Counting counts

Valerie Perry, chief of party of the Public International Law and Policy Group, writes from Sarajevo:

Following a delay of several years and much heated debate, Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) conducted a long overdue census 1 – 15 October 2013, the first in 22 years. This census is of crucial to both BiH and the international community, as many of the Dayton-era power-sharing arrangements between the three constituent peoples (Bosniaks, Croats, and Serbs) are based on the 1991 census. The new census results will reflect the significant demographic changes caused by wartime ethnic cleansing and displacement. Given the continuing downward spiral of BiH’s current political dynamic, there should be little doubt that census results will be extremely controversial.

On 3 February 2012, Bosnia and Herzegovina’s (BiH) Parliamentary Assembly adopted a law for a census to be conducted in April 2013. The delay in adopting the law meant that BiH did not hold a census in 2011, the year that all European Union (EU) member states (as well as other former Yugoslav countries) held theirs. Additional political haggling delayed the census from April to October 2013.

Even though the process of knocking on doors has finished and many are already exhausted from the politicization of the process, the census is far from over. The aggregation, analysis, and most importantly, the use of the data will remain open questions during 2014 – a general election year. This brief, published by the Democratization Policy Council, provides an overview of the key issues surrounding the census in BiH and identifies a number of potential policy and political implications that will continue to both shape and reflect the politics of numbers.