During the autumn of 2012, I conducted fieldwork in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) with an aim to interview the international and local judges and prosecutors working within the War Crime Chamber of the Court of Bosnia and Herzegovina. The Dayton Peace Agreement was in its 17th year of implementation. The West was seemingly losing its influence over the implementation process as the international judges and prosecutors were forced to leave the Court BiH by the end of 2012 as a result of the pressures from Bosnian Serb leader Milorad Dodik. This was my fourth extensive field trip since 2001. In many ways, it was different from my previous work on local elites, as I was now increasingly focusing on studying the different aspects of intervention policy devised by the international policy elites in the country. In the initial stage of my fieldwork, I arranged to meet up with a senior member of the Office of the High Representative (OHR), whom I knew since the time of my dissertation fieldwork. Having worked in the western Balkans since the early 1990s, co-founding two prolific international NGOs, working for NATO afterwards, and now working for the OHR, this person— a perfect example of the type of ‘shape-shifting’ policy entrepreneur who has been called ‘flexian’ in the literature (Wedel, 2009)— seemingly knew almost everyone in international policy circles and among local elites in Bosnia and had been helpful in facilitating contact with specific local politicians during my previous fieldworks.

Unlike our prior meetings at the trendy patisserie owned by a spouse of a senior OHR policymakers, which was located in the proximity of the OHR building, this time we met at the OHR's headquarters. During our chat in his office, we exchanged views regarding the political and economic developments in BiH. My interlocutor praised my dissertation work for its data and analysis, and for pointing the finger at the ‘real problems’ of the Bosnian peacebuilding process. He also enquired about my ongoing research regarding the Court BiH and, when hearing about my meetings, expressed his pessimism about the state of the peace process and cautioned about imminent risks of new violence. In addition, he explained that the international community had lost the battle to defeat the Bosnian Serb leader Milorad Dodik in 2009– 10 when the American and Slovene prosecutors in the State Court BiH were preparing to indict him for corruption.