On Nov. 21, 1995, in the conference room of the Hope Hotel on the Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio, the leaders of Bosnia-Herzegovina, Serbia and Croatia initialed an agreement that brought the three-and-a-half-year war in Bosnia to an end. Three weeks later, the General Framework Agreement, known as the Dayton Peace Accords, was signed.

The war over Bosnia was the most brutal and devastating of the wars spawned by the dissolution of Yugoslavia. Attacked from the moment it moved toward independence in early 1992 by militias supported by the neighboring nations of Croatia and Serbia, Bosnia was born under fire and nearly perished. Half of its population of 4.4 million were forcefully displaced, and over 100,000 people died during the conflict.

Ethnic cleansing and war crimes marked the war, including the Srebrenica genocide of July 1995, in which more than 8,000 Bosniak victims were murdered by the army of Republika Srpska.

The peace agreed to at Dayton left Bosnia, or Bosnia and Herzegovina as it is known in full, intact as a country but divided into two entities, Republika Srpska – a secessionist entity proclaimed by ethnonationalist Serbs in January 1992 – and the Bosnian Federation. Meanwhile, an international military force was deployed to secure the peace.

But it was an ugly peace: The patient was saved, but left deformed and weak. As scholars who have written extensively about the Bosnian war and its aftermath, we believe the legacy of the Dayton Peace Accords, 30 years on, is decidedly mixed.

Bosnia’s life after Dayton can be divided into three roughly decade-long eras: reconstruction, stalemate and permanent crisis.

The first decade was the toughest but most hopeful. With peace enforced by an international force including U.S. and Russian troops, Bosnians returned to their war-shattered country.

But restoring the country’s social fabric proved hard. While the international community aspired to reverse ethnic cleansing, the obstacles were immense.

A once proudly multicultural country was left divided into separate ethno-territories.

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