The Media as a Tool of International Intervention: House of Cards

This book explores the role of external powers and international organisations in media assistance in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Through analysis of key documents, media reports and interviews with key participants it examines the main actors, their roles and the way in which they influenced the media and society.

Bosnia and Herzegovina remains one of the biggest experiments in international intervention in modern history. Media assistance, as well as international intervention, was an enormous project which involved many donors and recipient organisations, and large amounts of money, but it is just one of many countries where democratisation and state-building took place with little to no input from the local community. Since the mid-1980s, media assistance has been an integral part of international intervention used as a tool of democratisation in post-conflict countries and societies. The process is often led and created outside these countries and implemented by various international organisations, led by technocrats and dictated by the will of donors. The author uses the case study of Bosnia and Herzegovina to assess this in a broader context.

This volume will be of interest to scholars and students of Southeast Europe, international organisations, peace-building, and rebuilding society in post-war countries, as well as journalists and policy-makers.

Nidzara Ahmetasevic is a journalist, editor and researcher from Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina. She has been working in the media for over 20 years and she holds a PhD from the University of Graz, Austria. Her fields of interest are democratisation and media development in a post-conflict society, hate speech, transitional justice, media and political propaganda, human rights and migrations. She has received the AHDA Columbia University Fellowship, Chevening Scholarship, Ron Brown Fellowship for Young Professionals, UNICEF Keizo Obuchi Award, and Annenberg-Oxford Summer Media Policy Summer Institute Fellowship; she was short-listed for the European Press Prize in 2022; and Fetisov Journalism Award 2022 for ’Outstanding Contribution to Peace’. Her work has been featured in various media in the Balkans, as well as the New Yorker, Al Jazeera English online, The Observer, the Independent on Sunday, the International Justice Tribune, Der Spiegel, The Guardian, and Rolling Stone, among others. She was a speaker at the TEDx Talk in Krakow, Poland, and Personal Democracy Forum, 2017, Gdansk, Poland.