Explaining History Podcast

Dayton Agreement (1995)

Explaining History Podcast

Dayton Agreement (1995)

Reading time:

1–2 minutes

Full Description

The peace agreement that ended the Bosnian War, initialled at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio in November 1995 and signed in Paris in December. It established Bosnia and Herzegovina as a single state with two entities — the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina (Bosniak-Croat) and Republika Srpska (Serb) — each with substantial autonomy. NATO forces were deployed to implement the military provisions. The agreement ended the war but institutionalised ethnic separation and created a state that has remained dysfunctional.

Critical Perspective

The Dayton Agreement has been called a peace that ended a war without resolving a conflict. By creating ethnically defined entities with their own governments and armies, it rewarded ethnic cleansing — the political goal of ethnic separation was achieved, with only the method (mass murder and expulsion) condemned. The agreement was designed to stop the killing rather than to create a viable state, and Bosnia has consequently spent thirty years trapped between ethnic nationalism and dysfunctional governance.

Explaining History

Explaining History Podcast

For more than a decade, the Explaining History Podcast has helped listeners around the world make sense of modern history. What began in 2012 as a simple experiment—short, accessible episodes explaining major historical events—has grown into a long-running library of carefully researched, thoughtful explorations of the 20th and 21st centuries.

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