How did Chechnya fall into radical Islamism while Bosnia & Herzegovina, despite being under even more direct support by Islamists and Jihadists than Chechnya, stayed a secular state?

part 1

/u/kaisermatias is probably best for explaining the situation in Chechnya but aside the specifics of religiosity in Bosnia (which I'll get to) one of the major reasons for a very different outcome is that the political structure of Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) is the outcome of Dayton Agreement, also known as the General Framework Agreement for Peace in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Brokered by the international community with representatives from the US, France, Germany, the European Union and so forth present, the aim of the Dayton Agreement was and still remains to preserve a multi-ethnic, multi-religious, secular political structure in BiH by instituting a highly complex political structure in BiH and giving the international community in form of the office of the High Representative immense political power.

With the NATO bombing campaign against the Republika Srpska and the success of Croatian Operation Storm in the summer of 1995, the Republika Srpska (the Serbian part of BiH) signaled their willingness to negotiate peace and through brokerage of the international community, the accords were signed at Dayton, Ohio in November 1995. With it, BiH's status as a multi-ethnic, multi-religious, and secular state were established by imposing the internal political division that is present in BiH to this day.

And here is where it gets complicated: The state known as Bosnia and Herzegovina is technically speaking the Federal parliamentary Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH for short, which I'll continue to use throughout this post). So, according to Dayton and some further agreements, BiH has a president elected directly by the people (we'll get to some specifics), a government formed under a prime minister from a federal parliament with two chambers, a fairly usual judiciary with a Constitutional Court but also with a special Human Rights Chamber operating until 2003, and the High Representative for Bosnia and Herzegovina, a special office created by Dayton (we'll come to him too soon).

But that is not all. BiH is constitutionally comprised of two seperate state-like entities that form the country as a whole: The Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, which – unsurprisingly is a federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina – and the already mentioned Republika Srpska (RS). The Federation represents the Bosnian Muslims and Croat Bosnian parts of the population and according to the Dayton agreement controls 51% of the countries territory and the RS controls the remaining 49%. The Federation itself is – like BiH – a federation comprised of 10 autonomous cantons. While since 2005 BiH has its own army – before that the Federation and the RS had their own set of armed forces – in pretty much everything else the Federation and the RS are separate: Each have their own government, parliament, supreme court, flag and coat of arms, police force, customs, and postal system.

I already mentioned the Cantons in the Federation but it is important that while these follow a "classical" federal structure more closely related to a form that we are related with, they too have their own governments, prime ministers, agencies, and so forth. These Cantons are further divided in municipalities. The RS is directly divided into municipalities without any further cantons.

Also, speaking of the president of BiH, that isn't just one person. Rather it's three. During the four year term the chair of presidency rotates among the three members (a Bosniak, a Serb, and a Croat) every 8 months. These members are elected directly (the Bosniak and the Croat from the Federation, the Serb from the RS) and they serve as a collective head of state with their most important functions being proposing a budget and being actively involved in foreign policy.

So, to recap, Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) is a country with a three members collective presidency, a two chamber parliament, and one federal constitutional court. This country is at the same time comprised of two political entities ("entities" being the exact terminology used in the Dayton agreement as to not imply they are states): The Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina and the Republika Srpska, each of them with their own parliament, their own prime minister, and supreme court and corresponding internal administrative and political structure. In addition to that, the Federation is also comprised of 10 Cantons, each of which also has its own government and prime minister. So, you have a country with 3 million inhabitants and a bit smaller than West Virginia that has a three person presidency, three supreme courts, 13 parliaments – one of which with two chambers with proportional representation – and 13 prime ministers.

And this is where the Office of the High Representative in Bosnia and Herzegovina resp. the High Representative comes into place. Because if the above sounds to you like a recipe for girdlock, that's because it is. And the Western powers who hammered out Dayton agreed on that. So not only did they created the High Representative as a position to oversee the implementation of Dayton, they also granted the position powers that can best be described (and have been various times) as dictatorial. The High Representative can adopt binding legal decisions if he feels that local parties are unwilling to act and he can remove from office public officials who violate legal commitments or, in general, the Dayton Agreement. And the High Representative also uses these powers, having until 2004 dismissed a total of 139 officials, including judges, ministers, civil servants and members of parliaments, sometimes freezing their bank account in the process.

The High Representative's decisions can not be appealed and he is also not elected by the people of BiH but rather is only responsible to the Peace Implementation Council, an international body with steering members from Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia, United Kingdom, United States, the Presidency of the European Union, European Commission, and the Organization of the Islamic Conference, which is represented by Turkey. Past high representatives in chronological order were Carl Bildt, former first conservative prime minister of Sweden; Carlos Westendorp, Spanish Diplomat; Wolfgang Petritsch, Austrian diplomat; Paddy Ashdown, British Lib Dem politician; Christian Schwarz-Schilling, German conservative politician; Miroslav Lajčák, Social Democrat Slovak foreign minister; and currently Valentin Inzko, Austrian diplomat.

Critics of the Dayton agreement, especially from within BiH, have contended that Dayton might have helped end the war in Bosnia but has essentially turned the country into an international protectorate that for all its complicated internal political structure is essentially ruled by the international community.

And while that criticism is certainly valid to an extent, the deeper running problem, especially with Dayton now approaching almost a quarter century of being in effect is the issue that the way the state of BiH was set-up cements the categorization of nationalities that intially played such a huge role in the conflict. In essence, the specific structure that is based upon national categories like Croatians, Bosniaks, and Serbs prevents the inhabitants of BiH to develop any sort of civic nationalism or positive relationship with the central state because the only group that at this point can claim as their "own" but not wholly is the Bosniaks while Croatians and Serbians constantly look to Croatia and Serbia for their interests too: Dayton is the conflict not resolved but frozen in place.

At the same time, it has also prevented extremists of anyone side gaining an upper hand, including those who'd have supported some sort of jihadist policies. It is however important to emphasize here that for all intents and purposes, mujahideen and international jihadists never had an overly massive presence in Bosnia during the war and that Bosnian Muslim religious practice has a very different tradition from other Muslim areas of the world.

Estimates of the number of Islamist volunteers in Bosnia during the war of the 90s vary widely, as widely as 500-5000, though most serious studies such as those of the International Crisis Group and the Center for Strategic and International Studies put the number somewhere in between 1000-2000. ARBiH did establish a detachment of foreign fighters during the war, El Mudžahid, which was attached to ARBiH's 7th Muslim Brigade under Mahmut Karalić. However, as the ICTY found during its case against Enver Hadžihasanović, the chief of staff or ARBiH, the relationship was not so much one of subordination but rather, almost outright hostility. According to witnesses, the only way to control El Mudžahid was to threaten them with attack rather than order them anything.

And this wasn't exactly the only way relationships between the foreign volunteers and the Bosniak natives were fraught. Radical extresmists such as Al-Queda, which sent some of their people to join the El Mudžahid would often clash with Bosniaks over their lax(er) interpretation of Muslim practices. While Muslim religion especially during the war became an important part of Bosniak identity, to this day 54% of Bosniaks identify as "non-denomiational Muslim" and many religious practices common in other countries, from Hijabs to the prohibition of alcohol, are not observed or only observed by a comparatively small part of the community.