Frontiers: Poorly Regulated Arenas of State Action
Initial American explorations of the frontier's sociological significance highlighted its positive impact on U.S. society and its economy, suggesting that the ready availability of land lent the country its energy, dynamism, and democracy.[12] Critics, however, noted that this interpretation ignored the Native American frontier experience of dispossession, segregation, and death.[13] Building on this later work, I define frontiers as geographic zones demarcated by explicit boundaries of some sort and not tightly integrated into adjacent core states. Core agents may be involved in frontier politics, but their involvement is often indirect. Under these conditions, the rules states make for themselves, and that international actors make for states, do not fully apply, granting frontier agents substantial autonomy.[14] Until core polities close the frontier and extend central authority, they often choose to influence events through clandestine frontier allies operating with little respect for the law.[15] Frontiers are thus weakly institutionalized and often chaotic settings prone to vigilantism and paramilitary freelancing.[16] In the American West, for example, over 300 different vigilante groups were active between the eighteenth and early twentieth centuries, [17] taking the law into their own hands and using lynching, whipping, and other extra-legal methods to establish dominance.[18] Frontiers permit and even promote intensely destructive and graphic violence.
The results are illustrated by the American experience.[19] When the frontier was open and indigenous populations were unincorporated into the U.S. polity, they were targeted for dispossession and massacre. Once the frontier was subject to central state regulation, by contrast, aboriginals were locked in reservations, where they were policed and oppressed,
Part I of the book applies the notion of frontiers to Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1992–93, arguing that international politics inadvertently helped transform Bosnia into a frontier vis-à-vis Serbia. In April 1992, Western powers recognized Bosnian independence, transforming what had been an internal Yugoslav boundary into a sovereign, international border. Although ethnic Serbs on both sides of the border protested, international pressure compelled Serbian authorities to publicly acknowledge the new line as a meaningful boundary. At the same time, however, key Belgrade authorities sought to shape Bosnian events by supplying Bosnian Serbs with logistical and military support and encouraging the dislocation of non-Serb populations. The Bosnian frontier was external to the Serbian core, but was still heavily, albeit clandestinely, influenced by Belgrade's decisions. Bosnian Serb combatants and Serbian cross-border paramilitaries served as clandestine frontier agents and carried out most of Bosnia's ethnic cleansing.
The importance of Bosnia's institutional setting is graphically illustrated by the fate of non-Serb populations living just over the border within Serbia proper. Although Serbian paramilitaries harassed and intimidated these populations, they did not employ Bosnia-style methods of forced displacement. Bosnian frontier met Serbian core at the border, where Serbian nationalism was transformed into a very different regime of violence. Frontier led to death or dispossession, but core offered some crucial protections.