Post-conflict Europeanization and the war of meanings. The Challenges of EU Conditionality in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo - Miruna Troncota

"Stories have both the power to heal and to hurt the wounds of the past. Most often, when the war with the real weapons was over, another one was about to start - the cruel 'war of meanings', which targeted not the bodies, but the minds of people, with the main aim to deepen the gap between different ethnicities. In other words, in post-conflict countries each public narrative becomes a 'weapon'. Around this idea evolves the main red thread of the book, showing that the particularity of the post-conflict countries in the Western Balkans lays in the fact that different ethnicities attach contradictory meanings to the same political realities, which complicates the puzzle of post-conflict transformation in the context of the European Union integration process. For an external observer, like the author of this book, who is originally from Romania and focuses on the ex-Yugoslav space, this symbolic process of constructing 'parallel realities of political discourse' can raise multiple challenges. In my view, the most valuable contribution of this study is that it convincingly argues that policy narratives matter for an in-depth understanding of Europeanization in post-conflict settings. Moreover, it shows that in the particular cases of Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo they are essential units of analysis, as they become instruments of everyday policy making, where symbols are used as strategic tools for divisive agendas. In the end, the study shows that there is a need to pay more attention to policy narratives in analysing EU enlargement policy in the Western Balkans, particularly in the post-conflict societies, in order to unpack alternative conflict transformation strategies that would allow a sustainable reconciliation at the same time with full-fledged Europeanization. 
I strongly recommend this book as a relevant analytic tool for both scholars and policy makers interested in a critical approach towards the newly theorised concept of 'post-conflict Europeanization' proposed by Mrs Troncota, and illustrated with rich empirical material from field research insights from Kosovo and Bosnia."

Prof. Dr. Iordan Barbulescu 
Dean of the Department of International Relations and European Integration, SNSPA, Romania.