In the Western Balkans, capitalists and ethno-nationalists collaborate to seize and distribute mineral wealth, backed by the EU and other geopolitical actors. Their pragmatic strategies of parceling, swapping, and sacrificing land perpetuate a cartographically detached vision of ‘others’ as patterns to eradicate. In her contribution to the “Pluriverse of Peace” series, Mela Žuljević analyzes the power of maps in this context and she shows how private sector elites (and their political allies) use maps to reshape legacies of violence and advance processes of accumulation and extraction.
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The memoirs of international negotiators who led the peace talks in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH), such as Richard Holbrooke, reveal insights into the vision of the land that was instrumental in dividing the country. The negotiators describe the land as ‘important’ or ‘worthless’ and compare it to an ‘egg’ or a ‘pocket.’ They describe the frantic search for parcels of land to exchange as finding ‘something,’ ‘anything,’ or ‘nothing’ to give away or gain. At a pivotal moment in appeasing war criminal Slobodan Milošević by incorporating Republika Srpska into Bosnia’s borders, Holbrooke examined a 3D simulation of the Bosnian landscape and observed that there was “hardly anything to see on the screen –no houses or villages, just mountains and rocks.” These mountains and rocks, along with other uninhabited areas, were more easily sacrificed in the pursuit of peace.
Seeing, exchanging, and sacrificing land for ‘peace’
These US-centric narratives of peacemaking emphasize how land was considered valuable only when inhabited by the ‘right’ people and depicted on maps as easily identifiable, interconnected parcels. The search for these parcels spurred the development of cartography, making maps and terrain simulations central to peace negotiations. This led local and international scholars to describe the war as map-driven.
BiH was marked by a multiethnic patchwork: people inextricably mixed in cities, villages, houses and marriages. To achieve the ethno-territorial visions entrenched in the history of international diplomacy, negotiators divided the land into stereotypically colored areas on maps: red for Serbs, green for Bosniaks, and blue for Croats. The peace talks concentrated on a cartographic fix: creating a map that everyone would be happy with, which they believed would end the war. The search for a solution had real consequences, amplifying ethnic cleansing as warring factions sought to eradicate mixed communities shaped by long coexistence. This leads you to recall: Peace agreements and maps are not visions of peace but divisions of territory and exchanges of land gained through violence.
Historically, map language was used to transform territorial and resource conquests into a matter of competing national and ethnic justice. However, the colonial vision of land as empty and worthless, ready to be taken, is fundamental to the logic of capitalist land accumulation and the territorial expansion of ethno-nationalist movements. In postwar BiH, the ethno-nationalist oligarchy seized and consolidated the divided land as ethnic property through neoliberal peacebuilding and transition, which dismantled societal property and converted it into private capital. Recently, these oligarchs have partnered with foreign capital to map the land once again, surveying the ‘worthless’ mountains for their mineral value and dividing rivers and forests into ethnic landscapes to facilitate exploitation. These partnerships benefit from the territorial division established by the Dayton Peace Agreement, as new extractive projects build on the war spoils that the agreement legitimized.
The legacy of violence for new extractions
After peace was finally brokered in Dayton, Ohio, in 1995, the Inter-Entity Boundary Line (IEBL) was drawn to divide BiH into two entities: the ‘Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina’ (FBiH) and the ‘Republika Srpska’ (RS). The IEBL was drawn according to ethnic and military criteria. However, it did not correspond with any historical or natural divisions of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Imposing these criteria on the complex spatial reality of Bosnia and Herzegovina meant that the line would divide cities, neighborhoods, and streets. It also cut through forests, mountains, rivers, and all the land deemed ‘worthless’ on the map. The DPA completely transformed regional development and local administration to run along ethnic lines. This led to the creation of new municipalities, divided land use regulations, parallel energyscapes, and the division of water systems.
Tracking how postwar elites reshape legacies of violence, such as the IEBL, reveals the mechanisms by which warfare establishes orders that perpetuate new processes of accumulation and extraction. These orders are embedded with the vision of land as something to parcel, swap, and sacrifice, making territorial division useful for implementing major construction, energy, and mining projects. Elites and investors use the IEBL to circumvent or ignore administrative, legal, and ethical procedures. For example, the IEBL benefits those who exploit forests. Illegal logging occurs more frequently around the line due to reduced supervision of this ‘peripheral’ land. In Ruište, near Mostar, loggers from both entities plunder the forest. However, there are also ‘legal’ mechanisms through which more powerful loggers exploit the complex territorial division of BiH. Construction companies are developing luxury apartment projects on Trebević Mountain, which the IEBL has divided into two entities and two categories of protected areas. These projects often involve political and economic elites from both entities who trade land access in quid pro quo arrangements. For example, companies backed by political figures in the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina develop forestland in the Republika Srpska, aided by local authorities who grant permits and waive environmental regulations.
