Bosnian War

The Bosnian War was fought in the former Yugoslav republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina from April 1992 to December 1995. It erupted after Bosnia declared independence from the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia following a referendum in late February–early March 1992, which was boycotted by most Bosnian Serbs. The principal belligerents were the Bosniak-led Government of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina, the self-proclaimed Republika Srpska (backed by the Yugoslav People's Army and Serbia under Slobodan Milošević), and Bosnian Croat forces of Herzeg-Bosnia (backed by Croatia under Franjo Tuđman). Bosniaks and Croats fought each other in a sub-conflict from 1992–1994 before the Washington Agreement (March 1994) created the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina.

The war is notable in international law and IR scholarship for several reasons:

• Ethnic cleansing became a widely used term during this conflict, particularly to describe the expulsion of non-Serbs from areas claimed by Republika Srpska.
• The Srebrenica massacre of July 1995, in which Bosnian Serb forces under Ratko Mladić killed more than 8,000 Bosniak men and boys in a UN-declared "safe area," was later ruled a genocide by the International Court of Justice (Bosnia and Herzegovina v. Serbia and Montenegro, 2007) and by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY).
• The Siege of Sarajevo, lasting roughly 1,425 days, was the longest siege of a capital city in modern warfare.
• The UN deployed UNPROFOR, whose limited mandate and the failure to protect Srebrenica became a case study in peacekeeping shortcomings.
• NATO's Operation Deliberate Force (August–September 1995) marked one of the alliance's first major combat operations.

The war ended with the General Framework Agreement for Peace (the Dayton Accords), initialed in Dayton, Ohio on 21 November 1995 and signed in Paris on 14 December 1995, which established Bosnia's current two-entity constitutional structure.