In this interview with ECPS, Dr. Semir Dzebo, Postdoctoral Researcher at the Centre for Socio-Legal Studies at the University of Oxford, examines Bosnia and Herzegovina’s October 4 elections through the lenses of populism, nationalism, secessionism, and ethnic politics. He argues that Bosnia remains marked by “stable instability”: Dayton secured peace but has struggled to function as a democratic constitution. Dr. Dzebo discusses “populist secessionism,” the erosion of anti-elite appeals under long incumbency, competing constructions of “the people,” Croat and Bosniak representation, foreign influence, disinformation, and the limits of territorial revisionism. Rather than expecting dissolution or a sweeping constitutional settlement, he points toward incremental reform, EU integration, stronger state capacity, desegregated schooling, cross-ethnic electoral incentives, and improved economic conditions.
Interview by Selcuk Gultasli
Bosnia and Herzegovina approaches its October 4 elections amid renewed strain on the political architecture established by the Dayton Peace Agreement. More than three decades after the end of the 1992–95 war, questions of statehood, entity autonomy, ethnic representation, foreign influence, and the legitimacy of shared institutions remain deeply intertwined. Political competition continues to be structured less by a conventional left–right divide than by competing understandings of sovereignty, citizenship, collective rights, and of who constitutes the legitimate political community. Against this fragmented backdrop, the elections are not simply about who will govern Bosnia and Herzegovina, but about the character and durability of the post-Dayton state itself.
In this interview with the European Center for Populism Studies (ECPS), Dr. Semir Dzebo, Postdoctoral Researcher at the Centre for Socio-Legal Studies at the University of Oxford, examines these tensions through the lenses of populism, nationalism, secessionism, and ethnic politics. He argues that electoral competition in Bosnia carries unusually high constitutional stakes because “whatever coalition gets formed after the October 4th elections is, in a way, a choice about the state itself.” In this sense, the election resembles “a de facto referendum” on the country’s future political architecture.
A central theme of the conversation is what Dr. Dzebo conceptualizes as “populist secessionism.” Whereas ordinary nationalism operates along a horizontal axis of competition between national communities, populist secessionism introduces a vertical, moral division between an allegedly authentic people and corrupt or illegitimate elites. In this framework, political disagreement becomes morally charged: as Dr. Dzebo puts it, disputes that might otherwise be negotiated can acquire “this moral dimension that turns them into treason,” making compromise appear as capitulation.
The interview also explores the limits of this strategy. Dr. Dzebo’s research suggests that support for secession in Republika Srpska is driven less by populist attitudes than by ethnonational identification, ingroup bias, deteriorating intergroup relations, and economic grievance. Long incumbency, moreover, can erode the credibility of anti-elitism: voters predisposed against elites may increasingly view Milorad Dodik himself as part of the elite.
The broader diagnosis culminates in Dr. Dzebo’s assessment of Dayton itself. Bosnia, he argues, lives in a condition of “stable instability.” Dayton “has really accomplished the first task” of securing peace, but “has not really been great at the second task” of functioning as a democratic constitution. Yet he rejects both expectations of imminent dissolution and hopes for a sweeping constitutional reset, instead pointing toward incremental reform, EU integration, implementation of Strasbourg judgments, stronger state capacity, desegregated schooling, cross-ethnic electoral incentives, and improved economic conditions as the more plausible path toward a more cohesive democratic order.
Bosnia’s Elections Are De Facto Referendums on the State
Dr. Dzebo, welcome! Bosnia and Herzegovina enters the October 4 elections with its post-Dayton political order under considerable pressure, and the central political divisions concern not simply left and right but competing understandings of statehood, sovereignty, entity autonomy, citizenship, and ethnic representation. Looking at the campaign as a whole, are these elections fundamentally about who governs Bosnia and Herzegovina—or about what kind of political community and state Bosnia and Herzegovina should be?
Dr. Semir Dzebo: Before I start responding, thank you very much for the invitation to be part of the series. With regard to your question, it’s very hard to separate those two things, especially in Bosnia. Whatever coalition gets formed after the October 4th elections is, in a way, a choice about the state itself. It’s a little bit like a de facto referendum on what kind of coalition architecture we’re going to have after the elections.
