Episode 302: The memory of Srebrenica and current tensions in the Western Balkans with Aidan Hehir

In this episode, Dominic Bowen and Aidan Hehir discuss the legacy of the Srebrenica genocide, the politics of remembrance, and why, nearly thirty years later, the region continues to struggle with denial, revisionism, and rising ethnic tensions.

Find out more about how competing narratives have shaped post-war identities, the role of international courts in establishing the historical record, and the impact of recent political developments in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia and Republika Srpska.

The conversation also addresses the fragility of peace in the Western Balkans, the limitations of international interventions, the erosion of democratic norms, and the dangers posed by nationalist rhetoric and historical distortion.

Finally, they explore what meaningful remembrance should look like, how civil society can counter denial, and whether the international community is equipped or willing to prevent future atrocities in the region.

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Aidan Hehir is a Professor of International Relations at the University of Westminster, where he has taught since 2007 after positions at the University of Sheffield and the University of Limerick, where he also earned his PhD in 2005. He is Course Leader for the postgraduate programmes in International Relations, International Relations and Security, and International Relations and Democratic Politics, and teaches modules on humanitarian intervention and international security. His research focuses on transitional justice, humanitarian intervention, and statebuilding in Kosovo. He is the author or editor of twelve books, including Kosovo and the Internationals: Hope, Hubris and the End of History (2024) and Hollow Norms and the Responsibility to Protect (2019) – winner of the British International Studies Association’s prize for best book on intervention and R2P.  His publications include over fifty book chapters and journal articles in leading outlets such as Ethics and International Affairs, and Cooperation and Conflict. He is co-editor of the Routledge Intervention and Statebuilding series, a founding co-convenor of the BISA Working Group on the Responsibility to Protect, and has delivered more than a hundred conference papers worldwide. 

The International Risk Podcast brings you conversations with global experts, frontline practitioners, and senior decision-makers who are shaping how we understand and respond to international risk. From geopolitical volatility and organised crime to cybersecurity threats and hybrid warfare, each episode explores the forces transforming our world and what smart leaders must do to navigate them. Whether you’re a board member, policymaker, or risk professional, The International Risk Podcast delivers actionable insights, sharp analysis, and real-world stories that matter.

Dominic Bowen is the host of The International Risk Podcast and Europe’s leading expert on international risk and crisis management. As Head of Strategic Advisory and Partner at one of Europe’s leading risk management consulting firms, Dominic advises CEOs, boards, and senior executives across the continent on how to prepare for uncertainty and act with intent. He has spent decades working in war zones, advising multinational companies, and supporting Europe’s business leaders. Dominic is the go-to business advisor for leaders navigating risk, crisis, and strategy; trusted for his clarity, calmness under pressure, and ability to turn volatility into competitive advantage. Dominic equips today’s business leaders with the insight and confidence to lead through disruption and deliver sustained strategic advantage.

Transcript:

00:00: Aidan: I would also warn that a conflict that starts in Kosovo will not finish in Kosovo. It’s highly unlikely that something like that will not involve other countries and spark violence elsewhere.

00:12: Elisa: Welcome back to the international risk podcast, where we discuss the latest world news, and significant events that impact businesses and organisations worldwide.

00:20: Dominic Bowen: Hi, welcome to the International Risk Podcast, where we unpack the topics that matter. I’m Dominic Bowen, your host. And today we’re extracting some lessons from the Yugoslav wars, from Bosnia, Kosovo, Srebrenica, and what they tell us about intervention, about transitional justice and the credibility of global norms. My guest today is Professor Aidan Hehir. In our conversation with Dr. Hehir today, we’re going to explore the current relations between Bosnia-Herzegovina and Serbia and to the extent that the memories of the 1990 conflicts as well as the Srebrenica genocide and other massacres and how they still impact people today. Dr. Hehir, welcome to the International Risk Podcast.

00:59: Aidan Hehir: Thank you Dominic, it’s very good to be here.

01:01: Dominic: Now, the 1995 genocide remains the continent’s worst atrocity since World War II, and commemoration coexists with, I think what we could say is denial or even revisionism by some communities. Now, you’ve spoken about how memory shapes politics. Can you remind us about what happened in Srebrenica in 1995 and why this event still holds a large place in the memory in the region today?

