engleski

(Un)Avoidable War : Peace and Violent Conflict in Multiethnic Areas in Croatia

This paper is based on preliminary results of a research project on social integration and collective identities in certain multiethnic settings in Croatia. Generally, a distinction is drawn between two main forms of peace in multiethnic settings. The first one relates to the existence of peace in the places that maintained their peace and integrity amid the spread of ethnic violence in their surroundings. The second form of peace is much more frequent, as it relates to the whole scale of post-conflict processes. Next, a typology is proposed, distinguishing multiethnic peace and conflict areas in Croatia, where the former are the areas where no violent conflicts happened in the 1990s, and the latter areas where return of refugees, mostly Serbs, is taking place as an aftermath to the conflict in 1990s. Subsequently, answers given by national experts and certain local leaders of Croatian and Serbian nationality are described in order to pre-test the bottom-line of typology, i.e. the existence of conflict and non-conflict areas inhabited both by Croats and Serbs. In the end, two main conclusions are proposed. The one concerns the relevance of the basic dichotomy of the multiethnic areas, and the other the possible usefulness of the path-dependence approach to the explanation of the difference between conflict and peace areas in the case of Croatia.

multiethnic areas; conflicts; peace; typology; Croatia; path dependence.

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