When Vladimir Putin met with Milorad Dodik at a diplomatic forum in Sochi on October 2, 2025, he greeted him as “President Dodik.” This moment drew attention because two weeks prior, after months of resisting arrest for refusing to comply with а mandated removal, Dodik stepped down from his post as President of Republika Srpska as a deal to avoid prison time. Yet at this meeting, Dodik shook Putin’s hand, assured Republika Srpska’s support for Russia, and spoke of agreements made at a recent meeting with the Minister of Foreign Affairs. For someone who was out of office, Dodik was still acting very much in charge.
Dodik’s continued visibility is not just about one man’s political defiance. It exposes a deeper structural challenge within Bosnia and Herzegovina: the very ethnic quotas and deep decentralization that were arranged to end conflict also made the state susceptible to nationalist capture and extra-constitutional influence.
Bosnia and Herzegovina’s postwar framework was designed to stop violence. The Dayton Accords froze the frontlines of war into the borders of governance, creating two entities: the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Republika Srpska (plus the semi-autonomous Brčko District). Each entity has extensive autonomy, controlling its own policing, courts, and budget. At the state level, Bosnia is led by a three-member presidency—one Bosniak, one Croat, and one Serb—each elected by voters from their respective ethnic groups. Those outside of these groups are designated as ostali, or “others”, and cannot serve in or vote for the highest offices (a system repeatedly condemned by the European Court of Human Rights).
The intent of such power-sharing was to prevent renewed conflict by ensuring guaranteed representation for each ethnic community. But instead of transcending wartime divisions, the political system institutionalized them, making national politics a perpetual negotiation between competing ethnic elites. Compromise is often viewed as betrayal, with concessions framed as selling out the community. As a result, parties now compete less over ideas and policy, and more over who best “defends” their group’s identity.
It is important to emphasize that the problem is not ethnic diversity itself, but the way institutions are structured to manage it. Comparative research on diverse societies finds that when political rules tie representation to ethnic categories, leaders have incentives to mobilize along those same lines. The result is narrower voter choice, weaker vertical accountability, and asymmetric delivery of public goods.
Within such frameworks, leaders like Dodik flourish. His political survival depends less on good governance and more on reinforcing the narratives that sustain his power: that Bosnia is a failed experiment by the international community, that Republika Srpska is under threat from Sarajevo, that the Serb people are trapped in Bosnia, and so on. By operating within a system that treats belonging as political currency, his nationalist and secessionist messaging both draws from and deepens Bosnia’s structural problems.
Even after stepping down from the presidency, Dodik continues to shape Republika Srpska politics through his party, the Alliance of Independent Social Democrats (SNSD), and through a tight circle of loyalists in local government and state media. Recognition from foreign leaders, including Vladimir Putin and Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić, further reinforces his legitimacy at home, even in defiance of Bosnia’s federal authorities. These parallel networks allow him to bypass formal state structures while maintaining real influence, highlighting how personal power can outlast institutional checks in a fragmented system.
This is not to say that the framework put into place by the Dayton accords failed to anticipate that a strongman might exploit ethnic tensions for political gain. In fact, Dodik’s removal was made possible directly because of the laws outlined by the accords. The problem was enforcement: Bosnia’s decentralized system gave Republika Srpska enough autonomy that Dodik could rely on local institutions and security forces to block federal action. When state police moved to arrest Dodik for defying orders from the High Representative, local police units physically blockaded him, rendering a court order effectively unenforceable.
That standoff exposes a basic contradiction: constitutional authority can exist in theory while power on the ground answers to different, often local, loyalties. Bosnia’s experience fits a broader pattern seen in other post-conflict, identity-based settlements. After 2003, Iraq’s division of power among Shia, Sunni, and Kurdish elites produced parallel administrations and armed groups that often bypassed Baghdad. Lebanon’s ethnoreligious quota system has preserved peace at the cost of creating party leaders that are more powerful than the state itself. In all three cases, agreements meant to stabilize violence created institutional openings for leaders to operate beyond constitutional limits.
As Bosnia seeks closer ties with the European Union, these enforcement gaps have become harder to ignore. EU integration requires a more unified, functional state, but Bosnia’s fragmented system undermines national coherence and leaves its entities vulnerable to competing external agendas. Leaders like Dodik exploit these weaknesses, using nationalist rhetoric and foreign backing to consolidate personal power while obstructing change. Without institutional reform to centralize authority and weaken ethnic patronage, Bosnia risks remaining a state that endures but never fully governs.
This is an excellent and thoroughly grounded analysis of how Bosnia’s post-Dayton institutional design not only enabled but effectively reproduced figures like Dodik. The explanation of how ethnic power-sharing institutions (PSIs) became a structural incentive for permanent nationalist mobilization is very strong. One additional point worth noting is that the recent U.S. decision to ease sanctions on Dodik signals an interesting shift in policy, which rewards Dodik’s tactical, procedural concessions that allowed him to retain de facto control while appearing cooperative. In other words, even the influence from the West, which was transformational in Bosnia, ended up reinforcing Dodik’s rule. Stabilocracy on steroids.