Politics of boundary conflicts
The exchange logic extends to hydropower projects. According to activists in the Neretva Valley, political elites reached a silent agreement to allow each other to construct hydropower plants on both sides of the IEBL-intersected river. The Republika Srpska government approved the construction of the Ulog hydropower plant next to the IEBL, which will have devastating effects on the Neretva River downstream in FBiH. The construction project benefits from its location in a depopulated, peripheral area of the Republika Srpska where activists in the FBiH have limited legal recourse. The investor claims that future hydropower plants in FBiH will mitigate the damage, which gives the authorities there grounds to inflate the value of their part of the exchange.
When the IEBL was drawn up, the Dayton cartographers used pens whose size translated to a 50 to 100-meter-wide boundary area in the actual terrain. In follow-up negotiations, a commission was established to define the precise line and resolve property disputes. However, in many uninhabited areas, the line remains imprecise to this day. This issue reaches absurd levels in the case of foreign investment in hydropower plants on the Ugar River, which crosses between entities. An energy company from Austria received permits in the Republika Srpska and benefited from its legislation even though some of its hydropower plant facilities extend into the other entity. The mobilization of the territorial division goes both ways, from exploiting the IEBL’s ambiguity to claiming exclusive ethno-nationalist rights to extraction. Recently, a major hydropower plant project in the Republika Srpska was declared a vital entity interest in order to designate rivers as ethnic landscapes defined by the IEBL, which would classify them as ‘inner territorial waters’ of the Republika Srpska.
As private sector elites (and their political allies) continue to exchange and trade in order to extract and accumulate wealth under the guise of ethnic justice, they also continue to view portions of land as worthless and expendable. For example, when forest land in Vareš was sold to the mining company Adriatic Metals from UK at an extremely low price, the prime minister of the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina claimed that this area would remain “useless scrubland” if not for this “promising investment.” Critical raw material exploration, such as lithium exploration in Majevica Mountain, occurs in areas that Holbrooke saw as ‘worthless.’ Postwar extractive projects redefine and claim land designated as state property, including forests, mountains, and bodies of water, to transfer common goods into entity or private ownership. They justify this as a vital ethno-interest, claiming that land gains more value by becoming entity property. As in Dayton, designating land as ‘worthless’ makes it easier to swap and sacrifice.
Cartography of resources and countercartographies in the making
Over the last decade, the renewable and ‘green’ mining sector has increased in the Western Balkans and has been integrated into land-grabbing processes. Cartography is a useful tool for the accelerated search for resources; however, it is also constitutive of the processes of resource-making. Maps literally create resources by producing knowledge about them, converting them into spatial data and legends while representing them as separate from their context. They have the power to depict humans, landscapes, and nature as divisible into categories rather than as integrated and dependent on each other. Maps visualize resources as torn from their surroundings and ready to be extracted. A recent EU-funded study of critical raw materials in the Western Balkans produced a map that projects the land as rich in resources yet empty and without barriers to extraction.
In the Western Balkans, capitalists and ethno-nationalists collaborate to quickly grab and distribute mineral wealth, supported by the EU and other geopolitical players. Their pragmatic strategies of parceling, swapping, and sacrificing land perpetuate a cartographically detached vision of ‘others’ as patterns to eradicate and of their land as empty. However, cartography can also expose this logic. As David Harvey says, “The power to map the world in one way rather than another is a crucial tool in political struggles.” The landscapes silenced in the war and postwar maps of BiH reappear as valuable sites, but also sites of struggle. These struggles are shaped by histories of extraction and violence, both brutal and slow. In BiH, political elites discredit resistance to extractive projects by labeling it ethnically motivated and claiming that it is co-opted by enemies of the entity’s interests. They fear that the protests are uniting people across entity lines and forming cross-border movements of resistance.
These movements are multiethnic and led by local communities, bringing together different identities and classes in a political project that includes environmental activists, scientists, farmers, and miners. The invisibilization of these pluriverses on maps is similar to the cartographic absence of landscape relations. Dominant visions actively produce both as nonexistent. To resist the colonial vision of land, we must expose how it legitimizes and mobilizes geospatial legacies of war, profits, and violence in postwar extractions. But maps also provide tools to articulate latent connections and navigate the hurdles that hinder the pluriverse as a political project. Countercartographies allow us to develop a complex vision necessary to understand the layers and histories that unite those affected by war and environmental harm. They can help us see the central conjunctions of pluriverses of peace.