The reform, reconstruction and restructuring of the criminal justice field in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) since 1995 has taken place in a specific local historical and political context. This chapter sketches out the most relevant contextual factors from the country's history, concentrating on the period from 1944, when it was reintegrated into a second Yugoslav state, its experience of the disintegration of that state, and the post-war political settlement and structures of government. The context of multiple and overlapping transitions developed in this chapter is key to understanding the ongoing development of criminal justice structures in a country with a highly complex framework of governance. Before locating BiH in the context of the second Yugoslav state, some pertinent features of its pre-1944 history are discussed, below.

A long history of Bosnia would include a period of fragile and emerging statehood in the late medieval period in which the pendulum swings between centrifugal and centripetal tendencies of the kind observed elsewhere by Elias (1994: particularly 195 ff, for the manifestation of this in BiH, see Malcolm 1996: 13–27; Ibrahimagić 1998: 71–76). For parts of this period Bosnia was a multiconfessional society, and Catholic, Eastern Orthodox and domestic variants of Christianity were found at Court (Malcolm 1996: 17, 23, Fine 2002: 4), but the combination of the absence of a unifying Church and a mountainous landscape contributed to localism, instability, and vulnerability to external intervention (Fine 1987: 454). Pressed by competing interests, particularly the Hungarian Kingdom to the north and the expanding Ottoman Empire to the south, Bosnia and Herzegovina were fully incorporated into the latter upon the fall of Jajce in 1528, but continued to exist as a territorial unit until 1929 when, as part of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, it was divided across four Banovine. These divisions were revised in 1939, and during the course of the Second World War (1941– 1944) BiH was divided again, this time between zones of Italian and German interest within the German sponsored Independent State of Croatia (NDH). Only in the founding stages of Yugoslavia's second historic manifestation did Bosnia and Herzegovina regain territorial recognition as one of the country's six constituent republics (see map 2.1).