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Abstract: This paper argues that women's groups and feminists should be engaged, supported, and integrated into peacebuilding processes to ensure a sustainable and just transition from war to peace. By reflecting on the experiences of Bosnia and Herzegovina and the country's post-conflict reconstruction and recovery processes, which took on a neoliberal character, the article shows how international politics within the framework of peacebuilding and development were exclusionary in their understanding of gendered experiences of war. At the same time, international politics intervened in a postwar conceptualization of gender equality. By analyzing the interventions, the paper argues that the failure to recognize the importance of addressing gendered experiences of war, as well as patriarchal and structural inequalities, immediately within the peace process and as an integral part of postconflict recovery strategies, has impaired the building of a sustainable peace in Bosnia and Herzegovina. We argue that the sustainability and quality of the peace in Bosnia and Herzegovina would have benefited from interventions that engaged, supported, and integrated a grassroots feminist movement. A grassroots feminist movement that puts patriarchal and structural inequalities at the center would have been able to formulate contextualized strategies in response to the challenges that are posed before a country coming out of war.
INTRODUCTION
Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) is approaching the 25th anniversary of the Dayton Peace Agreement (DPA). This passage of time gives us a valuable platform from which we can look back at what has been done with respect to building of peace. It also gives us an opportunity to understand what is still being done with respect to societal transformation.
The DPA succeeded in stopping the war in BiH, but it also codified new political categories. For the purpose of this article, the most relevant are ethnicity and international community. The so-called international community had a major role in negotiating peace.1 This role enabled the international community to establish itself within the DPA as one of the power-holders in the post-war period, able to intervene and make decisions in relation to both civilian and military state matters. However, its poor understanding of the root causes of the war played into the hands of nationalist projects. Consequently, the DPA institutionalized ethnic and territorial divisions, which corresponded to the war-gains...