BB: The Road to War in the Bosnian Municipality of Kotor Varoš in 1992: A Microhistory

The dissertation explores the local political-military contest for the municipality of Kotor Varoš in north-central Bosnia and Herzegovina that evolved from the fall of communism in 1990 to the spread of war during 1992. It simultaneously works on identifying both the escalatory local elements and ground-level actors that contributed to the spread of the conflict and the mitigatory agents that aimed to contain tensions. Furthermore, the thesis applies micro-level insights to formulate hypotheses regarding the origins of ethno-political conflicts in Bosnia. Amidst the many studies focused on the larger cities, elite actors, political macro developments, and on foreign responses to the Bosnian crisis, this innovative microhistorical study seeks insights “from below” through memory and witnessing accessed through the author’s in-field interviewing in and around Kotor Varoš municipality. This novel socio-historical approach can assist a research field in need of more studies of small-scale contexts and provincial-rural Bosnia.

Øyvind Hvenekilde Seim is a Junior Visiting Fellow in the cluster Inequalities in the context of social transformation processes (focus on Southeast and Central Europe)