There’s the option of continuing the Troika model, then potentially the return of SDR, or strengthening the entity-focused axis of SNSD and HDZ. And there’s maybe a larger question looming there about the pardon of Milorad Dodik, depending on what kind of coalition is formed.
I think it’s a little bit unusual because, in most other countries, elections are just about elections and who’s going to govern, without necessarily thinking these elections are going to change the nature of the state itself. But in Bosnia, it’s always a little bit intertwined when it comes to those things.
Certainly, what I really liked in your introduction about the elections was that you said it’s really less about issues that are considered in other countries’ elections, where it’s liberal versus conservative, it’s left versus right. There’s very little sort of program being announced and promoted by parties. Some of the people who have done research on these elections have found that not even 10% of social media content by parties has been about anything but a program.
It’s more about these traditional ethno-national tensions, and that’s why the tension is on top of everything. It’s not necessarily what ordinary voters care about, but, in a way, it’s omnipresent, so they’re almost forced to think about those things.
Then we recently had the death of Ratko Mladić, the convicted war criminal, which was almost a gift for those wishing to stoke the flames of nationalism again, and it forced itself into these elections again as something to really be considered.
Populist Secessionism Turns Disagreement into Treason
Your recent work introduces the concept of “populist secessionism” to describe the fusion of anti-elite populism with ethnonational claims to territorial separation. In Republika Srpska, how should we distinguish ordinary Serb nationalism from specifically populist secessionism? What changes when the claim that Republika Srpska must defend its national autonomy is reframed as a struggle of a morally authentic “people” against corrupt domestic elites, Sarajevo institutions, and international authorities?
Dr. Semir Dzebo: I followed the line of thinking of people who have done earlier work on the distinctions between nationalism and populism and the fusion of those two, like Rogers Brubaker, and then my PhD advisor at Central European University, Erin Kristin Jenne, who writes about ethno-populism. They tried to differentiate them as having two different axes.
I would say that ordinary Serb nationalism would be a horizontal axis, where claims of rights and autonomy of the Serb nation relative to other nations are made in this comparative sense, and the goals of that nationalism can be pursued through institutions. It is acceptable, in that view, that there will be those who disagree on the best course of action and the best way to pursue the goals of Serb nationalism within Serb people.
But populist secessionism has a vertical or moral axis, where the nation has a singular will. The leader is the one who embodies it, and everyone who presents an obstacle is part of the corrupt elite. In my paper, I thoroughly analyzed the discourse of Milorad Dodik. I find that he has three types of elites that he targets.
The first one is the domestic opposition, the Serb political parties within Republika Srpska that are his opposition, the ones that run for votes, that he used to run for votes against; now he’s technically not a part of these elections. Then you have the Bosniak elite in Sarajevo, whom he also targets within the country. Then there’s also the element of what he presents as a neo-colonial international community that he sees as standing in the way of the will of the people and imposing these external decisions without, according to him, any legitimacy to do so.
So, what happens is that some of these disagreements that could happen and could be debated get this moral dimension that turns them into treason. It almost prohibits any sort of compromise, because it sees it as capitulation to the interests of those who wish to harm the Serb national project in Bosnia.
Dodik Uses Populism to Redirect Discontent
One of the most intriguing findings of your research is that Milorad Dodik’s populist-secessionist discourse appears to function more effectively as an elite political strategy than as a direct reflection of mass attitudes: stronger anti-elitism was actually associated with lower support for both secession and Dodik’s party, while ethnic identification, ingroup bias, and economic grievances were stronger predictors. Does this suggest that analysts have overestimated the popular foundations of secessionism in Republika Srpska? And if so, why does the rhetoric remain politically so persistent?
Dr. Semir Dzebo: Partly, it really does. There’s definitely support for secession in Republika Srpska. It’s real support, and it tends to vary a great deal. But in a survey that I’ve done, I found that it has almost nothing to do with populist attitudes. In fact, those who really hold populist attitudes, and we see them as a combination of anti-elitism, pro-people, and a Manichaean element, are actually the ones who have lower support for both Dodik’s party and secession.
Those who support secession are actually motivated by other, more traditional motivations, like just a sense of distinct ethnonational identity, just a sense that intergroup relations in the country are already poor, that the country is really not a unified whole.
