Explained | Peace without power: Why Gaza risks becoming another Bosnia?

The proposed Gaza peace plan mirrors Bosnia’s post-war settlement: violence may stop, but real power would remain in foreign hands, with little democratic accountability. Bosnia’s experience shows that peace imposed from above brings stability without justice and leaves societies trapped, not free.

Photo Credit: IANS

When the outlines of the new Gaza peace plan began to surface, the sense of déjà vu was hard to ignore. For anyone who has lived in Bosnia and Herzegovina over the past three decades, the language was familiar, the structure recognisable, and the warning signs impossible to miss.

The plan promises an end to violence. But it also builds a system of permanent external supervision, a form of peace that stops war while denying people real power over their own future. Bosnia knows this model well. It has been living with it since 1995.

Peace negotiated about people, not with them

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The war in Bosnia ended with the Dayton Accords, negotiated at a US military base and brokered by foreign diplomats. Leaders of the warring sides signed the agreement, along with representatives of neighbouring states that had fuelled the conflict. Ordinary citizens were shut out entirely.

That same logic underpins the Gaza plan. Decisions are being made over Palestinians’ heads, justified as necessary for stability, order and “best international standards”. Bosnians have heard this phrase for 30 years. To this day, no one has clearly explained what those standards actually mean.

What they produced in Bosnia was not sovereignty, but a semi-protectorate.

A state designed from the outside

Dayton froze wartime divisions into the foundations of the state. Bosnia and Herzegovina was split into two entities, Republika Srpska and the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, alongside the separate Brčko District. Power was scattered across layers of institutions, while the central state was left deliberately weak.

The country’s political structure looks democratic on paper, with a Council of Ministers and a rotating three-member Presidency, each member representing one of the three dominant ethnic groups. But these bodies do not hold ultimate authority.

Bosnia’s constitution itself symbolises this problem. It was written in English by international mediators and included as an annexe to the peace agreement. It was never drafted by Bosnian citizens. Even today, there is no official version in local languages.

Who really governs Bosnia?

Real power lies with the international community, exercised through two bodies, the Office of the High Representative (OHR) and the Peace Implementation Council (PIC).

The high representative, always a European politician, has sweeping authority. They can impose or annul laws and remove elected officials from office without any legal challenge. Bosnians have never been told what qualifications are required for this role, nor how someone can wield such power without accountability.

The PIC, made up of 55 representatives from governments and international organisations, including NATO, the EU and the OSCE, oversees the high representative. Its decisions are driven by the interests of its members and announced through press statements. Citizens cannot question them. Journalists cannot interview PIC members about their decisions.

Gaza’s proposed governance looks familiar

The governing structure planned for Gaza echoes this model closely. At the top sits a “Board of Peace”, chaired by US President Donald Trump, with states able to buy membership for $1bn. Beneath it are two executive boards: one of US officials and businessmen, the other of Western and regional representatives.

Below them is a technocratic administration of “qualified Palestinians and international experts”. Like Bosnia’s institutions, these bodies would operate above local authority while claiming neutrality and expertise.

The result is governance without democratic control.

Stability at the cost of change

In Bosnia, foreign oversight has survived not only through international power but through cooperation with local elites. Political actors willing to maintain the status quo have been rewarded with access to power. Those pushing for deeper reform have been marginalised.

This arrangement discourages change and produces a donor-dependent civil society, active, visible and tightly managed. Criticism of international institutions is often framed as a threat to peace itself.

That logic has had real consequences. In 1997, NATO forces intervened against the public broadcaster of Republika Srpska, cutting its signal at the request of the OHR. The justification was the need to enforce “international norms of professional media conduct”.

The mindset remains. In December, marking 30 years since Dayton, the current high representative, Germany’s Christian Schmidt, warned that “some today point the finger at the international community and its representatives, refusing to remember that without international intervention, as late as it came, Bosnia and Herzegovina would have descended into chaos and despair.”

He described Dayton as “the basis for the future”, though “not the future itself”, and called vaguely for “action” instead of “complaining”, without saying who should act or how.

When people tried to reclaim democracy

Bosnia has not been passive. In 2014, protests erupted in Tuzla and spread to more than 20 cities in a matter of days. Workers led the demonstrations. Citizens occupied public buildings, held open assemblies and put forward political demands.

For a short time, people experienced democracy outside the foreign-controlled framework.

The response was repression, silence and indifference. The international community watched but did not engage. When exhaustion and pressure ended the protests, nothing changed institutionally.

One trace remains. On the façade of the Sarajevo Canton building, graffiti still reads: “Those who sow hunger reap wrath.”

The long aftermath

What followed was an exodus. Nearly 500,000 people have left Bosnia since 2014. Many more are waiting for the chance. Nationalism, once a wartime ideology, has become a tool of everyday governance, used by local elites and tolerated, even stabilised, by international actors.

As Sarajevo-based feminist authors Gorana Mlinarević and Nela Porobić wrote in Peace That Is Not, peace “neither starts nor ends with the signing of a peace agreement”. They argued that Bosnia’s imposed peace has weighed down its political, economic and social life for decades.

The same burden now threatens Gaza.

Peace is more than the absence of war

Ask most Bosnians whether the Dayton agreement was a success, and they will say it stopped the war. That is true. But peace that halts violence without delivering freedom and dignity is not real peace.

Imposed peace creates stability without justice and governance without democracy. Bosnia’s semi-protectorate is not a model to copy; it is a warning.

Bosnia cannot be undone. Gaza can be approached differently. That requires involving Palestinians directly, giving them real power over decisions, and treating democracy as more than a technical problem to be managed from the outside.

Anything less risks repeating a familiar story, one where peace exists on paper, while frustration, inequality and silence grow underneath.