Reconciliation After a Protracted Violent Conflict: Do Believing Processes Play a Role, and Which One? A Research Agenda

Abstract

Twenty years after the conclusion of the Dayton Peace Agreement, the conflict between Bosnia and Herzegovina is still a prime example of the difficulties and challenges of reconstructing and reconciling deeply divided societies after protracted violent conflict, especially with ongoing ethnic mobilization of the population in the educational and political system. At the same time, there are ongoing theoretical battles between proponents and adversaries of the ethnic power-sharing system established by the Dayton constitution, as well as between methodologically individualist and neo-institutionalist approaches in the social sciences on how to understand and explain the phenomenon of “ethnicity.” This chapter, therefore, tries to make use of credition theory in order to focus on the functions which “processes of believing” can play in the political mobilization of “ethnicity” and thereby to contribute to a better conceptualization for further research with regard to “ethnic” conflict and reconciliation.