But again, the reason why this populist secessionism exists, and the reason why Dodik uses it, is because it really enables him to have a tool and a discursive arsenal to attack domestic opposition, the Bosniak elite, and the international presence in the country. It really helps him to try to mobilize against all of these elites in pursuit of goals, because he can’t mobilize the anti-elite discourse.
What it shows is that, among people living in Republika Srpska, those who are predisposed to dislike elites are the ones who think of elites in Banja Luka; those are the ones they directly live under. So those who are dissatisfied with elites tend to think of Dodik as elite, while Dodik essentially wants them to think of the Bosniaks in Sarajevo or the international presence in the Office of the High Representative as the elite.
It’s a discursive move to try to shift attention from his long-standing incumbency and the things that people might be dissatisfied with, and to get the people’s attention onto other targets where he can fare more favorably in competition with.
Anti-Elite Voters Increasingly See Dodik as the Elite
That finding also creates an apparent paradox: populists normally mobilize against entrenched elites, yet SNSD has exercised power for many years while continuing to present itself as a resistance movement against Sarajevo, international bureaucrats, and external interference. Does prolonged incumbency eventually exhaust the credibility of populist anti-elitism? Or can ethnonationalism compensate for that contradiction by continually redefining the incumbent elite as the defender of the community against more distant and allegedly more threatening elites?
Dr. Semir Dzebo: Exactly. At the mass level, it really shows that long incumbency is going to exhaust the appeal of anti-elitism. As I said in response to the previous question, those who are predisposed to have anti-elite attitudes are less likely to vote for Dodik or his party because they think of him as the elite. So, if they have an anti-elite predisposition, they’re going to think negatively of him and his party.
This also shows, and is in line with other work, that it’s a bit of a methodological question for all of us working on populism whether standard attitude scales work for predicting support for populists once they are in power for a long time. Sebastian Jungkunz and his colleagues had a paper on this, where it shows that these scales predict support really well when populists are in opposition, but once they hold on to power for a long time, the predictive power of populist attitude scales for support for populists actually vanishes.
This is something that the field still needs to try to figure out better: How do we measure this once populists are in power for a bit longer? What you also see in this campaign for these elections is that those who are really appealing to anti-elitism in the sense of intra-ethnic competition are the opposition in Republika Srpska. They’re saying, we need justice back. We’ve seen them accuse Milorad Dodik of being a false patriot who’s just willing to sell national interests for personal gain, or just asking him to let the reins of power go so the people can finally live.
So, the opposition is really trying to mobilize this anti-elitism against Dodik and his party. What he tries to do is, like you said, shift this anti-elitism from intra-ethnic competition towards the High Representative, towards the Bosniak politicians, and present themselves, the SNSD, as really the savior, the defender of the interests of Republika Srpska.
Weakening SNSD Would Not Weaken Serb Nationalism
How important is it to separate dissatisfaction with SNSD and Dodik from attitudes toward Serb national autonomy itself? Much of the opposition in Republika Srpska challenges corruption, patronage, and personalized rule but remains strongly committed to Serb national interests. If SNSD were significantly weakened in these elections, would that represent a decline of ethnonational politics—or merely a change in who is considered the most credible representative of the Serb national project?
Dr. Semir Dzebo: I would say it’s the latter. If you look at recent examples, such as the death of Ratko Mladic, opposition politicians were present at memorial services, showing that they remain aligned with these ideas and the national project. Some opposition members also went to Belgrade for the commemoration and praised Ratko Mladic and everything that he has done.
So, while they are willing to challenge Dodik on issues such as corruption, the rule of law, and the use of his position for personal gain, they are not going to make a major shift in how they view the position of Republika Srpska or the project of Republika Srpska vis-à-vis the state of Bosnia and Herzegovina.
If SNSD is significantly weakened, as you say, it would be more a statement about the electorate no longer trusting Dodik with the national project and wanting to select someone else because of fears or dissatisfaction that he is willing to compromise or sell out vital parts of this national project for personal gain. You can sometimes see this in decisions regarding the non-recognition of the decisions of the Office of the High Representative, which were later reversed in exchange for the lifting of personal sanctions imposed by the US on Dodik.
That is what the opposition is trying to do: attack him on this basis. If the result is as such, it can certainly signal that people no longer trust him with the national project.
