The Bosnian Peace Process is used because the Dayton agreement of 1995 is a close fit to the constitution and therefore provides a good benchmark for the methodology. The Bosnia & Herzegovina constitution was enacted in 1995 and updated in 2010. We are using the updated version.
There are 164 sections in the Bosnia & Herzegovina constitution of 2010. Of these, 158 are mapped by one or more provisions in preceding peace agreements. A list of these sections can be viewed here (Sections List).
The plot below shows a timeline from the earliest agreement on the left to the constitution at the right. Agreements are ordered by date along the x-axis. The number of sections in an agreement that map onto the constitution are on the y-axis.
Each agreement that maps onto the constitution is represented by a vertical blue line. The height of the line represents the number of sections in the constitution that has mappings from this agreement. The constitution is marked as a green line at the final day of the year it was enacted or updated (2010). This is because day and month data are not available. The height of the line represents the 158 mapped sections (see above). Non-mapping agreements are marked in red. It is possible that a section is mapped by more than one provision and to avoid double-counting we remove duplicates.
The Bosnian constitution and the Dayton agreement are very similar. Our results reflect this; the highest blue line is the Dayton agreement, i.e., the Dayton agreement is mapped to more constitution sections than any other agreement. This indicates that the constitution is more semantically similar to the Dayton agreement than any other agreement in the Bosnian Peace Process — 158 of 164 constitution sections are mapped by provisions in the Dayton agreement.
The agreement-constitution data can be analysed using a binary-valued matrix with constitution sections in rows and agreements in columns. The binary values reflect whether an agreement maps to a constitution section (value 1) or does not map to a constitution section (value 0). A visualisation of such a matrix is shown in the plot below.
The x-axis shows the section index. Each horizontal line represents a section of the constitution. The order in which the sections are plotted is by the date of the agreement for which the section has mappings. A dot means that the section is mapped by at least one provision from the agreement at the dot's position on the x-axis.
The plot shows the flow of mapped sections across the time series of agreements. The Dayton agreement is the dense vertical line at index value 42.
