The Yugoslav War and the Dayton Peace Accords

The paper analyses the breakup of Yugoslavia, the escalation of the Bosnian war, and the evolution of international peace diplomacy, in order to clarify the political and military conditions that led to the 1995 Dayton Accords. It argues that Yugoslavia’s collapse stemmed not from a simple state breakup but from the interaction of complex ethnic configurations, deep economic crisis, and nationalist mobilisation by political elites, especially hardline Serbian nationalism which shattered federal cohesion and made Bosnia and Herzegovina’s multiethnic landscape a focal point of violent contestation and international concern. Comparing Slovenia and Croatia, where ethnic homogeneity, limited territorial objectives, and early international recognition facilitated relatively short conflicts, with Bosnia, where highly mixed populations and overlapping territorial claims produced protracted, all‑out war, the paper shows why Bosnia required full‑scale external intervention. Humanitarian and strategic crises such as the Sarajevo siege, the Srebrenica massacre, and mass displacement exposed the powerlessness of traditional UN peacekeeping and the ineffectiveness of diplomacy without credible force. The study then traces how fragmented and militarily unsupported early initiatives by the UN, EU, and the United States gradually gave way, under the pressure of changing battlefield dynamics, sanctions, domestic politics in Western states, and U.S. congressional pressure to a more unified Western strategy that combined military pressure with coercive diplomacy. It highlights the decisive role of active U.S. engagement, which shifted from conflict management to conflict resolution and leveraged the interests of Milošević, Tuđman, and Izetbegović to push negotiations forward. Overall, the thesis concludes that the Bosnian conflict was structurally produced by intertwined domestic and international factors, and that an effective peace settlement became possible only when military and diplomatic instruments were aligned under a strategy capable of exerting clear coercive leverage, offering broader lessons about the possibilities and limits of international intervention in civil wars.