The Relationship between Peace, State and Democracy: Bosnia and Herzegovina an Deviant Case

The conventional wisdom in political theory for a long time was that the establishment of peace is a prerequisite for state building and that state building is a prerequisite for the development of democracy. This conventional wisdom of the relationship between peace, state and democracy has been disturbed several times in Bosnia and Hercegovina from the first democratic elections in 1990 to the present day. This short overview of political attitudes of the three constitutive ethnic communities – Muslims/Bosniaks, Serbs and Croats – and their elected political representatives shows that there is no consensus on the state and on the political order, but only on the political democracy.