Bosnia’s Ethno-Populist Axes Are Almost Fused
Bosnia and Herzegovina contains several rival constructions of “the people”: the Serb people of Republika Srpska, a historically vulnerable Bosniak community closely associated with the defense of the Bosnian state, the Croat constituent people demanding “legitimate representation,” and a civic conception centered on citizens irrespective of ethnicity. Does this plurality make Bosnia a particularly distinctive case of populism, because political actors compete not only over who represents “the people” but over who the legitimate people actually are?
Dr. Semir Dzebo: It’s a valuable case for all the work on ethno-populism, in particular, because there is no singular people. In the Constitution, it’s defined as three constituent peoples, and then we have others. As a result, the vertical and horizontal axes that I talked about earlier are almost fused and confused everywhere.
One good example of this is the concern that has existed for years within the Croat community over the issue of legitimate representation: whether the way elections are set up allows Bosniaks, because of their sheer larger numbers, to choose the Croat representative to the presidency, and whether this is what they call legitimate representation.
You see the Bosniak member, Bakir Izetbegović, who is the candidate for presidency, borrowing this a little bit and saying that if the member of Troika is elected to be part of the presidency, that will almost be like token Muslim representation, but that wouldn’t be legitimate.
Then, within the elections for the Croat member of the presidency, the opposition, instead of using anti-elitism, is saying, “Hey, you have the same people who have been running the country for a very long time, and we need change.”
So, it’s quite a distinctive case when it comes to who the people are. It’s really valuable for those of us who study ethno-populism to devote attention to the unique dynamics that we have in Bosnia.
Mladić’s Death Mobilized Pride, Grievance, Fear, and Anger
The funeral and commemorative ceremonies for Ratko Mladić appear to have reactivated sharply divergent memories of the 1992–95 war. What emotions and forms of political mobilization did they generate among Serbs, Bosniaks, and Croats? From a populism perspective, did political actors use these ceremonies to reinforce boundaries between “our people” and rival communities or elites, revive narratives of victimhood and betrayal, and frame contemporary conflicts as continuations of unresolved wartime struggles?
Dr. Semir Dzebo: Reactions were obviously different. Among Serbs in Republika Srpska, the official reaction, as well as the reaction by most of the opposition, was, in a way, one of pride, but also of mourning and grievance. There were tribute gatherings across the cities and across the entity, including in Srebrenica itself. Certain politicians were trying to present his imprisonment as suffering endured by the entirety of the Serb people. The resulting events related to it in Serbia were intended to send the message that Serbia and Republika Srpska are as one.
Obviously, for Bosniaks, the emotions were quite different. They were ones of humiliation, fear, and anger. Some of the events, like at the football game, when the fans of Crvena zvezda at the Belgrade Stadium had a banner saying, “Pravac Potočari (Straight to Potočari),” which is an infamous saying by Ratko Mladić, were like a clear invocation of genocide. So, there has also been a lot of mobilization on the part of ordinary people trying to report these to the relevant authorities in order to deal with the rise of genocide-denial sentiment through potentially legal channels.
Bosniak Outbidding Takes the Form of Defending the State
The Bosniak political field is itself fragmented between national-conservative, social-democratic, liberal, and civic currents. Can Bosniak political fragmentation weaken ethnonational polarization by preventing one actor from monopolizing national representation, or does electoral competition instead create incentives for rival parties to demonstrate that they are the more credible defenders of Bosnia, Bosniak security, and the integrity of the state?
Dr. Semir Dzebo: Yes, there’s a good side to this fragmentation, and that is democratic accountability. Because there are multiple legitimate options, there’s a way for the electorate to hold those in power accountable and vote them out once they’re not happy with their performance. But outbidding still happens. In particular, it depends on the level of perceived danger to the state and to the existence of Bosniaks within it.
So, let’s say Bakir Izetbegović has been saying that we might not have a country if, again, Troika and Denis Bećirović are elected to power, and that governing with SNSD and HDZ BiH is really a humiliation. Again, it’s like this populist logic: you cannot really compromise on this; otherwise, you’re selling out the people.
I think everything that’s happened with Dodik also gave Troika an opportunity to try to act as defenders of the nation and maybe make some moves that would make them appear tougher when it comes to matters of security and inter-ethnic relations.
But there is also restraint. For example, I’ve read some analysis of the elections saying that it’s actually been quite subdued, that it’s been unusually quiet when it comes to the elections for the Bosniak presidency. I think Bećirović has said that he doesn’t want to campaign on quarrelsome politics. He said he wants to focus on jobs and crime.
