Dayton Agreement in the context of "Republika Srpska"

Bosnia and Herzegovina, often referred to as Bosnia-Herzegovina or short as Bosnia, is a country in Southeast Europe. Situated on the Balkan Peninsula, it borders Serbia to the east, Montenegro to the southeast, and Croatia to the north and southwest, with a 20-kilometre-long (12-mile) coast on the Adriatic Sea in the south. Bosnia has a moderate continental climate with hot summers and cold, snowy winters. Its geography is largely mountainous, particularly in the central and eastern regions, which are dominated by the Dinaric Alps. Herzegovina, the smaller, southern region, has a Mediterranean climate and is mostly mountainous. Sarajevo is the capital and the largest city.

The area has been inhabited since at least the Upper Palaeolithic, with permanent human settlement traced to the Neolithic cultures of Butmir, Kakanj, and Vučedol. After the arrival of the first Indo-Europeans, the area was populated by several Illyrian and Celtic civilisations. Most of modern Bosnia was incorporated into the Roman province of Dalmatia by the mid-first century BCE. The ancestors of the modern South Slavic peoples arrived between the sixth and ninth centuries. In the 12th century, the Banate of Bosnia was established as the first independent Bosnian polity. It gradually evolved and expanded into the Kingdom of Bosnia, which became the most powerful state in the western Balkans by the 14th century. The Ottoman Empire annexed the region in 1463 and introduced Islam. From the late 19th century until World War I, the country was annexed into the Austro-Hungarian monarchy. In the interwar period, Bosnia and Herzegovina was part of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. After World War II, it was granted full republic status in the newly formed Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. In 1992, following the breakup of Yugoslavia, the republic proclaimed independence. This was followed by the Bosnian War, which lasted until late 1995 and ended with the signing of the Dayton Agreement.

The Constitution of Bosnia and Herzegovina (Serbo-Croatian: Ustav Bosne i Hercegovine, Устав Босне и Херцеговине) is the supreme law of Bosnia and Herzegovina. The current text is Annex 4 to the General Framework Agreement for Peace, initiated on 21 November 1995 and signed on 14 December 1995. The Constitution affirms state continuity, establishes institutions, allocates competences between the State and the Entities, and incorporates extensive human-rights guarantees with explicit reference to the European Convention.

The Kosovo War (Albanian: Lufta e Kosovës; Serbian: Косовски рат, Kosovski rat) was an armed conflict in Kosovo that lasted from 28 February 1998 until 11 June 1999. It was fought between the forces of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (FRY), which controlled Kosovo before the war, and the Kosovo Albanian separatist militia known as the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA). The conflict ended when the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) intervened by beginning air strikes in March 1999 which resulted in Yugoslav forces withdrawing from Kosovo.

The KLA was formed in the early 1990s to fight against the discrimination of ethnic Albanians and the repression of political dissent by the Serbian authorities, which started after the suppression of Kosovo's autonomy and other discriminatory policies against Albanians by Serbian leader Slobodan Milošević in 1989. The KLA initiated its first campaign in 1995, after Kosovo's case was left out of the Dayton Agreement and it had become clear that President Rugova's strategy of peaceful resistance had failed to bring Kosovo onto the international agenda. In June 1996, the group claimed responsibility for acts of sabotage targeting Kosovo police stations, during the Kosovo Insurgency. In 1997, the organization acquired a large quantity of arms through weapons smuggling from Albania, following a rebellion in which weapons were looted from the country's police and army posts. In early 1998, KLA attacks targeting Yugoslav authorities in Kosovo resulted in an increased presence of Serb paramilitaries and regular forces who subsequently began pursuing a campaign of retribution targeting KLA sympathisers and political opponents; this campaign killed 1,500 to 2,000 civilians and KLA combatants, and had displaced 370,000 Kosovar Albanians by March 1999.

Bosnia and Herzegovina, like many countries, is made of geographical, historical, and political regions. The current geopolitical regions were finalised with the signing of the Dayton Agreement.

The political divisions of Bosnia and Herzegovina were created by the Dayton Agreement. The agreement divides the country into two federal entities: the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina (FBiH) and the Republika Srpska (RS) and one condominium of the two entities named the Brčko District.

The vast majority of the population in the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina is Bosniaks and Croats. In contrast, in Republika Srpska, the vast majority are Serbs. Due to the entities' high powers and the political differences between them, Bosnia and Herzegovina is described as a confederation.

The Army of the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina (Bosnian, Serbian, Croatian: Vojska Federacije Bosne i Hercegovine or VFBiH) was the military of the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina created after the 1995 Dayton Agreement. It consisted of two merging units which had been in conflict with each other during the Croat-Bosniak War: the Bosniak Army of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina (ARBiH) and the Croat Croatian Defence Council (HVO). In 2005 it was integrated into Armed Forces of Bosnia and Herzegovina controlled by the Ministry of Defense of Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Republika Srpska (RS; Serbian Cyrillic: Република Српска, lit. 'Serbian Republic', pronounced [repǔblika sr̩̂pskaː] ) was an unrecognized geopolitical entity and a self-proclaimed quasi-state in Southeastern Europe under the control of the Army of Republika Srpska during the Bosnian War. It claimed to be a sovereign state, though this claim was only partially recognized by the Bosnian government (whose territory the RS was recognized as nominally being a part of) in the Geneva agreement, the United Nations, and FR Yugoslavia. For the first six months of its existence, it was known as the Serbian Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina (Serbian: Српска Република Босна и Херцеговина / Srpska Republika Bosna i Hercegovina).

After 1995, the Republika Srpska was recognized as one of the two political entities composing Bosnia and Herzegovina. The borders of the post-1995 RS are, with a few negotiated modifications, based on the front lines and situation on the ground at the time of the signing of the Dayton Agreement on 14 December 1995. As such, the entity is primarily a result of the Bosnian War without any direct historical precedent. Its territory encompasses a number of Bosnia and Herzegovina's numerous historical geographic regions, but (due to the above-mentioned nature of the inter-entity boundary line) it contains very few of them in entirety. Likewise, various political units existed within Republika Srpska's territory in the past but very few existed entirely within the region.

The accession of Bosnia and Herzegovina to the European Union (EU) is the stated aim of the present relations between the two entities. Bosnia and Herzegovina has been recognised by the European Union as a "candidate country" for accession since the decision of the European Council in 2022 and is on the current agenda for future enlargement of the EU. Bosnia and Herzegovina takes part in the Stabilisation and Association Process and trade relations are regulated by an Interim Agreement.

Bosnia and Herzegovina formally applied for EU membership on 15 February 2016, following years of constitutional reforms and engagements with the Dayton Agreement. Bosnia's failure to meet the conditions for the closure of the Office of the High Representative (OHR) in Bosnia and Herzegovina, including addressing state and military property ownership issues and implementing constitutional reforms, had prevented the country from submitting an application until 2016.