01:25: Aidan Hehir: Well, ah Yugoslavia broke largely because of aggressive Serbian nationalism. After Tito died, um there was a number of movements that tried to you know move into the vacuum that he left. But one of the the most dominant was Serbian nationalism. And that was impelled initially by intellectuals who began to question the very idea of Yugoslavia and the role of the Yugoslav state in what they claimed was the suppression of Serbian identity. There was this idea that the Serbs had been the largest group in the partisans who’d fought in the Second World War, but they hadn’t been rewarded afterwards. So there was this phrase that the Serbs had won the war but lost the peace. So there had been a kind of simmering resentment amongst some Serbs um throughout the the period of Tito’s rule. But this really came to the fore in in the 1980s. And it was something then that was picked up by Milosevic, who was um you kind of a low level politician within um Yugoslavia. He was you know not considered to be particularly charismatic or especially interesting, but he latched on to the Serbian nationalist cause and began to present himself as a champion of the Serbs within Yugoslavia. Now, obviously, when he started to openly talk about the interests of Serbs within Yugoslavia, it kick-started a domino effect and and other nationalities also began to say, well, we think we should have more rights, et cetera, et cetera. And, you know, this led to um the return of of nationalism within but in Yugoslavia, particularly, obviously, in Serbia, but also in Croatia and elsewhere. The issue with respects to the actual breakup of of Yugoslavia then and how that relates to Bosnia was that, you know, and I’m simplifying it enormously here, was “Slovenia left first”. And that wasn’t particularly problematic because pretty much everybody in Slovenia was a Slovene. But when Croatia declared independence and Bosnia declared independence, and that was much more problematic because, you know, you had a large number of Serbs living in Croatia And you also had a large number of Serbs and Croats living in Bosnia. So the Serbs living in Croatia said, well, we don’t want to be part of Croatia. We want to be part of a Serbian-run state. And likewise, in Bosnia, the Croats said the same thing there, and so to the Serbs. So there was initially war in Croatia, but it the more serious conflict um really took place in in Bosnia. And as I say, anybody who’s a historian of Yugoslavia will kind of be somewhat outraged by how I’m simplifying things here a little bit, but essentially the the major problem occurred in Bosnia because you had three different groups there vying for control. And what the Serbs in particular sought to do was to create an area of Bosnia that was ethnically pure, as it was known. So they they wanted this area to be just populated by Serbs and then to say this part of Bosnia is now going to be incorporated into Serbia. But so long as you had the Bosniaks or the Bosnian Muslims, as they’re called, living in certain parts of Bosnia that bordered with Serbia proper, there was a problem there. So hence began the awful, the horror of of ethnic cleansing, whereby Serbian militias inside Bosnia, supported by Serbia itself, began to try to move populations from towns and villages in eastern Bosnia, away from those areas up towards the sort of the central area of Bosnia, and try to, as I say, incorporate that into Serbia itself. And Srebrenica is a town in eastern Bosnia, which became a kind of magnet for a number of the Bosnians who were fleeing um the the war, and they they moved into Srebrenica and a number of other areas um in eastern Bosnia, number of towns in eastern Bosnia, around 1992-1993. And eventually the UN effectively were kind of strong-armed into declaring these places safe areas. So Srebrenica was declared a safe area when a French UN peacekeeper um traveled to Srebrenica and um was effectively not allowed to leave by the locals and then kind of declared, “OK, well, this is now a UN protected safe area”. So sort of forced the hand of the UN somewhat. But this idea of creating a safe area in Srebrenica simply didn’t work. The idea was that you would have a place there that would was free from any armed forces, whether they were Bosnian or Serb, that the UN would protect the people inside the safe area, and in return, the Bosnian Muslims wouldn’t use force from within Srebrenica. But that arrangement broke down very, very quickly. And this little island within Bosnia became essentially under siege. And eventually the Dutch troops took over from the Canadian troops, and in 1995 then, as the war on Bosnia began to um escalate in favor of the the Bosnian Serbs, General Mladic, with the, you know, consent of of Belgrade as well, ah began to move troops towards Srebrenica, surrounded it initially, and then you know entered, forcefully entered it. And the UN peacekeeping forces basically did nothing to stop them entering. There was an attempt made to call in airstrikes, but the airstrikes never materialized. And then the actual area of Srebrenica itself began to become you know, entrapped by these marauding Bosnian Serbs. The locals who had fled there, the refugees, all then ran to the UN base at Potachari, which is just outside the town centre, and pleaded with the UN to let them into the base, again, hoping to be protected. Some were, but most weren’t. And in the next a couple of weeks, the Bosnian Serbs essentially separated the men and the women and took the men off into the local area and massacred over 8,000 of them. Many people tried to flee the area through the woods to move towards a Bosnian safe area, up by Tuzla, and you know in the course of that exodus, um hundreds if not thousands of people were killed as well by the Bosnian Serbs. So overall, you know anywhere between 8,000 and 10,000 people were killed in the course of a couple of weeks. And it was made all the more horrific by virtue of the fact that there was a UN peacekeeping mission on the ground there. There was the Dutch BAT, as they were called, the Dutch Battalion. but battalion who were heavily criticized for not doing enough to stop the Bosnian Serbs from both entering Srebrenica, but also then you know forcefully separating the men and the women and massacring the men.