So, one thing that’s different, obviously, is that when it comes to Bosniak outbidding, it takes the form of trying to defend the state. But when it comes to outbidding in the case of Republika Srpska, it goes into the realm of separatism.
The Croat Representation Grievance Is Very Real
A comparable tension exists around Croat demands for “legitimate representation.” Supporters see collective representation as necessary to prevent a numerically larger community from determining who represents Croats, while critics fear that further institutionalizing such principles would deepen ethnic territorialization. Is this ultimately a conflict between two democratic logics—individual political equality and collective national representation—and has the Dayton framework reached the limits of its ability to reconcile them?
Dr. Semir Dzebo: It is really a conflict between two democratic logics. From the standpoint of the Croats in Bosnia, their idea is that the representative of the people in the presidency should be chosen by them. If it’s the Croat representative, it should be chosen only by Croats. Obviously, the Dayton Agreement has different prescriptions, and it’s written into the Constitution that what happens is one person, one vote. So, everyone living in the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina has the right to choose whom they want to vote for.
The ruling in the case of Sejdić-Finci has pushed more towards this idea of individual equality, where they’re more sympathetic towards the first option, while the Constitutional Court has a different idea of what the decision should be. The grievance in the case of the Croat community is very real because Željko Komšić won the seat four times, each time with a substantial amount of non-Croat support. The discourse on it is still very much the same.
Bosnia Is More Ethno-Populist than Religiously Populist
Religion in Bosnia is often intertwined with national identity rather than operating as a wholly independent ideological cleavage: Islam with Bosniak identity, Serbian Orthodoxy with Serb identity, and Catholicism with Croat identity. Would you therefore characterize Bosnia as a case of religious populism, or is it more accurate to speak of ethnonational populism in which religious institutions, symbols, sacred geography, and memories of collective suffering provide legitimacy and emotional reinforcement to political projects whose primary logic remains national?
Dr. Semir Dzebo: I think it’s the latter. It’s more about ethno-national populism. I don’t think there’s much there in terms of sacred reinforcement along religious lines. Because of the nature of how ethnicity works in Bosnia in terms of identity, and because it’s a bit fused with religion, it works as this boundary marker of where one belongs or is supposed to belong. But I don’t see much religious doctrine infused into the way populism or ethno-populism works.
Economic Support Is Far More Popular than Territorial Revision
Your work on kin-state politics in Serbia finds that nationalist appeals can increase support for cultural and economic assistance to co-ethnics abroad, while public resistance to more aggressive territorial revision remains considerably more robust. What does this tell us about Serbia’s relationship with Republika Srpska? Should we distinguish carefully between popular support in Serbia for protecting or assisting Bosnian Serbs and actual public willingness to endorse secession, territorial revision, or destabilizing intervention?
Dr. Semir Dzebo: What it tells us is that, when it comes to matters of irredentism, there are two very different sides to it. One is assistance in terms of economic and cultural support, and what I found is that people are much more willing to support those in the first place. They can also be convinced to either increase or decrease their support through rather minimal framing.
If you frame it as support being costly—that those are funds we could invest here at home in Serbia—then they will decrease their support. If you convince them that there is this duty to support their ethnic brethren, their ethnic kin in Bosnia, then you can convince them to increase their support.
But when you start talking about changing borders, which would likely result in conflict, people will, as a baseline, be less likely to support that. You are also less likely to convince them to either increase or decrease their support, no matter how you try to frame it.
It means that there is really a limit to how much you can engage in this irredentism, and that as long as it’s economic or cultural, you can work with that, you can increase it if you wish to, and you can try to mobilize support for it. But changing borders is really just not something that people will change their minds about, and it does not seem to be something that is as popular as economic and cultural support.
Kin-State Engagement Must Be Transparent and Neutral
More broadly, how should we distinguish legitimate kin-state engagement from political interference in Bosnia’s elections? Serbia and Croatia have obvious constitutional, ethnic, and historical connections to Bosnian Serbs and Croats, while Russia, Turkey, Hungary, the European Union, and the United States possess very different political, strategic, religious, and economic interests. At what point does diplomatic, cultural, religious, financial, or media engagement cease to be ordinary external influence and begin to distort domestic democratic competition?
