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Chapter 9 Multilevel Citizenship and the Contested Statehood of Bosnia and Herzegovina eldar sarajlić Examining the multilevel citizenship regime in Bosnia and Herzegovina as established through the provisions of the Dayton Peace Agreement (DPA), this chapter considers how the citizenship regime relates to the character of the Bosnian state and its statehood and how this relationship affects human rights. I argue that the existing multilevel citizenship regime harms human rights because of its particular and ambiguous relation with the sovereignty of the state. The current two levels (state and entity) of citizenship help sustain the fragile stability and sovereignty of the country but also create a basis for instability by allowing ethnic agents to contest the country’s statehood . The interplay between these two processes results in political outcomes detrimental to citizens’ human rights. There is a strong correlation between the sovereign character of a democratic state and respect for human rights. Absent historically embedded democratic culture, strong state institutions can play an important role in protecting citizens’ rights. Having been established as part of a peace treaty and enforced within a highly sensitive and conflicting environment, Bosnia ’s multilevel citizenship regime aimed to reconcile diverging ethnopolitical claims rather than establish institutions to ensure respect and protection of citizens’ human rights. The regime creates complex and asymmetrical relations between individuals, ethnic groups, and the state and thus disregards individual rights and ideological institutionalization of group rights. This explains Bosnia’s poor human rights and social inclusion record. Contested Statehood 169 The Bosnian multilevel citizenship regime should be analyzed within a wider regional context. The immediate neighborhood of Bosnia and Herzegovina has an enormous effect on the country’s social and political perspectives . Thus, Bosnian multilevel citizenship should be contextualized within a constellation of competing local and regional networks of power and citizenship regimes1 whose interaction and mutual contestation directly affect the quality of human rights of Bosnian citizens. Understanding the historical background of the role of citizenship in the creation of Bosnian statehood entails a focus on different periods of Bosnian history, particularly the period of socialist Yugoslavia. Although the focus here is on analyzing citizenship legislation, I also discuss the political and substantive dimensions crucial for human rights–based outcomes, from social exclusion of noninstitutionalized groups to naturalization provisions and their effects. The Formative Effect of the Socialist Period Before becoming a republic for the first time in the midst of World War II, Bosnia and Herzegovina had been part of more powerful empires and neighboring states. As a part of the Ottoman Empire between 1463 and 1878, Austria-Hungary between 1878 and 1918, and the Kingdom of Yugoslavia between 1918 and 1943, Bosnia and Herzegovina could not develop modern institutions and establish an independent citizenship regime.2 Although the rudiments of political subjectivity and independent citizenship started to develop during the Austro-Hungarian phase, when individual investment in being Bosnian had been partly determined as legal through local institutions, it was in the first stages of the socialist period that the first full, republican citizenship was created for Bosnia and Herzegovina.3 This citizenship had a distinct character and was integrated into a wider political system that rested on federal (and later confederal) relations between the Yugoslav federal units and the center. The most salient characteristic of the citizenship regime established and maintained during the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRY) was its multilevel or bifurcated nature, with federal and republic citizenships existing simultaneously .4 This meant that Bosnian citizens had republic (Bosnian) and federal (Yugoslav) citizenship at the same time. Their relation was determined by (2024-04-26 04:59 GMT) 170 Eldar Sarajlić the constitutions and by the federal and republic citizenship laws enacted over a period of roughly thirty years, from 1945 to 1977. Although the citizenship of the Socialist Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina (SRBiH) was not multilevel in its nature, it was part of a wider political system and directly related to a federal, multilevel citizenship framework that determined its political significance and meaning. Socialist Yugoslavia had gone through a number of constitutional phases that reflected the ideological and geopolitical shifts the ruling Communist Party pushed forward, but these shifts also affected the shape of the party’s constituent parts, the republics.5 However, the constitutional development of Yugoslavia can be also seen through the prism of political identities developed in direct relation to the structural evolution of the country and the position of particular republics within it, including Bosnia...

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