07:09: Dominic Bowen: Yeah thanks for unpacking that for us. It’s good to understand that. You mentioned aggressive Serbian nationalism, and of course we’ve done a lot of analysis and we’ve spoken a lot on the podcast about ah the predictability of the Kremlin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, and part of that was this ah perception of Ukraine being part of a greater Russia organization. Just before we started recording, the air alarms went off again here in Kyiv today or this afternoon. And we’re seeing that continual attack on on civilian targets ah across ah the country just the other day. Six civilians were killed, including two children. But it’s interesting how how quickly the world forgets about attacks and how the memory changes. And obviously, I’m in Ukraine today, so that’s at the centre of my mind. But we forget about the a atrocities in in in Butcher and and other Ukrainian cities, even though they were just a couple of years ago. Can you help us understand how does denialism and institutional memory in the in across the region, across Europe, translate into today’s security risks and what actually works to reduce these risks? I mean, there’s education and legal sanctions and perhaps other things, but I’d be really keen to help ah help you us unpack and understand what denialism, what rewriting of history it has occurred and and what does that mean for us today in Serbia and Bosnia and Herzegovina?

08:16: Aidan Hehir: Well, every state tells its people stories about its past, and they tend to tell stories that are… heroic, you know, we did these wonderful things and we had this glorious history, or they tend to be, we suffered this unjust treatment, or we were defeated by foreign evildoers, these kinds of things. The stories the states tell their people aren’t always triumphant. They can also be stories of defeat. So the fact that the the the Serbs today um are denying what happened in the 1990s isn’t particularly interesting or novel. It’s something that all states do. The difference is how do people respond to that from the outside? And I think that’s the more important issue, really. Serbian nationalism you know emerged in its present form really in the 19th century. You know, and it was developed at a time when Serbs wanted to leave the Ottoman Empire and the Austro-Hungarian Empire. They wanted to free themselves from um subjugation by foreigners, so crafted this myth relating to Kosovo. And they had long-term attachment to Bosnia as well. So Kosovo and Bosnia have always been central to Serbian nationalist mythology. And this myth was re-emerged in the 1980s when Milosevic began to agitate for Serbian rights within Yugoslavia. And the reason I say all that is because we this is a story that’s been played out before. From the point of view of the international community, if we were sat here now in 1991 or 1990, you would be warning, experts on Serbian nationalism would be warning that this kind of view of the Serbian world, as they call it, or Greater Serbia, it’s not something that can be kind of contained. It’s not something that can be reasoned with. It has to be confronted. But the fact that, you know, people said that in the early 1990s and still there was attempts made to appease Milosevic, attempts made to kind of avoid recognizing just how dangerous it was and the whole thing blew up and thousands of people were killed in many parts of of the region. The fact that all that happened once is bad enough, but the fact that it’s happening again today is you know extraordinary. you know ah Anybody who’s read about the breakup of Yugoslavia and and the war in Bosnia and the war in Kosovo in particular, will have read countless accounts of people saying, you know, we warned them in advance that if you don’t deal with this now, the situation is going to explode in Bosnia and later on in Kosovo. And the same thing is happening today with respects to Bosnia and Kosovo. And as you said, the same thing happened when Russia began to attempt to reclaim, as it would call it, its territory, starting with the you know the invasion of Georgia in 2008, but then obviously Ukraine’s Crimea in 2014. So the issue isn’t so much, as I said, that states tell their people lies and that they deny the past. The issue is, what does the international community do in response to these things? And having been burnt so badly once with respect to Serbian nationalism in Bosnia and Kosovo, it’s incredible that this is just happening again. In the current president of Serbia, he came to power initially as prime minister, but his party at that point became the government of Serbia and also held the presidency. And that they’ve held the government and the presidency ever since 2012. Now, they were initially seen as a kind of moderate pro-EU integration party. But Vucic had come from a political movement that was steeped in violence. In 1995, he stood up in the Serbian parliament and said, for every one Serb killed in Bosnia, we will kill 100 Muslims. So he was somebody with a pretty bad track record. He had been Milosevic’s minister for information. as well. So these were guys who were steeped in that worldview. So to think when he came to power in 2012, this was somehow going to usher in some new phase of pro-liberal sort of um Serbian um foreign policy was was naive at best. But again, you could say, okay, we made a mistake in 2012, but we should have recognized that by 2014. But it still you know it still continues today. So from 2012 on, Vucic and the people around him have gradually escalated their rhetoric and their actions with respect to Bosnia and Kosovo in a way that absolutely mirrors what Putin has done in Russia. You know, that this idea that there’s a kind of a big Russia and a small Russia and a small Russia in Serbia, you know, that’s exaggerated to some extent, but there are clear parallels between how Russia has behaved under Putin and how Serbia behaves under Vucic. And the escalation of that rhetoric has has has led to the emergence within Bosnia and Kosovo of um cessationist movements who are now today um openly say they want to redraw the borders of Bosnia. And of course, they don’t accept that Kosovo exists at all. So they claim that they want to, reclaim Kosovo and are willing to use force um to do that. 

