Balkan Peacemakers: The Roles of International Mediators in the Yugoslav Wars, 1991-1995

Cruikshanks, Alexander (2022) Balkan Peacemakers: The Roles of International Mediators in the Yugoslav Wars, 1991-1995. Doctoral thesis, University of East Anglia.

PDF Restricted to Repository staff only until 28 February 2027. Request a copy

Abstract

This thesis is centred on the roles of three leading international mediators who led the formal peace process attempting to reach a peaceful settlement to the wars in the former Yugoslavia in the first half of the 1990s: Peter Carrington, Cyrus Vance, and David Owen. While scholarly attention on the Yugoslav Wars has indeed given plenty of attention to the diplomatic process, including to the aforementioned mediators, it has more often done so through the prism of the perceived failures of the international community response as a whole, or as incarnations of the approaches of particular states and international organisations that the mediators represented. This thesis, however, contends that individual leading mediators in fact played a greater personal role in the development of the peace process – and of the wars themselves – than has previously been appreciated. The three men were given a considerable degree of autonomy and discretion to determine the direction, format and basis for peace talks, in a way that enabled them to discursively normalise and set expectations for particular views of how the conflict would end – normalised expectations that could and did persist after the individual mediators themselves left the stage. This left considerable space for the particular personal experiences, quirks, prejudices and idiosyncratic attitudes of just a few men to considerably influence the process by which the wars would be brought to a close.

Item Type:	Thesis (Doctoral)
Faculty \ School:	Faculty of Arts and Humanities > School of History
Depositing User:	Chris White
Date Deposited:	12 Mar 2024 13:11
Last Modified:	12 Mar 2024 13:11
URI:	https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/94644
DOI:

Actions (login required)

View Item