The past few months have seen an intensified Russian involvement in the Balkans. The Serb-dominated Bosnian entity Republika Srpska (RS) and its leader Milorad Dodik has been at the center of much of this activity. Since May, Putin has vetoed an UN resolution to recognize the Srebrenica massacre as an act of genocide. He supported the referendum on a “Statehood day” for the supposedly sub-national entity RS, and has been accused of trying to interfere with the Montenegrin elections. He also has known ties to the slightly bizarre “Balkan Cossack Army”, a new paramilitary group joining Orthodox Christian nationalists from RS, Montenegro, Serbia, Belarus and Russia with Russian Cossack organizations, a Kremlin-associated motorcycle gang, and Russians fighting with separatists in Ukraine.
This recent rise in RS-Russian contact is, as many commentators have recognized, caused by the meeting of Putin’s ambitions to bring Russia’s “soft power” to the western Balkans and Dodik’s successful pre-election drive to position himself on a number of high profile issues, showing of his nationalist credentials and important friends in the process.
However, while the BiH elections may have been the immediate catalyst for this highly publicized pan-Slavic camaraderie, Dodik’s electoral success does not signal its end. Putin’s involvement is welcome help in Dodik’s long term project of constructing an ever more state-like facade for RS. And Dodik is certainly doing the most of what Putin can give him.
The two leaders recently met in Moscow to discuss, among other topics, the “global evil dubbed terrorism” and the continuation of “anti-terrorist” cooperation between RS and Russia.[1] Like the meeting in itself, these deliberately chosen themes are filled with power posturing and effective nation-building gestures.
The modern state does not appear fully formed on the international scene. Rather, it is constituted through the enacting of politics on this arena. Its existence is justified and normalized through the performance of state-like actions, that also serve to establish a cohesive identity for the polity. According to International Relations-scholar David Campbell, the speech and actions of political elites are “exclusionary practices in which resistant elements to a secure identity on the ‘inside’ are linked through a discourse of ‘danger’ with threats identified and located on the ‘outside’.”[2] Through this process, the world is coded into a territorial and social inside in need of constant state protection from a threatening outside. “The constant articulation of danger through foreign policy”, Campbell argues, “is thus not a threat to a state’s identity or existence: it is its condition of possibility.”[3]
The realization that polities establish themselves through a continuous production of insecurity leads critical geopolitical analysts like Merje Kuus to insist on the need to “investigate the category of security in terms of its political functions rather than its level or degree”, in order to determine how insecurity is “actually used in daily (geo)political practice”.[4]
This brings us back to the Kremlin. Just by meeting with Putin on the subject of the ubiquitous “terrorist threat”, Dodik has started to use it in a number of ways. First of all, it is activated as an “issue” to conduct “foreign policy” around, establishing Dodik and RS as actors in this arena and naturalizing the fact that one of the world’s most powerful leaders would meet with the head of a sub-national administrative entity. Further, the association with Russia allows Dodik to cement RS political identity as part of Slavic Orthodox Christianity. His effort to combat the ”global evil” of terrorism also shows him as a strong leader, and justifies the existence of an autonomous RS administration that can guarantee the supposedly threatened security of Serbs in Bosnia.
Putin already knows how to exploite the terrorist threat. He expertly used the presence of Jihadi fighters in the Chechen independence struggle to reframe it in terms of an emerging “global jihad” rather than the secular struggle against Russian hegemony that it was.[5] Placing the conflict within the newly announced “Global War on Terror” (GWOT) allowed Putin to use any means necessary to consolidate his domestic power as well as to reinstate Russian control over Chechnya’s territory. Perhaps Dodik is now looking to this example when contemplating his own issues of political power and territorial control.
Saying that geopolitical threats are constructed does not imply that they aren’t real or that action taken to counter them doesn’t have real-world effects. Russia’s disproportionate use of violence in Chechnya under GWOT:s permissive rules of engagement caused widespread radicalization, and transformed a marginal Wahhabi presence from sideshow to main act. As one analyst concluded: “Russia having constructed an Islamist bogeyman in Chechnya, has managed to give life to it by its brutal policies.”[6] (Hughes 204) With Jihad the only anti-Russian game in town, Putin could proceed to carpet bomb Grozny with impunity.
Chechen radicalization is, to be sure, not the only case of blowback from the enthusiastic use of GWOT-rules. The US invaded Iraq thirteen years ago led by – among other rationalizations – the false claim that Saddam Hussein was connected to al-Qaeda and 9/11. Of course, he was not. But with the Baath system smashed to pieces and Iraq’s military left dishonored and disenfranchised, al-Qaeda and Baathists found each other in the insurgency underground, later joining up with Syrian Jihadis to form the newest threat: ISIL.[7]
In the western Balkans, terrorism is still a relative non-issue. However, as in Iraq and Chechnya, it is possible that overeager “counter-terrorism” can help create that which it claims to oppose. Hegemonic power often tries to construct terrorism as an effect of individual insanity, perverted cultures or some sort of primordial evil incarnate, rather than an extreme expression of more or less legitimate political grievances. Studies suggests, to the contrary, that terrorists are surprisingly normal and that Islamist radicalization is a rational process much like any other occupational choice.[8] The RS-Russian approach will certainly not make the choice for radical Islam harder.
Putin’s increased involvement in BiH and the wider Balkans will likely cause civilian and militant Muslims alike to remember Russia’s problematic participation in conflicts in Afghanistan, Bosnia, Kosovo, Chechnya, Ukraine and Syria. Further, Muslims in the Balkans may recall how Milosevic’s campaign for a Greater Serbia, as well as the ethnic cleansing that created RS, was wrapped in propaganda claiming that the Serbs were in great peril – from “Islamist fundamentalist”, among others – and therefore needed a separate territory to entrench themselves on. Together with Dodik’s separatist politics and the creation of pan-Slavic paramilitary groups, this is an incendiary mixture.
To make matters more troublesome, all of this comes at a time when ISIL, the major territorial materialization of militant Islam, is under heavy attack, and its leadership may be looking to deterritorialize and export their struggle to other arenas.
In order to deescalate the situation, it is imperative that the political debate in BiH is moved beyond provocative “clash of civilizations”-type arguments. The first battle in Bosnia’s war on terror should be fought to deconstruct the persistent discourse of chauvinism and xenophobia that underpins separatist nationalism. BiH deserve leaders that will take responsibility for the country’s development rather than rely on ethnocentric politics of resentment and fear to monopolize power and its rewards.
[1] https://sputniknews.com/europe/201609221045588903-russia-republica-srpska-terrorirsm/. Accessed 2016.11.04.
[2] Campbell, D. 1992. Writing Security: United States Foreign Policy and the Politics of Identity. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Pp. 65.
[3] Campbell 1992: 12.
[4] Kuus, M. 2007. Geopolitics Reframed. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Pp. 122.
[5] O’Loughlin, J, Ó Tuathail, G., Kolossov, V. 2004. ”A ’Risky Westward Turn’? Putin’s 9-11 Script and Ordinary Russians”, Europe-Asia Studies. 56 (1). pp. 3-34.
[6] Hughes, J. 2007. Chechnya: From Nationalism to Jihad. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Pp 204.
[7] Moubayed, Sami. 2015. Under the Black Flag. London & New York: I.B. Taurus
[8] Pisiou, D. 2012. Islamist Radicalisation in Europe: An occupational Change Process. New York: Routledge.
Written by Daniel Andersson