Dr. Semir Dzebo: What needs to happen, not just in the case of Bosnia, but also anywhere where there is this ethnic kin element of states having ethnic kin abroad, is that, according to the recommendations of the 2001 Venice Commission report on kin-states and the OSCE prescriptions, any engagement of states with their ethnic kin abroad should, first of all, be transparent in terms of the fact that it is occurring.
It should, in the best-case scenario, be channeled through the institutions of the host state, but if that’s not the case, at least the host state institutions should be made well aware of it. Then, it should not be used for the purposes of mobilizing voters, which we often find to be the case, but it should really be aimed at communities at large.
It shouldn’t be timed to the electoral calendar, but should really be sustained long-term support and engagement. And lastly, it should be neutral to the constitutional order of what we call the host state, where the ethnic kin lives.
If these conditions are not satisfied, then you tend to have friction, which can also result in a worsening of the situation of the co-ethnics that live within the host state.
International Inconsistency Feeds Secessionist Opportunities
Foreign influence is frequently narrated through the same populist vocabulary as domestic conflict: external actors can be represented either as protectors of a threatened community or as illegitimate elites overriding popular sovereignty. In Republika Srpska in particular, opposition to the Office of the High Representative and international intervention has become integral to political mobilization. Does international involvement unintentionally strengthen populist secessionism by allowing domestic elites to present constitutional constraints as foreign domination?
Dr. Semir Dzebo: I talked about it quite a bit in the first part of our interview. It really gives a convenient target for Dodik. For example, one of the things related to the elections now is that these are going to be the first elections with the introduction of new election technology and machines. What is supposed to be a technical safeguard against fraud, Dodik is calling the will of unelected foreigners who are trying to impose this technology for the purposes of potentially defrauding the election.
It’s a very convenient target, and throughout his career, he has always targeted the Office of the High Representative, the previous US administration’s ambassador, the US Embassy, and the other European embassies. But I don’t think that this international involvement really causes secessionism. There are all of these other domestic motivations that translate into support for secession. Even if international involvement feeds or gives potential targets for anti-elitism, we also see from this that anti-elitism doesn’t really translate into support for secession.
What, in the case of Bosnia, feeds secession is the opening of potential opportunities to advance secessionist causes because of the inconsistency of the international actors in Bosnia. We have the former High Representative announcing his resignation, and then there’s a bit of disagreement over who the new High Representative is going to be. There might be changing opinions on the mandate of the High Representative in Washington, D.C., as opposed to the opinions in the EU.
So, the inconsistency, the disagreement within the international community, is providing these openings for those who might favor secession in Republika Srpska to try to advance it a bit more, but not involvement per se.
Bosnia Is Highly Vulnerable to Disinformation
Information politics seems especially important in this election. ODIHR is explicitly monitoring social-media campaigning as well as foreign and domestic misinformation, disinformation, and interference. In a society where media spaces are already fragmented along political, territorial, and ethnonational lines, how vulnerable is Bosnia and Herzegovina to coordinated information campaigns? And is their principal danger that they persuade citizens of entirely new ideas, or that they intensify pre-existing fears, historical grievances, and perceptions of ethnic threat?
Dr. Semir Dzebo: Structurally, when it comes to disinformation, Bosnia is very vulnerable. The media space is very fragmented, and there is also a wide reach of media from Serbia and Croatia. A lot of people also get their information from Facebook. There’s been great work done by people at organizations like Istinomjer and Raskrinkavanje, who have documented bot networks and Facebook pages that have been used to smear the opposition and politicians, as well as fabricated posts and a lot of AI-generated content.
Polarization is omnipresent, with ethnic polarization also omnipresent in the coverage of the news, and I don’t think the current fines for any misuse of media are really meaningful. I also don’t think that there’s any danger that it’s going to convert people who weren’t nationalists into nationalists, but there is a danger that it’s just going to amplify nationalist sentiment among those who were already predisposed to it.
One particular danger that I talked about just a while ago is the denial of results. Dodik has already planted the seeds with his comments on the new technology—that the international community is doing it so they could defraud SNSD and him, and that it’s a Western tool of fraud, as he calls it. The danger is that, through the media that is co-opted by SNSD, there’s going to be a rejection of the results, or some of it happening even in advance, whatever the results turn out to be.