12:30: But we we missed a huge opportunity between 2012 and today. The situation that we’re in now, where you face violent militias in Kosovo attacking um the police and and blowing up the the water infrastructure, arms caches are being found in in the north of Kosovo um almost on a weekly basis at this stage. And then in Bosnia, you have cessationist movements who are declaring their love for Putin and their their willingness to carve up Bosnia. This could all have been stopped if a much firmer line had been taken with Vucic and with the people around him when he came to power in 2012. But as history shows, appeasement doesn’t work, you know. And again, you don’t have to just look at you know the late 80s, early 90s in Yugoslavia. You go back to the 1930s and you can see that as well. you know the the Dictators, authoritarian leaders, people who want to um use force to redraw borders are not people that can be reasoned with, ultimately, they need to be confronted. And had a much firmer line been taken with Buttigieg and the people around him, we wouldn’t be in the position that we’re in at the moment. So a lot of the blame for where we are now obviously has to go to the nationalists, but they are what they are. Serbian nationalists. You know they’re not really trying to pretend to be anything else. The I would say the majority the blame has to go on those people within Europe who pretended that these people weren’t what they are, who cheered when Vucic was elected every two or three years, who kept up this rhetoric that you know Serbia is moving towards the West, when very obviously it wasn’t. And they deserve, I think, most of the blame for the situation that we face at the moment, which is a situation that, you know, as I’ve said a million times, as other people like me have said a million times, it’s not just bad for Kosovo and Bosnia. That’s the key thing here. It’s bad for the whole of Europe. A conflict in that region is highly unlikely to just stay in that region. It is a threat to Europe as a whole.

14:10: Dominic Bowen: Yeah, very, very much. And I think, you know, I’ve lived and worked in every major war zone over the last 20 years. And so the last thing I am is a warmonger. But I can only wholeheartedly agree that appeasement just doesn’t work as a student of international relations and history. I wish there were examples of where appeasement works. But, you know, I think we have to really call a spade what it is. and and then come up with systems that mitigate the risks that come from that. And of course, in the 1990s, there was the hate crimes, there was the ethnic cleansing, there was genocide. And this obviously shaped relationships. And we’re not talking about that long ago. We’re talking about 30 years ago, the people that committed those crimes and the children that witnessed those and suffered from them are still alive today. Can you help us unpack it a little bit more about how the Bosnians, the Serbs, the Croats, the nations and the communities across the Western Balkans, so how their viewpoint is shaped by those events today and and how you think that’s going to influence what happens next?

14:59: Aidan Hehir: Well, certainly in my experience of being in in Bosnia and certainly more so Kosovo. I’ve spent much more time in Kosovo than Bosnia. So, you know, I know that country much more. You know, if you walk around Sarajevo or Pristina, then, you know, they look like vibrant, normal cities. At least at first glance. But then you look a little bit deeper and you can certainly still see in Sarajevo the effects of the war, you know, in terms of the buildings that are destroyed still and certainly in Kosovo as well. The legacy of the conflict is certainly, you know, maybe slightly under the radar. But when you talk to people, it’s still very visceral. They still feel it very um deeply in their soul. And of course, why wouldn’t they? 

