From Social Protests to Citizens’ Assemblies in Democratizing States

Over the recent years, several instances of social protest in Europe have transformed themselves into new initiatives for citizens' participation and experiments of direct democracy. Many of these citizens initiatives took place in established democracies and often interacted with the existing democratic framework. What is less clear however is whether such citizens' assemblies can also function in the more volatile settings of post-conflict democratizing states? In this paper we want to contribute to answering this question by focusing on recent events in Bosnia and Herzegovina and gauge the potential of the Bosnian plenums – popular assemblies that emerged in several cities across the country in the wake of violent clashes over economic restructuring in February 2014. On the basis of interviews and an analysis of the mid-term effects of these initiatives on Bosnian electoral politics, we examine the plenums and their potential durability as  a new channel of inclusive political participation. Analyzing them from the perspective of experiences of citizens' assemblies elsewhere in Europe we investigate the value, limits and potential uses of the Bosnian plenums as a form of incident-driven democracy in a country where the regular institutions of representative democracy are highly ethnicized and widely mistrusted.