The Challenge Is Separating Populism from Antagonism
You have also worked on computational approaches to identifying populist discourse, including research suggesting that large language models can detect context-sensitive people-versus-elite framing with accuracy approaching expert human coding. Could such tools help us map the 2026 Bosnian campaign across Bosnian, Serbian, and Croatian language environments—identifying when ordinary nationalism becomes populist, when religious or historical symbolism is mobilized, and how narratives travel between domestic political actors and external information ecosystems? What methodological cautions would be necessary in such a deeply context-dependent political setting?
Dr. Semir Dzebo: It’s a good question. Having worked in this area, there’s promise there, but I would still say that, for a place as complicated as Bosnia, especially when it comes to distinguishing all of the things that you said from one another, I don’t think we are that close to doing all of it.
But some of the work that I’ve done with my colleagues in Team Populism has really managed to use large language models to replicate the work of human coders when it comes to recognizing populism. As part of all of the testing that we have done, some of it included speeches from Montenegro in Montenegrin, and the results there were really encouraging. Obviously, that would also work in the case of Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian texts.
One of the cautions that I had from similar work on these computational approaches is that it’s sometimes hard to separate populism from just antagonism. The hostility between ethnic groups is everywhere, but not all of it has these elements of populism, like people-centrism, anti-elitism, and Manicheanism. So that would be my primary concern. It’s also about some of the contextual elements—the extent to which those would work.
One other thing that we should try doing is looking at how a lot of the campaign has moved on to digital things like songs, video, and symbols. So, for scholars of populism who work on those things, that would be another interesting thing to look at.
Bosnia Lives in Stable Instability
And finally, Dr. Dzebo, thirty-one years after Dayton, is Bosnia and Herzegovina approaching a point at which the original peace-making consensus can no longer provide a sustainable democratic equilibrium? Dayton successfully institutionalized safeguards against domination, but it also entrenched ethnicity as a central principle of political representation. Looking beyond October 4, do you see a plausible path toward a renewed constitutional settlement that preserves collective security while expanding civic equality and cross-ethnic political competition—or is the more likely trajectory a continued fragmentation in which competing national communities increasingly interpret sovereignty, democracy, and even the legitimacy of the state itself in incompatible ways?
Dr. Semir Dzebo: Hard question. I’ve heard someone once say that the best compromise is the one that leaves everybody unhappy, or at least a peace settlement. In a way, that’s the case in Bosnia, in that it’s a peace settlement that is also supposed to work as a democratic constitution. It has really accomplished the first task. It has not really been great at the second task.
We have this stable instability in Bosnia. There’s no active armed conflict, but there’s always, underneath the surface, some inter-ethnic tension. And also, the Dayton Agreement, the way it was framed, has created this self-reinforcing loop. The institutions, because they’re set up in a way that makes ethnicity the primary political identity, strengthen all these things that I found to also be feeding into secessionism in Republika Srpska, like in-group bias, which I found to be the strongest predictor of support for secession.
I don’t think we’re going to have, anytime soon, some grand settlement, but we’re also not going to have, at least in my opinion, dissolution. The most plausible path is one of incremental moves towards EU accession. Implementing the Strasbourg judgments would be a plausible path forward. Trying to strengthen state capacity through the reform agenda would be a plausible path forward.
In the slightly longer term, the priority should also be ending segregated schooling, because that would produce very positive societal benefits, as well as trying to add some electoral incentives that would emphasize winning votes across communities. Those incremental steps would have a very positive effect on the state of politics in the country.
One thing that I found in my paper on secessionism and populism is economic grievance. So I said in-group bias was the strongest predictor. Economic grievance was the second strongest driver of secessionist sentiment. And this really gives reason for some cautious optimism, because material conditions can change, in a way, more easily than all of the prescriptions of Dayton and the Constitution.
Trying to address the fact that more than half of young people are interested in leaving the country is really a pressing problem, and trying to improve economic conditions should be the priority of both domestic politicians and the international community. That has the potential to have very positive knock-on effects for societal cohesion and interethnic dynamics.
If populist anti-gender politics establishes the heteronormative family as a symbolic representation of the legitimate social order, conformity to particular gendered and sexual norms can become intertwined with the conditions of legitimate national membership. Family is therefore not simply something the state claims to protect; it becomes a political template through which ‘the legitimate citizen’ is imagined.