15:33: It’s not so much just that their family members were killed. One of the big issues is the fate of the missing. You know, the people who still don’t know where their loved ones are. That you know they I think most of them would accept now they’re almost certainly dead, but they want their bodies back, quite understandably. And that’s an open wound in Kosovo and Bosnia. And it’s something that I think people didn’t pay enough attention to in the beginning. When the Dayton Accords were signed in 1995, there was this idea of, now we’ve sorted out Bosnia, got the Croats and the Serbs and the Bosniaks have agreed to put their differences aside and look to the future. So let’s not talk about the past. And likewise in Kosovo in 1999-2000 when you know the NATO intervention ended and the UN arrived, and The K4 deployment happened. Again, there was this sense of, “right, that’s all done now. Wasn’t it awful? But let’s move on. Let’s look to the future. If we keep talking about the past, we’re just going to perpetuate hatred”. And you can see some logic to that. But again, if you don’t know where your son or mother or daughter is buried, it’s very difficult to move on from those things and not addressing those ongoing traumas that people experienced in both Kosovo and Bosnia was a huge mistake. And these two interventions happened at a time as well, which I think is very, very important to kind of contextualize these things. When there was the idea of the end of history and constant progress for all time, that liberalism had triumphed over communism, there was no alternative to liberal capitalism. And everybody was going to get rich and everybody was going to be happy and peace would reign supreme forever. And that period of what we would call in international relations, unipolarity, really reached its zenith around 1999. So between 2005 and about 2003, just before the invasion of Iraq, let’s say, there was that sense of “we can do anything. and the future is wonderful and rosy”. So a lot of that discourse about moving on and looking to the future was impelled by that notion that we are all just going to and enter wonderland. You know In 2003, there was the Thessaloniki summit where the EU met with the the leaders of the the Balkan, former Yugoslavia republics and said to them all, you’re all gonna join the European Union, everything is great. you know The future is within the EU. And if you fast forward a little bit, then you know people began to think, well, when is this going to happen? This wonderful world that we were promised hasn’t materialized yet. And then you had the global financial crisis in 2008. You had Russia’s invasion of Georgia. You had Putin’s Munich speech. And we very quickly entered into a period of sort of multipolarity where suddenly these promises weren’t being made anymore. And in particular, and the Balkans, slipped off the radar. There was a kind of a sense of, well, we don’t really have the time or the energy or the money to deal with the Balkans anymore. Let’s just leave it as it is and hope that it just stays like that forever. So the promise of future prosperity and peace was no longer convincing to the people on the ground. And what they were left with then was stagnation. And when you have a stagnant society that doesn’t think we’re going to join the European Union or even NATO in many circumstances, then where are we going to go? And that kind of anger at the the fact that their hopes hadn’t materialized, what they’d been promised hadn’t materialized, leads obviously to populist demagogues like Vucic and other people in the Balkans who were able to say, look, you were lied to. We should talk about the past because we suffered this terrible injustice. We, the Serbs, were attacked by you know Islamists and you know capitalists. The West came to get us because we were standing up for our rights, etc, etc. And that argument, though nonsense, is very convincing. If you’re an 18-year-old living in Novi Sad and you’ve got no prospects of getting a job and the idea of joining the European Union is impossible to imagine, and that then stokes this fire of nationalism again. And you can see that not just in the Balkans, throughout Europe, you know, nationalists have capitalized on people’s um anger at the fact that the promises that were made to them in that period of unipolarity haven’t materialized. And as a result, then, you know, all those people who suffered so terribly in the 1990s, their suffering is not just ignored. It’s also been kind of willfully misused, by these nationalists who are saying, look what happened to person X, Y and Z. Our suffering was greater than their suffering. In July this year, when I was in Sarajevo for the 30th anniversary of the Srebrenica genocide, there was a graffiti in the center of Belgrade at exactly the same time saying that the only genocide that happened in the Balkans was the genocide against the Serbs. Now, there was no genocide against the Serbs in the 1990s, but this was scrawled across a very prominent building in the center of Belgrade. And of course, people believe it. You know, we, the Serbs, suffered genocide in the 1990s. And these nationalist demagogues then use that bitterness and anger to perpetuate these these lies. And the truth is attacked from all sides, really. And you get back into that kind of… bear pit of “you did this and I did that and you did this, et cetera, et cetera”. And, that is food for the nationalists. That’s what they want people to talk about.

20:05: Dominic Bowen: What are the long-term demographic and social consequences of the displacement, of the migration, of the Srebrenica genocide, the rape camps set up by the Serbian forces in Bosnia and the children that were born of war that that are alive today?  What are the social consequences? You know, I’ve spoken to a few people about this. And as a human, I find it so difficult to imagine how a community, how a person, how a family moves on from that, even if it was 30 years ago. There are things that are lived and felt today because of that?

20:32: Oh yeah, I mean, I don’t know how some people manage to live where they live, given what happened. I mean, in Srebrenica there are Serbs, predominating in that part of Bosnia, so that the memorial centre at Potichari to the Srebrenica genocide is surrounded by Republika Srpska. And the people who… live in Republic of Srpska, the overwhelming majority of those people deny that that genocide happened, which is a very, very unusual dynamic. I mean, most places where I’ve gone to see, you know, visit sites of atrocity crimes or memorials to battles and things like that tend to be within a community that at least accepts that it happened. But it’s not the case with the Srebrenica Memorial Center. And I remember speaking to one of the people that works there and she said that sometimes they get Serbs from Serbia visiting, but they’ve never had a Serb from Republika Srpska come to the Memorial Center. Which again is extraordinary. And you think, what are these people thinking as they drive past the memorial centre or cycle past the memorial centre every day, that this is all a huge lie? And of course, what do the people who know that it isn’t a lie, who know that their children or their parents are buried there are still buried somewhere in the region, they don’t know where their bodies are, what how do they feel living in a community where the Serbs simply don’t accept that they’re they they parents, children, whatever, were actually killed. And it’s a very, very unusual dynamic.  And certainly in Kosovo as well, when you go around Pristina, there isn’t any Serbs, really. You go to Prisir and there really isn’t any Serbs. The Serbian areas in Kosovo are still very much like um little enclaves. Now, the Serbian populated parts of Kosovo south of the river Ibar, like Gracinitsa, the Serbs there tend to be much more integrated with Kosovo than the Serbs and in the four northern municipalities. But there is still a sense of that, you know, the the integration hasn’t really worked. 26 years on, you know, the Serbs that live in Gratchnice still largely just talk to each other. Now, the Serbs that live in the four northern municipalities of Kosovo are much, much more divided, as exemplified by the the bridge across the the the river in Mitrovica. So when you when you see that 26 years on and, you know, whatever it is, 30 years on in Bosnia, it does, I think, say an awful lot about the human condition. It does tend to make you quite pessimistic, I think, about us as a species. But also, and I think this is something that I always try to emphasize to my students, is that in both Bosnia and Kosovo, the most ambitious post-conflict reconstruction missions ever launched took place in both Bosnia and Kosovo. And yet still 25, 30 years later, granted there hasn’t been the outbreak of war, renewed fighting, but still, we’re not really close to genuine reconciliation or anything approaching inter-ethnic integration on on on a massive scale. And that has to say something again about the way in which the the state building community, if you want to call it that, behaved in the 90s and the early 2000s and in the limits of what we think we can do in the liberal West when it comes to sort of reconstructing communities. And all the ideas that we have about transitional justice and democratization and all that, I think, have to be questioned when you see how divided Kosovo is and how divided Bosnia is as well.

