Associate Professor
Department of Geography
Miami University
Horsedrawn
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the road between Srebrenica and Potocari, March 2004. (Photo:
C. Dahlman)
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This project is funded by a grant from the University of South Carolina Research and Productive Scholarship Fund from April 2005 to June 2006. The proposed research seeks to explain how the outcomes of forced displacement affect post-war state-building and social reconstruction. The outcomes of displacement are the constrained set of locational, social, and economic options facing displaced persons; whether, for example, a displaced person has the resources and access to return to one’s pre-war home or whether other factors force them to seek permanent resettlement in another town or country (Preston, 1999). The outcomes of displacement also include myriad political factors that constrain and condition the decisions to resettle or return (Goodwin-Gill, 1999; O Tuathail and Dahlman, 2004). State-building refers to the post-war creation of effective state institutions that offer citizens security, representational legitimacy, and economic stability (Ball, 2002; Milliken and Krause, 2002). State-building is also dependent on social reconstruction, which refers to the renewed social practices and relationships that emerge after a war, eg, (re)establishing civil societal linkages that cross socio-political cleavages resulting from the war (Duffield, 2002; Pugh, 2000). Displaced persons (both refugees and the internally-displaced) are key to post-war state-building and social reconstruction as they usually have the most pressing humanitarian needs and face the most difficult long-term socio-political and economic dilemmas (Helton, 2002: 78-119). This is especially so in recent “new wars” in which the targeting and forced migration of the civilian population is an intentional goal of the warring parties (Kaldor, 1999). In the context of post-war Bosnia-Herzegovina (BiH), which this research addresses, state-building has meant overcoming the near-partition of the country by three warring factions during the Bosnian war (1992-1995), which displaced roughly half the population (2.2 million persons) and killed over 200,000. Though the war ended in 1995, the underlying conflict continues into the post-war period, further impeding efforts at stabilization and reconstruction. As a consequence, the international community in BiH has produced only mixed results for its broad post-war intervention, the most expensive in modern history (Dobbins, 2003). For example, although the UNHCR is justly encouraged by the recent milestone of one million returnees, this figure is less than half the total population displaced by the war. Furthermore, this number includes just over 400,000 “minority returnees,” those returning to homes in areas now dominated by a different ethnic group. The hostility against minority returns by local political machines and the lack of economic opportunities for them in their former villages and towns have further produced “failed returns,” persons who returned home but gave up, going back to areas with better social relations and/or economic opportunities. Currently, however, there is only limited evidence of how displacement outcomes impact post-war dynamics relating to state-building and social reconstruction in Bosnia and other comparable situations—a knowledge gap this research addresses.
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The Geopolitics of Terrorism and State-Building in Bosnia-Herzegovina
This project, funded by the USC Walker Institute of International and Area studies, takes a close look at the claim that the Bosnian war was an early frontline for al-Qaeda. In partciular, it attempts to balance the problem of Islamic foreign fighters present in Bosnia during and after the war with the hyperbolic rhetoric of Serb and Croat nationalists who accused Bosnia's Muslims of seeking to establish an Islamic state.
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War memorial to Serb soldiers and orthodox church under reconstruction, Eastern Bosnia, Summer 2002.
(Photo: C. Dahlman)
Re-Making Bosnia: The International Community and the Refugee Return Process in Three Bosnian Municipalities
With Dr. Gerard Toal, Virginia Tech
This NSF-funded project (BCS 0136847) investigates the refugee returnee process developed by the international community to implement Annex 7 of the Dayton Peace Accords, the peace treaty that brought the Bosnian war to an end in 1995. The central research question is: how has the international community sought to reconstitute multi-ethnic Bosnian places and how have local authorities mediated this process? Field-research is grounded in three ethnically cleansed Bosnian localities. In answering the research question, data is collected from three sources: policy decisions, reports, and operational procedures generated by institutional actors involved in implementing Annex 7 of the Dayton Peace Accords; semi-structured interviews with key international, national, and local decision-makers in the returnee policy process; and focus group sessions with returnees in the selected research sites. Multiple methodological strategies will be used to study the data gathered including mapping the geographies of displacement and return, charting the reconstruction and return policy process, discourse analysis of policy-maker and implementation storylines at various scales, and discourse analysis of the perspectives of returnees themselves.
This research investigates a nascent contradiction in the Dayton Peace Accords, which, on the one hand, pledged to reverse ethnic cleansing, but, on the other hand, sanctioned a segregated Bosnia created by ethnic cleansing and ruled by local authorities committed to ethnonationalism. This contradiction has given rise to a struggle between the international community and local authorities to define the ethnic and political geography of Bosnia. The study focuses on local municipalities to analyze how the extensive efforts of the international community to reverse ethnic cleansing in Bosnia impacted particular places. More broadly, it develops a conceptual understanding of the problems associated with the rebuilding of post-conflict states, especially the political geographic aspects of ethnic identity. It offers insight into how post-conflict plans conceived in international peace agreements are mediated and thereby transformed by the local contexts of their implementation.
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Kurdish refugee migration
This NSF-funded research (BCS 9906948) seeks to improve our understanding of the Kurdish community living in diaspora, in general, and the experiences of those living in Nashville, San Diego, and Washington, D.C., in particular. The Kurdish communities in these US cities are largely made up of those who were identified by the U.S. government as persons in need of protection from the regime in Iraq and who were brought to the United States during 1996. Their experiences of having to leave their homes and resettle in a new country is comparable, in many respects, to refugees fleeing other dangerous situations. However, the role of the United States in Iraq throughout the 1990s and its current role in a post-Saddam Iraq has consequently changed the expectations of and opportunities for members of the Kurdish refugee community living here with respect to their future plans, including possible returns to Iraq. Moreover, the change in immigration practices after the events of September 11, 2001 have posed challenges for community members, whether as Muslims living in the United States or in expediting the normalization of their immigration status. Finally, recent changes in the community, including an increase in those seeking citizenship, the increase of additional migrants as part of family reunification allowances, and new births, complicate any simple analysis of community dynamics.
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Maintained by Carl Dahlman Last updated: May 6, 2006