Over the past 15 years, Bosnia and Herzegovina has served as a laboratory of techniques to re-establish state sovereignty and promote democracy. The post-conflict intervention in Bosnia has justifiably received great interest from political theorists and scholars of international relations who have explored the limitations of the institutions and policies of international intervention. This book begins from an alternative premise: rather than examining institutions or charting limitations, Jeffrey argues for a focus on the performance of state sovereignty in Bosnia as it has been practiced by a range of actors both within and beyond the Bosnian state. In focusing on the state as a process, he argues that Bosnian sovereignty is best understood as a series of improvisations that have attempted to produce and reproduce a stable and unified state. Based on four periods of residential fieldwork in Bosnia, The Improvised State advances state theory through an illumination of the fragile and contingent nature of sovereignty in contemporary Bosnia and its grounding in the everyday lives of the Bosnian citizen.

Alex Jeffrey is a University Lecturer in Human Geography at the University of Cambridge. His research has focused on the governance of post-conflict environments, particularly the former Yugoslavia, and the role of non-governmental organizations in fostering democracy. He is co-author, together with Joe Painter, of Political Geography: An Introduction to Space and Power (2009) and with Anoop Nayak on Geographical Thought: An Introduction to Ideas in Human Geography (2011).