23:30: Dominic Bowen: I mean, the the Balkans certainly taught us that a late or a divided response to conflict or threats of conflict really raises the human and the the political costs of supporting a population. And yet, 25, 30 years later, we still see that early and credible commitments are actually still rare. But I wonder, Aidan, if you were producing an intervention checklist when politicians should intervene, what are the triggers that should compel action? And what are the tools, whether it’s sanctions, safe area enforcement, arms control, deployment of troops, what are most likely to have the best impact?

24:03: Aidan Hehir: Well, certainly I think by the time you have to send in the troops, it’s almost too late. And you know, there have been a number of times over the years where I think it’s been necessary to use force to stop a government from massacring its own people. That certainly is the case. But when it reaches that point, the positions of the different parties have become so entrenched, it’s almost impossible to… you might be able to stop the fighting, but it’s what you do next is the problem. So really the key is early intervention the key is to try to engage communities at an early stage and try to determine really what are the kind of the pressure points what could compel you know people to disassociate themselves from nationalist leaders who do want war there are a number of people in the balkans who absolutely would do want there to be renewed conflict, you know. um But what do you do? How do you stop people from supporting those kinds of groups? And I think at the end of the day, the obvious um first port of call is sanctions. And that can take the form of you know monetary sanctions, but also isolating individuals, as Fucic and Dodek and people like them have, you know, um escalated a rhetoric, have started, you know, from 2012 onwards, started to talk in particular ways about Kosovo and Bosnia. It should have been jumped on immediately. Serbia is surrounded by the European Union and NATO. So it’s very vulnerable. um Now, it has a kind of a friendship with with Russia, but what is Russia going to do? Russia isn’t really economically in a position to pour loads of money into Serbia. China has, in the last few years, started to invest much more heavily in Serbia. But back in 2012, you know, I don’t think that was really feasible. Serbia can’t really exist or certainly can’t prosper if it is isolated from the rest of Europe. And that was something that should have been leveraged much more against the nationalists. As soon as Vucic came to power, there was that there was a very strong line taken that you know you there are certain things you can’t do, certain things you can’t say, and if you do those things, we will impose very punitive sanctions against you. And the idea of you joining European Union will just be negated completely. But it didn’t happen. And there was this idea that if we keep hugging him, Vucic will behave. But of course, the opposite happened. The more that, you know, Angela Merkel and other European leaders cheerily posed with Vucic every time he was elected, the more he thought, well, I seem to be able to get away with anything here, which again goes back to the broader international context, you know, they the unipolarity that gave way to multipolarity. Whenever that happens, the previous powers always try to kind of adjust themselves to the new system and generally make mistakes. They think that they can, you know, recalculate the foreign policy priorities and do so in a way that that sort of um doesn’t involve values anymore, but involves just sort of raw power politics. And the decision was made of we need to stop Russia’s incursion into the Balkans. Russia will target Serbia as the place it will, you know, get most leverage from. So let’s try to embrace Serbia and pull it away from Russia so that Russia doesn’t get a foothold in the Balkans. But, you know, that there was a logic to that. Of course, there was logic to that. But you can’t keep embracing Serbia to stop Russia getting a foothold in the Balkans. If Serbia is behaving like Russia in the Balkans. And that was the problem. And at a certain point, there should have been an alarm bell ringing where someone just said, OK, this is clearly not working. We have to stop it now. And I really, naively, as it turns out, um assumed that what was going to happen in September 2023, when the Banska attack happened in Kosovo, when a Serbian militia group murdered a police officer and then took refuge in a Serbian Orthodox monastery. And then it turned out that the leader of the militia group was the deputy leader of the Serbian List Party in Kosovo, who was very, very close ally of Vucic. You know, and so I kind of thought, there we go. That’s it now. It’s clear! Vucic is supporting violent uprising in Kosovo. But really, what happened? Within four months, Christopher Hill, the US ambassador to Serbia, said um Serbia is closer to NATO than Kosovo. Really? In what respects? You know, the this is utterly bizarre. Where where was the the punishment? Where were the sanctions? Where was the isolation? None of that happened. And ironically, perversely, Kosovo was sanctioned by the European Union. So I don’t think it takes much. I’m not one of those people, like you said, you weren’t either. I i don’t think that we you know people should have started to bomb Belgrade as soon as Vucic was elected or anything like that. That was not my position, but a much firmer line had to be taken. And certainly with a guy like Dodek as well in Republic of Srpska. There isn’t much substance to these types of figures. There’s a lot of talk and a lot of rhetoric and a lot of hot air, but they don’t really have much resources. And they’re very vulnerable because of that. And much more could have been done, but but but it hasn’t been done. And now we are where we are, unfortunately.

