In Nastanak Republike Srpske: od regionalizacije do strateških ciljeva (1991–1992) (The Origin of Republika Srpska: From Regionalization to Strategic Objectives) the authors Muamer Džananović, Jasmin Medić, and Hikmet Karčić look into the process by which the Republika Srpska (RS) was established. Their main focus is on the period between the end of the 1980s and 1992. All three authors specialize in genocide research yet their book is a truly multidisciplinary endeavour, as Džananović is a sociologist, Medić a historian, and Karčić a legal scholar and sociologist.

In the first chapter, the authors give an overview of the history of Bosnia and Herzegovina (B&H) from the beginning of the ninteenth century until the dissolution of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. They focus on how Muslims were perceived by the Serb political elites during this long period. Additionally, they give a historical background to how Serb political leaders in Bosnia created the conditions for the RS. The second chapter then goes into detail about the political and military situation before and after the establishment of the RS in January 1992. As the authors show, before the war began the Serb Democratic Party (Srpska demokratska stranka, SDS) in Bosnia had ordered a few demographic studies of B&H that projected that Muslims (Bosniaks) might become the dominant ethnic group by 2021, at 63.4 % of the population. In the third and fourth chapters, the authors explain the legal and political contexts in which the Serb political elites organized a plebiscite to proclaim that Bosnia and Herzegovina’s and Croatia’s Serb populations wished to remain in Yugoslavia, rather than support the tendencies towards independence. In the fifth chapter, they give insights into Serb political leaders’ discussions on the future of B&H, what to do with the Muslims, and how to prepare for war. The sixth chapter describes the final steps towards the RS, with the Bosnian Serb assembly issuing a declaration proclaiming the “Republic of the Serb people of B&H”, later to become the Republika Srpska, in January 1992. The focus here too is on the further objectives of the Serb political leaders, including how these objectives are evidence of their genocidal intentions.

The book fills a gap in the literature on the war in B&H and the process of the dissolution of Yugoslavia. Books on the war in B&H, and the involvement of Serbia in it, have mainly dealt with the consequences of the war—the victims of genocide and other war crimes, the prosecution of war criminals, the practice of international tribunals and domestic courts regarding these topics, etc. This book, for the first time, explains the process of establishing the RS. The main pattern of the Serb political elites’ actions emerges as “deinstitutionalization”, or the weakening of the institutions of B&H. The authors debunk the myth that the establishment of the RS was the response to an “unconstitutional” proclamation of an independent B&H. Rather, they show that it was the RS that was established unconstitutionally while B&H was still part of Yugoslavia. After the first democratic elections in Yugoslavia in November 1990, the Serb political elites had realized that, if Bosniak and Croat political leaders supported the independence of B&H, they would not be able to stop this process. Therefore, after the elections, they began building paralegal state institutions.

This book was written based on archival evidence, and readers will be able to discover hitherto unavailable information. I will mention two facts I found intriguing. The first is that, as mentioned above, the SDS ordered a 30-year study of demographic projection. This study then was used as a legitimization for the genocidal objectives of the RS: Serb political leaders declared that they did not want to live in a state where Muslims (Bosniaks) would be demographically dominant. For Serb political elites, this “problem” could be solved only with the ethnic “cleansing” of the Muslim population. The consequences were war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide. The second fact that intrigued me is the above-mentioned unconstitutional plebiscite organized by the Serb political leaders, who asked whether the Serb population in B&H was in favor of remaining in Yugoslavia. The authors explain that in this plebiscite there were separate ballot boxes for the votes of Bosniaks, Croats, and Serbs, making it not just unconstitutional because it intended a fragmentation of B&H, but also because it was an example of blatant racism.

This book opens the door to further research and could be a valuable inspiration for genocide researchers, not only of the genocide in B&H, but also comparatively. In my opinion, however, the authors missed an opportunity. They could have focused more on the central pattern they identify: the process of “deinstitutionalization”. They do point out that all activities of the Serb political leaders, in both B&H and Serbia, and both before and after the first democratic elections, can be described with this word. This process of “deinstitutionalization” became possible a few years before the November 1990 elections, in September 1987 with the dismissal, in the context of the Agrokomerc affair, of Hamdija Pozderac, an important Muslim political leader. The decision to proclaim the RS before B&H became an independent state, among other decisions, was ruled unconstitutional by the Constitutional Court of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Yet all the Court’s decisions proved unenforceable because the Serb political elites had already created paralegal institutions that no longer complied with existing state structures. The Serb political leaders already had created sustainable preconditions for establishing the RS, and thereby for their genocidal objectives.

Given its central place, I think that the authors could have focused more on this process of “deinstitutionalization”. Was it indeed a preparatory stage of genocide? Elsewhere, Hikmet Karčić argues that “triumphalism” should be considered as the final stage of the genocide in B&H.^[1] Here, he and his co-authors show that the process of “deinstitutionalization” could be seen as this genocide’s first stage. Therefore, I would have liked to read about this assessment in more detail. If a second edition were to be published, or if the book were to be translated into English, which I hope will be the case, the authors should update the present version to provide an empirically denser argument, answering more comprehensively the question whether, and if so, how, the process of “deinstitutionalization” was the first stage of genocide in Bosnia and Herzegovina.