Furthermore, whilst one can debate the role of anthropologists acting on behalf of belligerents during conflicts, I believe a well conducted ethnography offers crucial and more objective perspectives of conflict situations before, during and after the escalation of violence and thus can assist in reconciliation programmes. An anthropological perspective has been applied as I believe it crucial for deconstructing preconceived essentialist and overly theoretical conceptions of identity, group formation and warfare. This study has predominantly relied on ethnographic accounts and case studies conducted in BiH before, during and after the war.
Throughout this essay attention will be paid to the role of Islam in these processes. The final section will demonstrate the role of various foreign actors in rigidifying it, both during and after the conflict, and reveal how ultimately this is both detrimental to long-term peace and contradicts both historical, and frequently, contemporary reality.
I shall argue that a Bosniak Identity was largely embryonic prior to the war and emerged in a more consolidated manner as a result of the conflict. This is followed by a historical examination to determine to what extent the Muslims of Bosnia belonged to a coherent, communal identity prior to the war. This essay will challenge these assumptions and begins by exploring theories pertaining to ethnicity, ethnonationalism and ethnic-conflict, arguing that these terms serve limited practical purpose in attempts to understand the Bosnian conflict. This agreement rigidified notions of three clearly distinct groups living within the boundaries of a single nation and thus assumes that Bosnian Muslims belong to a coherent and unified social group. Following the Dayton Peace Agreement in 1995 that marked the end of open warfare in BiH, the new political structure of the state was designed to accommodate Bosnia’s three major ethnic groups: Bosnian Muslims, Orthodox Bosnian Serbs, and Catholic Bosnian Croats (Reid, 2002).
The war in Bosnia was the most significant war in Europe for decades and the ferocity of violence between the three belligerent groups shocked the world. The outbreak of war in the former Yugoslavia is largely labelled as ethnic, with the major causal factor being that lingering animosity, tied to inherent ethnic differences, eventually resulted in the eruption of mass inter-ethnic violence. The foundation of many modern states has been inherently violent and the emergence of the first independent Bosnian and Herzegovinian ( BiH) state in 1992 is no exception.
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