Ethnoterritorial Divisions and Urban Geopolitics in Post-Yugoslav Mostar

Abstract

The ethnic and religious composition of Mostar, the capital of Herzegovina, changed significantly after the collapse of Yugoslavia. The urban space was re-fragmented and divided spatially and politically between the Croats and Bosniaks while the Serbian community, relatively large before the war, reduced its share in total population by 15.0%. The chapter’s structure follows formulated basic features of the Mostar urban geopolitics model, i.e., demographic and political asymmetry, multi-stakeholder geopolitics, permanent temporality, and territorial ethnocracy. The discussion is centred around the following issues: the causes and effects of the conflicting interests of the political parties of the two dominant ethnic communities formed after the civil war in the first half of the 1990s; the importance of their policy for formal and informal spatial divisions of the urban space; the internationalisation of the Mostar’s sociopolitical life. Taking into account the complex ethnopolitical and international context around Mostar and Bosnia and Herzegovina as a whole, the author discusses various scenarios for the evolution of the urban space’s organisation and stresses that both geopolitics of confrontation and geopolitics of dialogue are possible.

This chapter contains the results of the author’s research conducted in the project ‘Externalisation of ethnic identity in the landscape of selected cities in the Western Balkans’, supported by Polish National Research Centre (Miniatura-2, nr 2018/02/X/HS6/01,272, 2018–2019).