28:15: Dominic Bowen: And I’ll just take the opportunity to remind our listeners, for those of you that prefer to watch your podcast, the International Risk Podcast is now available on YouTube. So please go to YouTube and search for the International Risk Podcast and hit subscribe and like. Aidan, there was a really important concept called Responsibility to Protect, R2P. This was endorsed internationally in the early 2000s. It was asserted and used as justification to intervene in Libya in 2011. But really, it was neutered. It was it failed to achieve any traction during the Civil War, even though many, many people called for it to be done. Same in Burma, Myanmar, during attacks on civilians and genocide occurring along the border there. I think you’ve referred to this as as “hollow norms”. Can you talk to us? Is this something that’s salvageable? Because despite everything we’ve discussed, I think there is likely to be, hopefully not in our lifetime, but there will be further atrocities, there will be further attempts of genocide and and population displacement. Is the concept of responsibility to protect, that idea that foreign states can intervene into the domestic matters of another country, is that salvageable, or is it really just ah might makes right in 2025?

29:24: Aidan Hehir: The Responsibility Protect was explicitly created, as an attempt to stop any more Rwandas and Kosovo’s. The report was published in 2001 by the International Commission on Intervention of State Sovereignty says that, I think on the first page. We want no more Rwandas, we want no more Kosovo’s, and we think this report is the best way to achieve that. All very admirable. You know having gone through to the 1990s and seen not just in Kosovo and Rwanda or Bosnia, but other places around the world, people being slaughtered by their own governments, then clearly something did need to be done to change the way the international community responds to intrastate crises. But the Responsibility for Protect didn’t do that. It didn’t do anything, you know. And I wasted too many years of my life writing academic books and articles saying the same thing over and over again. You know Right from the beginning, I was thinking, how is this meant to work? And as things proceeded, it but when it was very obvious it wasn’t working, you know the my point was repeatedly, this is a slogan. You know It’s a very good slogan, and you can abbreviate it, and R2P sounds like something everybody can remember and say, but what does it actually do? The problem in the 1990s was that you had situations where there were mass atrocity crimes taking place inside countries where the government of that country was an ally of one of the permanent five members of the UN Security Council, in which case you couldn’t get legally sanctioned international action to stop that atrocity from taking place. So that’s one scenario where the perpetrator is a friend of one of the P5. The second scenario was a situation where none of the P5 actually wanted to get involved. And that’s really what happened in in Rwanda in 1994. You know, who cares about Rwanda? Who’s ever heard of the Tutsis, you know, it’s not a big issue for us. So they they’re slaughtering Tutsis. Nobody is marching in Paris or Berlin or London or or Washington saying, let’s help the poor Tutsis so we can ignore this one. So those two problems there of the P5 actively supports one of the belligerents or the P5 collectively don’t care. That was the problem that we faced. When Kofi Annan said in 1999, after class, something needs to be done, he said, we need to change the way we respond to these things. So those were the two problems. R2P didn’t address either of those problems. Responsibility Protect keeps the authorization of humanitarian intervention um within the UN Security Council. It explicitly says that when it was recognized in 2005 in paragraph 138 and 139, they clearly state that the UN Security Council is the sole power to authorize a humanitarian intervention and will only do so, (and it says that in in in the World Summit Outcome document(, “on a case-by-case basis”. Now, like I always say to my students, can you imagine if the police forces of the United Kingdom said, we will respond to cases of murder or mass rioting on a case-by-case basis? We would all be like, what does that mean? How can you possibly have any faith in in the enforcement of a legal system if it’s going to be done explicitly, selectively? So from 2005 on, when R2P was part of the international um political language, it was routinely invoked, routinely supported by states, but precisely because it was meaningless.

