of war was present all the time, regardless of the soldiers’ non-threatening behaviour.

This was further corroborated during our e-mail conversation with the local ARS commander in Mrkonjić Grad, who first agreed to an in-person interview, but later opted to respond questions via e-mail. He emphasized that during meetings held at the primary school (with the Committee and the Serb elder from Upper Baljvine), he repeatedly conveyed “that the Bosniak villagers had several options, they could stay in Baljvine or go through the civilian ‘escape corridor’ leading to territory held by the Army of BiH” (E1 2023). This was echoed by the ARS officer, who said that “some of them fled that way, but the majority of people, including Bosniaks, stayed in the village until October 1995, when the Operation Southern Move was nearing the village” (E2 2023). Two months before the signing of the DPA, the villagers from both the Lower and Upper Baljvine fled and then returned to their village only in 1996/1997. Thus, analysis of the spatial-strategic factor underscores the prevailing perception of Baljvine as lacking strategic importance, allowing pre-war interethnic dynamics to be preserved. Despite sporadic tensions between the villagers (i.e., barricades between Lower and Upper Baljvine, the Mujahideens’ and Chetniks’ in the village during the War, and gunfire from neighbouring villages), ARS officers somehow managed to take advantage of relatively strong interethnic coexistence, which helped prevent potential violence between the villagers. Although the village had non-war leaders who enjoyed legitimacy vis-à-vis the ARS, they still relied on ARS support to further consolidate the relations and make it possible for Baljvine to stay a non-war community/peaceful society. In this respect, it is interesting to observe how the attitudes of the outsiders associated with formal institutions had to uphold the existing structures that sustained peaceful coexistence within the village.

History as a strategic connector for the villagers

The observations from the field and interviews with the villagers demonstrate that the historical factor served as a cornerstone on which Baljvine was built as a community during the war. Both Bosniak and Serb interviewees asserted on many occasions that “Bosniaks protected Serbs from Ustashas during WWII, while Serbs protected Bosniaks from ARS during the last War” (A1 2022; B1 2022). Surprisingly enough, interviews with the ARS officer and the local chief of police corroborated this shared narrative among the villagers, as they both indicated that they had heard about this even before entering the village. However, to further explore this shared narrative, we discussed the dynamics during WWII with two older villagers. While the eldest (A1 2022) could not recall any potentially disruptive incidents, the other said that “during WWII, there were victims in Baljvine, but only in the Upper Baljvine, where Serbs live” (A3 2022). When asked if the victims were killed by the Bosniaks from Lower Baljvine, he said that “in Upper Baljvine, the Serbs were killing each other, as some of them were committed to the Partisan movement while the others identified themselves with the Chetnik movement”. As this could not be confirmed by any primary or secondary source, this account should be treated with due caution.

Building on these findings, the outcomes regarding the historical factor point out the conceptual contours of peaceful societies and non-war communities. History – or rather the historical trajectories as seen by the villagers it – functioned as a strategic connector for preserving (relatively) solid interethnic relations. In this respect, there is a consensus among the villagers that they have – during WWII and the Bosnian war – experienced no interethnic violence, which in turn managed to prevent the instrumentalization of myths and historical memories that would allow the process of ‘Othering’. Such results imply that the historical factor could be perceived as one of the factors with an important role in maintaining the internal order and establishing joint communal strategies at the interethnic level in Baljvine during the Bosnian war.

‘You cannot marry your family’

The delineations epitomizing the cultural factor proved somehow the most puzzling during our fieldwork. While we frequently heard about positive practices among Bosniaks and Serbs, and how they even nowadays remain “good neighbours and friends”, a closer examination revealed how gendered these practices are. For example, the only site where you could observe any kind of interethnic dynamics was the local shop, where men drink alcohol and discuss daily life. The gendered dimension was further evident in the e-mail conversation with one of the interviewees who did not return to Baljvine after the war. He argued (C1 2023) that “the community relies on the tradition of having at least one ‘dost’,’²⁰ to whom one would first pay a visit when returning from Mrkonjić Grad back to the village”. In this respect,” when returning from the city, a Bosniak would first come to a Serb, or vice versa to rest, drink or eat something and only later proceed to his home” (ibid.). There is another example that shows the limitations of the tradition of positive practices among the villagers. Interethnic marriages have long been considered taboo (A1 2022; B2 2022; C1 2023), indicating that the interethnic boundary continues to persist despite shared local values, perceptions and experiences.

