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The notion of security in international relations has been broadened and reconceptualized and now rightly includes an understanding of education as a potential security threat, not just a socializing tool. In post-war Bosnia-Herzegovina, the education system is decentralized, politicized and nationalistic, and promotes competing visions and identities of Bosnia. Some students attend segregated schools, while almost all study only with others from their same ethnonational group and learn from a mono-ethnic curriculum that does not foster understanding or tolerance of others, but breeds suspicion. This paper argues that these educational practices constitute a societal security dilemma. Many Bosnian Muslims, Croats and Serbs use the education system to gain rights and security for their group, which is viewed by others as a potential threat to their own security and identity within a fractured state. This paper shows that while these attempts to reinforce group security and identity (and increase power) may be beneficial to the group and nationalist leaders themselves, they paradoxically may have negative consequences for the security of other groups and for the security and stability of the Bosnian state itself, understood in terms of national cohesiveness and territorial integrity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The end of the Cold War, the twin processes of democratisation and European Union enlargement in the Central and East European states, and the desire to prevent inter-ethnic tensions in the region have created new incentives and resources for the promotion and protection of minority rights. Engaging the constructivist approach within international relations theory, this article seeks to understand the domestic impact of international minority rights norms and the actors who promote them by applying a current 'spiral model' of human rights norm socialisation concerning the case of the Roma minority in the Czech Republic. By tracing the mechanisms of the norm socialisation process, this article illustrates how minority policy and the domestic salience of minority rights norms regarding the Roma steadily progressed between 1990 and EU accession in 2004. Initial changes in minority policy were made for instrumental reasons, but as the Czech Republic became increasingly enmeshed in the transnational minority rights network, further changes were also made for reasons of belief and identity. Both rationalist and constructivist approaches taken together are best able to explain the outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focuses on the importance of a political approach to the management of ethnic conflict and the promotion of human rights in post-communist states. Effects of the preventive diplomacy strategy of High Commissioner for National Minorities; Things to which a legal approach to human rights promotion and conflict prevention relies on; Definition of preventive diplomacy.