So you had countries like Sudan, North Korea, you know, absolute willful human rights violators cheerfully saying in the UN General Assembly, “yeah, yeah, we support, responsibly protect”. You had the United States saying we support the U.S. Responsibility to Protect as it supports its allies in you know slaughtering their own people as well. So it was just a meaningless slogan. What was required was actual substantive reform of the UN Security Council. And it didn’t happen. And now we’re in the situation that we can see today where there are, again, since 2005, how many times has there been, you mentioned some of them, obviously, how many times has there been situations, whether it was in Syria or Myanmar, or obviously in Gaza, where clearly there was a need to intervene, but there wasn’t the will to do so. And that the structure of the international legal order is heavily weighted in favor of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council. There is no impartial means by which humanitarian intervention can be launched. There is no force that can launch a humanitarian intervention apart from states. And therefore, we’re locked into the system whereby states are called upon to do the right thing, the moral thing. But states aren’t moral actors. You know, a state… has its own national interest, of course it does. Why would they, why should they get involved in other people’s conflicts? And you saw that in Bosnia and Kosovo. So they are always going to be selective about whether or not they get involved in these types of situations. And so long as the international legal order has lots of laws, has judicial mechanisms, but doesn’t have the actual capacity to coercively enforce its own laws in a consistent way. We are always going to be um faced with Rwanda, Srebrenica, Kosovo, Syria…

33:46: Dominic Bowen: And just briefly one question we always ask guests as we wrap up, Aidan, is when you look around the world, what are the international risks that concern you the most?

33:53: Aidan Hehir: The one that I would say I’m most concerned about because it seems to be the one that few people are actually speaking about is Kosovo. I think there are a number of international organizations that monitor looming crises. And some of them do occasionally talk about Kosovo, but most don’t. Now, there are obviously other cases of which are much more obviously fragile, possibly more fragile than Kosovo. But it’s because Kosovo has got so little attention that it’s the one that I’m most worried about. I also have, no problem saying I love Kosovo. I’m completely biased in favor of Kosovo. I’ve lost all objectivity when it comes to that. I have so many friends in Kosovo that I do have a personal interest in it as well. But for me, when you look at the timeline of what’s happened since 2012 in Kosovo, it seems very clear to me that Serbia is waiting for the opportunity to use force to take back um Kosovo, as it would see that. When Azerbaijan used force against Armenia in 2023, Vucic praised the Azerbaijani government and said “they’ve shown patience and they waited for the right opportunity to strike, and we need to do the same thing”. And that’s what he’s doing. He’s playing the long game. He’s waiting for the West to continue this appeasement um policy, to become more weak, to become more distracted, and eventually to strike again. And I don’t know what more evidence people want for that, because you have the rhetoric. Vucic has repeatedly said that the government of Kosovo is engaged in “ethnic cleansing” against the Kosovo Serbs without any evidence of support. There isn’t a single international body that would agree with him on that. But what he’s doing is he’s softening up Serbian public opinion for this notion that our poor Serbian brothers are being ethnically cleansed in Kosovo. So you’ve got that rhetoric. You also have the um obvious influx of arms from Serbia into the northern part of Kosovo. The Kosovo Serbs are very resilient, resourceful people, but they’re not growing their own weapons. They’re clearly getting them from Serbia. So you have the weapons flooding into Kosovo as well. And you’ve had the actual use of these weapons at least twice in the last two years. And you have the ongoing alliance between Vucic and Russia. And you can see what Russia did in Crimea. So it looks to me to be blindingly obvious that in the next couple of years there will be a conflict in Kosovo, sparked by aggressive Serbian nationalism. And, like I said, I love Kosovo, so my primary concern is for Kosovo, but I would also suggest and warn that it a conflict that starts in Kosovo will not finish in Kosovo.It’s highly, highly unlikely that something like that would not engulf other countries and spark violence elsewhere.

36:12: Dominic Bowen

Yeah, thanks very much for explaining that, Aidan, and thank you very much for coming on the International West podcast today.

36:17: Aidan Hehir: Thank you, Dominic.

36:19: Dominic Bowen

That was a really interesting and insightful conversation with Aidan Hehir. He’s a professor of international relations at the University of Westminster. Really appreciated hearing his thoughts on the current relations between Bosnia-Herzegovina and Serbia and the situation in Kosovo today, and to the extent that memories of the 1990 conflicts still impact the people and the international Risk landscape today. Please remember to view and subscribe to our content on YouTube. Today’s podcast was produced and coordinated by Melanie Meimoun. I’m Dominic Bowen, your host. Thanks very much for listening. We will speak again soon.

36:48: Elisa Garbil: Thank you for listening to this episode of the International Risk Podcast. For more episodes and articles, visit theinternationalriskpodcast.com, follow us on LinkedIn, Bluesky, and Instagram for the latest updates, and to ask your questions to our host, Dominic Bowen. See you next time!