While interviewees emphasized on many occasions that they are not only neighbours but also friends, they highlighted that there were no instances of interethnic marriages in the village. When further probed about interethnic marriages, and particularly when asked what would happen if a Bosniak and a Serb from Upper and Lower Baljvine fell in love, the consensus was that “some things are more important than love”, pointing to the idea of how not having a practice of interethnic marriage somehow further consolidated their friendship. One of the interviewees (A4 2022) said that “in marriage, there are times where things can become more challenging, and in challenging times, ethnicity may become an obstacle, as marriage affects at least two families if not more”. When we asked the interviewees about examples where “nothing was more important than love”, one of them shared the story of Gavro and Elma (A1 2022):

“There was a case in a village. A young Serb named Gavro who returned to the village after serving as a conscript in the Yugoslav Army. He fell in love with Elma, a Bosniak from Lower Baljvine, and started to talk to her in that manner. Elma went straight to her father and then her father went to Gavro’s father. In the end, Gavro’s father kicked him out of the house and expelled him from the village”.

When asked to interpret the story, he said that “this example confirms the mutual respect that the villagers have always held for each other and consolidates the idea that you cannot marry your family” (A1 2022). While the results in other analysed categories demonstrate that the existence of positive practices among Bosniaks and Serbs both before and during the war existed and that the communal everyday is premised on shared local values, perceptions and experiences, the cultural factor to some degree (i.e., interethnic marriages, ‘gender’ interactions) implies that these practices are practices of coexistence rather than practices of meaningful contact (Demarest and Haer 2021). Even though the results still align with the idea of Baljvine as a small, face-to-face community where everyone is familiar, thereby maintaining the conceptual contours of a peaceful society and/or non-war community, it still reflects upon something deeper: the idea that a shared internalized communal strategy when it comes to interethnic marriages served as a mechanism for maintaining everyday coexistence among the villagers, and that the prospect of interethnic marriage would have made maintaining this coexistence more difficult.

Conclusion

This article has drawn attention to the dynamics of interethnic relations in Baljvine, a multi-ethnic village in BiH, which managed to avoid large-scale violence during the last war. It achieved this by rethinking the structural factors (i.e., politico-institutional, socio-economic, spatial-strategic, historical and cultural) not only as a framework that sustains and/or instrumentalises antagonistic interethnic relations, but rather as a framework that can prevent bloodshed, as has been the case in this Bosnian village. In other words, the structural factors outlined above – thought to have contributed to interethnic violence in many places across BiH – were applied to the conceptual contours of non-war communities and peaceful societies. This approach enabled us to understand its explanatory potential in a place where interethnic violence did not occur.

The results show that structural factors that tend to explain the origin of interethnic violence can also be of use in places such as Baljvine, where such violence did not occur. This is particularly evident when discussing the politico-institutional and spatial-strategic factors, as the results have shown how the outsiders and their agency became a focal point in creating opportunities to preserve Baljvine and its villagers as a peaceful society and/or non-war community. As the results show, they somehow managed to retain the trust of the villagers by promoting peace (social decision). This in turn prevented the opportunity for interethnic violence to occur. In doing so, ARS officers (alongside the chief of police of Mrkonjić Grad) supported the collective non-war identity of the villagers and somehow legitimized the non-war leaders in their pursuit of maintaining everyday coexistence in the village.

However, when examining factors such as socio-economic and historical, the perceptions among the villagers tend to be generally shared. The results highlight the common perception of historical trajectories in Baljvine that function as a strategic connector for solid interethnic relations, but also the idea of a relatively egalitarian social structure, which in turn enabled the potential of generalized reciprocity in the village. In this respect, the results suggest that the combination of historical and socio-economic alongside certain elements of cultural factors played a role in consolidating internal order and facilitated the construction of joint interethnic strategies for maintaining the peace. However, certain peculiarities, which are primarily tied to cultural factors, deserve attention. While the results show that positive practices among Bosniaks and Serbs existed both before and during the War, there are still certain areas that indicate that the communal everyday was not premised on meaningful contact but rather on coexistence. The first was the institution of marriage, as there were no interethnic marriages in the village; and the second he so-called gendered interethnic practices, indicating that positive interactions were – and still are – primarily carried and maintained by men.

