Constitutional Engagement for the Transformation of Bosnia and Herzegovina

Thirty years after the signing of the Dayton Peace Agreement, Bosnia and Herzegovina remains governed by a constitutional framework designed to end war rather than sustain democracy. The result is an enduring equilibrium of vetoes, ethnic quotas, and blocked reforms - peace without governance. While political and academic debates about reform continue to revolve around competing elite visions of federalism, civic democracy, or secession, very little is known about what Bosnia and Herzegovina’s citizens themselves would be prepared to accept as a shared constitutional future.

The project Constitutional Engagement for the Transformation of Bosnia and Herzegovina (CONSENT BiH) that we are embarking on at the University of Luxembourg seeks to fill that gap. It uses conjoint survey experiments to map the “zone of possible constitutional agreement” among Bosnia and Herzegovina’s Bosniak, Croat, Serb, and other communities. A multi-stage process - from expert consultations and citizen focus groups, through representative surveys, to conjoint experiments - will allow us to test citizen preferences across key constitutional dimensions, ranging from state form and territorial organization to the right of secession and minority protections. Each plausible reform package will be evaluated against the current Dayton status quo, providing an empirical benchmark for what kinds of institutional compromises could plausibly command cross-community support.

Rather than advancing yet another blueprint, the project proposes a new way to measure the possible. By treating citizens not as obstacles but as partners in constitutional imagination, it seeks to reopen the question of Bosnia and Herzegovina’s political future on democratic, evidence-based foundations.