Now that Christian Schmidt , Bosnia and Herzegovina’s (BiH) high representative, has announced his resignation this week, pundits, diplomats, and citizens are buzzing about what this could mean for BiH’s overall stability. The more consequential question, however, is whether, three decades after the Yugoslav wars, BiH should remain under open-ended international supervision at all.
Is the international community prepared to reassess that supervision in light of realities on the ground and the actual attainability of the so-called 5+2 agenda for closing the Office of the High Representative (OHR)? Shifting the narrative means finally moving BiH away from being treated as a foreign protectorate and toward being recognized, and treated, as a sovereign European state, even as Freedom House continues to rate it as “partly free” and classify it among the region’s “ transitional or hybrid regimes .”
After living and working in BiH for six years, I witnessed how the question of the OHR’s legitimacy and efficacy was a resounding theme across many facets of life in the country, from municipal governance and civil society to everyday conversations among citizens navigating a system that often felt designed by outsiders rather than by the people it was meant to serve.
For years, the Peace Implementation Council has insisted that the OHR’s mandate will end once five key objectives and two political conditions, the 5+2 agenda, have been met. On paper, this looks like a clear exit strategy. In practice, it has begun to resemble a moving target, shaped as much by shifting geopolitical anxieties and domestic spoilers as by any transparent assessment of BiH’s actual progress. If key elements of the 5+2 agenda are structurally blocked by the very power-sharing system Dayton created, then endlessly invoking these conditions becomes less a roadmap for closure and more a justification for indefinite tutelage.
Yet BiH today is not the country of 1995. While international actors have fixated on whether the 5+2 criteria have been fully met and whether another High Representative might finally push them over the line, Bosnians have been integrating their society from the bottom up.
Over the past three decades, for instance, Bosnians have generated pockets of real economic growth. In 2023, the country’s economy grew by around 1.7 percent, followed by about 2.5 to 2.6 percent in 2024 , with output now above pre-pandemic levels. They have also nurtured more political pluralism than the rigid power-sharing formulas suggest, with civic and cross-ethnic competition persisting in several urban areas, including the Trojka coalition maintaining control in Sarajevo and Tuzla , despite the continued dominance of the main ethnonational parties. And when Milorad Dodik defied the country’s constitutional order, it was Bosnia and Herzegovina’s own state court and electoral authorities that upheld his conviction, imposed a six-year political ban, and removed him from the Republika Srpska presidency .
These developments did not arise simply under the direct auspices of the OHR; they also emerged through citizens, institutions, entrepreneurs, and local leaders who could not afford to wait for another decree from Sarajevo’s international quarter. These developments did not arise under the direct auspices of the OHR. Rather, they emerged largely outside it, driven by citizens, entrepreneurs, and local leaders who could not afford to wait for another decree from Sarajevo’s international quarter. The real challenge now is to align the international community’s formal benchmarks with these lived realities and to design a responsible transition that rewards domestic ownership instead of perpetuating dependency.
Geopolitics has changed as well and so has Washington’s role in the Western Balkans. The Trump administration’s decision to lift sanctions on Milorad Dodik, his family members, allies, and affiliated companies , despite earlier U.S. findings that Dodik obstructed the Dayton Accords and threatened Bosnia and Herzegovina’s sovereignty and territorial integrity , signals a narrower and more transactional approach to Bosnia and Herzegovina. That shift is reinforced by reporting that Trump-aligned figures pushed for sanctions relief and that Dodik hired Rod Blagojevich, the former Illinois governor pardoned by Trump, to lobby for Republika Srpska . Bosnians can no longer afford to see the United States as the singular anchor it once was. They must increasingly treat U.S. policy as one variable in a more crowded and volatile geopolitical landscape and focus on securing their future through enforceable European structures.
In 2022, BiH gained EU candidate status . Two years later, the European Council decided to open accession negotiations after the European Commission noted important progress on key reforms, even if implementation remains uneven. If Washington is no longer the steady guarantor of Bosnia’s post-Dayton order that it once aspired to be, the European Union can no longer hide behind the OHR. A credible strategy for BiH now requires the EU to replace the logic of guardianship with a logic of accession. It must stop relying on the OHR as a political backstop for crises it is unwilling to manage directly, and instead use its own political, legal, security, and financial instruments to support a responsible transition that builds on the economic dynamism and pluralist impulses people in BiH have already shown.
First, the EU should absorb the 5+2 agenda into the accession framework rather than treating it as a parallel checklist for OHR closure. Each unresolved issue, state and defense property, fiscal sustainability, and the rule of law, should be mapped onto specific chapters and benchmarks in the acquis . Instead of asking whether a future High Representative can finally tick the boxes for closure, Brussels should make clear that resolving these questions through domestic democratic procedures is a condition for advancing accession talks.
Second, the EU needs to turn conditionality into something Bosnians can actually feel, not just hear about. That means pairing stricter political conditions with visible benefits: expanded access to European markets, stronger infrastructure and green-transition funding, and targeted support to municipalities and regions across both entities, Republika Srpska and the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, that meet standards on transparency, governance, and inclusion. By rewarding concrete reform with jobs, mobility, and better public services, the EU can undercut the familiar argument that only strong-arm interventions from the OHR can move BiH forward.
Third, Brussels must prepare a security and sanctions backstop that makes a phased OHR exit credible. Ending the role of the High Representative should not mean removing all external deterrents to secessionist or anti-constitutional moves. The EU should maintain a robust EUFOR Althea presence, but military reassurance alone is not enough. Although the EU has a Bosnia sanctions framework that can include travel bans and asset freezes against actors who undermine the country’s sovereignty, territorial integrity, constitutional order, or the Dayton Peace Agreement, the Union has been reluctant to use it decisively. Germany and Austria have imposed entry bans on Dodik and senior Republika Srpska officials , but EU-wide sanctions have remained blocked by divisions among member states, especially opposition by Hungary under Viktor Orbán . A credible post-OHR strategy would require the EU and willing member states to make sanctions, asset freezes, visa bans, and conditional access to funding and markets rapid, predictable, and politically usable against actors who threaten Bosnia and Herzegovina’s territorial integrity or constitutional order.
Finally, the EU should set out a public, time-bound roadmap for phasing out the OHR. That roadmap should tie the gradual narrowing of the High Representative’s mandate, including the eventual end of the Bonn powers, to measurable institutional milestones such as reform implementation, stronger judicial performance, and credible safeguards against unilateral attempts to unravel the state. Crucially, this roadmap must be communicated not only to political elites but to citizens in BiH, so that closure of the OHR is seen not as an elite bargain but as a step toward normalization and equality with other candidate states. The experience of Brčko supervision , where international oversight was eventually suspended once sufficient local capacity and safeguards were in place, shows that a responsible exit is possible when there is both political will and a clear strategy.
Moving beyond the OHR does not mean that BiH is problem-free. Rather, treating the country as a permanent international project now undermines the very objectives the OHR was created to pursue. Sovereignty without responsibility is dangerous, but so is responsibility without sovereignty. If citizens are to hold their leaders to account, if reforms are to be locally rooted rather than externally dictated, and if EU integration is to be more than a rhetorical promise, BiH must be allowed and required to own its political future.
BiH is now an EU candidate country with a Commission decision to open accession talks on the table, which is a formal recognition that its future lies in European structures rather than permanent international supervision. Against that backdrop, another decade of open-ended international oversight would be hard to justify.
BiH does not need another international governor. It needs a credible pathway toward political ownership, accountability, and EU membership, one that recognizes what its citizens have already built from the bottom up and firmly prioritizes local ownership over external tutelage, finally aligning its governance architecture with its European future.
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