Bosnia Remade is an authoritative account of ethnic cleansing and its partial undoing in the Bosnian wars from 1990 to the present. The two authors, both political geographers, combine a bird''s-eye view of the entire war from onset to aftermath with a micro-level account of three towns that underwent ethnic cleansing and--later--the return of refugees. Through the lens of critical geopolitics, which highlights the power of both geopolitical discourse and spatial strategies, Toal and Dahlman focus on the two attempts to remake the ethnic structure of Bosnia since 1991. The first attempt was by ascendant ethnonationalist forces that tried to eradicate the mixed ethnic structures of Bosnia''s towns, villages and communities. While these forces destroyed tens of thousands of homes and lives, they failed to destroy Bosnia-Herzegovina as a polity. The second attempt followed the war. The international community, in league with Bosnian officials, tried to undo the demographic consequences of ethnic cleansing. This latter effort has moved in fits and starts, but as the authors show, it has re-made Bosnia, producing a country that has moved beyond the stark segregationist geography created by ethnic cleansing. By showing how ethnic cleansing can be reversed, Toal and Dahlman offer more than just a comprehensive narrative of Europe''s worst political crisis in the past two decades. They also offer lessons for addressing an enduring global problem.
Industry Reviews
"A book a long time in coming and yet absolutely timely...Toal and Dahlman are very effective at weaving together an analysis that takes into account global power relations, local (opstina) political dynamics, nationalist narratives and their everyday circulation, actual practices of ethnic cleansing and its reversal, and the specific experience of place. Methodologically, the book makes use of published and governmental documents, as well as
interviews with both survivors, combatants, and political leaders in the towns of Zvornik, Doboj, and Jajce...extremely effective in its presentation."--Berfrois
"Gerard Toal's and Carl Dahlman's Bosnia Remade: Ethnic Cleansing and its Reversal is the best book yet written on post-Dayton Bosnia."--Marko Hoare, Reader, Kingston University London, and author of The History of Bosnia: From the Middle Ages to the Present Day
"This is the first comprehensive treatment of the Bosnian conflict and post-conflict eras as a continuous tale of those whose lives were destroyed or disrupted. The authors' unique advantages as political geographers are evident in the plethora of valuable insights that add greatly to our understanding of Bosnia's tumultuous last two decades and the international efforts to remake it. Toal and Dahlman employ to great advantage the testimony and judgments of the
International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia in constructing their account of the war and ethnic cleansing. The book is an invaluable addition to the literature on the complex and
contested events of the Bosnian conflict."--Robert Donia, Research Associate, Center for Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies, University of Michigan, and author of Sarajevo: A Biography
"The authors provide a detailed and shrewd analysis of the effects of war on post-Dayton Bosnia. Drawing on extensive English-language literature and interviews with the various local actors, theirs is the most perceptive account of contemporary social and political dilemmas in Bosnia and Herzegovina."--Ivo Banac, Professor Emeritus of History, Yale University
"Gerard Toal and Carl T. Dahlman have done an admirable job of providing background information about the war and its resulting many-layered displacement, as well as discussing the successes and failures of the postwar recovery period. With the benefit of more historical distance than that found in most books on that period, the book offers clarity anew through a dispassionate examination of the behavior and motives of those who destroyed Bosnia. Outside of
polemical works, it is rare and refreshing to find such pointed analysis."--Transitions Online
"Toal and Dahlman do an exceptional job of analyzing the successes and the more
frequent failures of minority returns in Bosnia. This is a data-heavy study, providing more
statistical information concerning minority returns than can easily be found elsewhere.
The authors are innovative, moreover, in their case studies of three strategically critical
towns that were hotly contested and saw waves of ethnic cleansing: Zvornik and Doboj in
the Republika Srpska, and Jajce in the Federation."--Slavic Review
"Bosnia Remade is a remarkable book that will speak to a number of audiences. To those interested in post-Cold War foreign policy the book provides the most sophisticated narration available of the nature of international interventions in Yugoslavia and subsequent state-building initiatives in BiH. To the geographer it illuminates the spatial characteristics of these processes, as the multifaceted nature of the Yugoslav Republic of Bosnia was reduced to a
matrix of ethnic identification by both political leaders and subsequently intervening agencies. To the scholar of critical geopolitics the text provides a powerful reminder of the political and theoretical
utility exploring the spatial characteristics of foreign policy as performances of power with plural outcomes."--Annals of the Association of American Geographers