To conclude, while the results highlight a generally consolidated and shared (meta)narrative among the villagers regarding the three structural factors discussed, it is crucial not to overlook several smaller pieces that somehow aligned in Baljvine’s peace mosaic. The question of how Baljvine and its residents managed to evade large-scale interethnic violence cannot be fully answered within the proposed conceptual framework. It requires consideration of the importance of individuals holding power in particular situations (e.g. officers of Army of Republika Srpska) and their contextual importance within the broader picture of the war. As interviews with them showed, they did not feel much pressure from above (military-wise) to utilize interethnic violence for achieving strategic goals of Republika Srpska at that time, even though such interethnic violence (during the war) was often favoured or legitimized for achieving the broader (strategic) goals. This is particularly important as the village was somewhat isolated from the main strategic communication line Banja Luka–Jajce, which connects Central and Northern Bosnia, and thus less relevant amidst broader spatial-strategic goals at that time. In other words, Baljvine were – military-wise –distant enough from the frontline to be of little importance, and a few dozen (unarmed) Bosniaks posed no threat to the Army of RS. It is important to note that the (intersubjective) motivation of the Army of Republika Srpska officers was also not to inflict conflict in the village, but to preserve the situation as it was before the start of the war. It is important to note that, as this case seems to illustrate, certain ARS officers – most of them having done their military training during the Yugoslav era marked with the ideology of Brotherhood and Unity – did not succumb to interethnic hatred (perhaps it is worth mentioning here that the leading officer deployed to the village worked as a teacher during peacetime and was mobilised into ARS only during the wartime). This sentiment was echoed by the village residents, who were also keen to maintain pre-war peace.

This, in turn, highlights how the interaction between structural factors resulted in them becoming conducive to the preservation of peace while pinpointing not only endogenous (i.e., history as a connector, egalitarian social structure) and exogenous (i.e., absence of a water supply system, the location of the village) components of structural factors but also intervening factors (i.e., the role of the ARS officer alongside the chief of police of Mrkonjić Grad). This interplay, which when spelt out appropriately constitutes the peace mosaic, nevertheless follows the logic of a ‘randomly oscillating magnetic pendulum’, meaning that we don’t know where and how strong the magnets are, suggesting that it is challenging to determine how the factors interact and which factor might prove decisive for maintaining peace in the village during the Bosnian war. Given this, potential avenues for further research should not only explore further conceptualization of how socio-economic, cultural and historical factors as factors that explain interethnic violence can illuminate the absence of such violence (as seen in Baljvine) but also fortuitous alignment of ‘smaller pieces’, particularly in instances where individuals with their (intersubjective) motivations and in absence of pressures by the elites from above, an element very much present in many other places in BiH, become important agents of peace. This is something that could also be of use for international actors and their initiatives in post-conflict societies, particularly when it comes to strengthening the bottom-up dimension of their peacebuilding programmes. In other words, the novel findings further consolidate the idea of innovative conflict prevention that in turn informs the bottom-up (international) agenda, particularly on the local potentials for peace that challenge ordinary images of war and peace where local actors are understood as recipients of (inter)national policies for peace and not as actors with autonomous potential. To conclude, the interaction between structural factors, as findings suggest, highlights the idea of how ‘smaller pieces’ – alongside some coincidence and luck– form a broader peace mosaic. It is perhaps the latter – namely, the coincidences and serendipitous alignment of factors and events and how they occasionally ‘work’ in favour of peace within the context of predetermined structural factors – that deserve future academic attention (Fig. 1).

Fig. 1

Applying the conceptual framework on the macro and micro context that enabled Baljvine to remain a warless Bosnian-Herzegovinian mosaic of peace. Source: Authors’ own synthesis