Why Bosnia Needs a Managed Transition Toward Stability |
Chairman of the Presidency of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Denis Bećirović, speaks with the flag of Bosnia and Herzegovina in the background in Sarajevo on January 13, 2026. The departure of the EU-appointed High Representative has left Bosnia’s future unity uncertain. (Shutterstock/RKY Photo)
Why Bosnia Needs a Managed Transition Toward Stability
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The Dayton Accords are unraveling. The only question left is whether Europe shapes the unraveling or watches it happen.
Christian Schmidt’s announcement this month that he intends to step down as high representative for Bosnia and Herzegovina has been read in Sarajevo and most Western capitals as a personnel matter: the end of a difficult tenure, the need for a successor, the institution carrying on. That reading is wrong, and the consequences of getting it wrong will become visible in November.
Having observed and engaged in the implementation of the Dayton Accords for three decades, including the April Package negotiations of 2006, I can say with some confidence that the Office of the High Representative has weathered worse personnel transitions. What it has not weathered, and cannot weather, is the slow dissolution of the political configuration that gave it authority in the first place. Russia obstructed Schmidt’s appointment in 2021 through the UN Security Council, refusing to recognize his legitimacy. That left “everyone minus Russia” as the working majority, adequate for routine business but increasingly strained on anything contested.
The harder question now is whether the Trump administration will continue to back the Office of High Representative (OHR) and its alliance with the other Peace Implementation Council (PIC) steering board members. The administration is a genuine wild card, and the recent signals admit of multiple readings: the lifting of sanctions on Milorad Dodik (the former president of the Bosnian Serb enclave, Republika Srpska) and his associates, Donald Trump Jr.’s visit to Banja Luka (Srpska’s capital), and reported commercial interests in projects requiring cooperation from Srpska. What can be said with confidence is that the assumption of reliable American backing, which has underwritten OHR authority for three decades, can no longer be made.
The forcing event will occur in November, with the UN Security Council’s........