Roles
Visualisation concepts: Mela Žuljević and Iaroslav Boretskii
Visualisations: Mela Žuljević
MapBox cartography: Iaroslav Boretskii
DataLab: Ivaylo Dinev
Advisor: Jana Moser
Mela: This sketch is based on a map that Franjo Tuđman, the former president of Croatia, famously sketched on the back of a menu at a banquet for diplomats in London, to illustrate his idea of dividing Bosnia and Herzegovina. It represents an arresting evidence of how those with power pictured the land of BiH, and the people who inhabited it, as something to be divided with ease. I could not use the original map drawing as I could not find a publicly available document in the archives of the ICTY online. I decided to redraw it as an abstract line sketch because it aptly represents the visual language of division through symbols of cuts, arrows, encirclements, and so on.
Mela: The Bosniak Institute holds a large collection of maps created before, during and after the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Many of these maps were created for the purposes of peace negotiations. Many of them are drawn or annotated by hand. But, most of them lack context and data about their authors, origin, purpose, production and use. For these reasons, the Institute is not willing to allow their reproduction, except for the small number of those with clear authorship and origin.
Mela: The IEBL data is not available on the state level, as the geodata is handled by institutions on the entity level. The data for drawing the line was acquired from the FBiH Department of Geodesy.
Mela: This visualisation is based on a “Map of Territorial Issues in Dayton” in the book “To End a War” by Richard Holbrooke (Random House, 1998). To his ‘issues’ (the “Egg”, the “pocket” and the “corridor”) I added mountains which were mentioned in different accounts of negotiations, as sites where parts of land were taken or given away in the last rounds of land exchange. The mountains are marked differently, with green colour, as they were not given a ‘nickname’ but they were persistently abstracted into empty and worthless land. I also added the Belly or Croissant, a description several authors used to mark the West Herzegovina land adjacent to the Croatian border.
Iaroslav: The Atlas deliberately employs a variety of production techniques to diversify map creation methods, therefore avoiding relying on a single tool. Particularly this SVG-based map was initially a draft provided by Mela as a vector file (Affinity Designer 2). With an added level of interaction with click and hover through classes, styles and a little bit of JS code, the map fits pretty well into the story. Being integrated into a Drupal module, it serves as a fairly straightforward solution for small, vector editor-friendly visualizations that require external interactivity.
Mela: Less than 4% of the total area of BiH is officially designated as protected, which is a considerable distance from reaching the global recommendation of at least 30% protected land. The current formally protected areas belong to two sets of categories, as these differ in the two entities, including the designations of protected area, nature reserve, national park, natural monument, protected natural feature, protected landscape, regional park and nature park. The total number of officially protected areas is currently 43: twenty-six in the Republic of Srpska and seventeen in the Federation of BiH. Some protected sites are divided by the IEBL. For example, Trebević mountain is protected as a ‘nature park’ in RS and as a ‘protected landscape’ in FBiH. Two habitats or species management areas are protected on an international level (Livanjsko polje and Hutovo Blato). This map also includes Emerald Network-designated areas, as these represent areas of high importance and biodiversity, which should be officially protected in the future. It is important to note that there are many areas planned for protection in the future, which are not yet indicated in this map due to the lack of data on their extent.
Mela: I wanted to visualise the overall effect of the IEBL crossing through all the landscapes, mountains, rivers and other natural areas in BiH. We had to work with available data: forests, protected areas, planned protected areas and water flows intersected by the IEBL. The data is visualised so as to overlay the IEBL in order to prioritise landscape connections and relation, and show how they traverse political boundaries.
Mela: It was important to visualise the ambiguity of the line in our maps. We decided to make the line thicker in the natural area here, and thinner in the urban area of Sarajevo. But it was very difficult to determine the extent of its actual ambiguity and imprecision based on available data. The data provided to us by the Department of Geodesy in FBiH seemed to completely align with the data available on Open Street Maps, without offering any additional precision.
Iaroslav: The discrepancies between data sources was one of the challenges here. The official datasets provided by the authorities of FBiH showed significant variations in the geometry as well as the line did not properly match the coordinate reference system (CRS) with the official dataset assigned to EPSG:31276 – MGI / Balkans zone 6 even after multiple reprojecting attempts. By contrast, when relying on OpenStreetMap data, the line seemed more simplified as well as more accurate when zooming into the Sarajevo part of the division line. Ultimately, we decided to use an OSM-based line, thereby ensuring consistency. The additional realignment (or translation, rectification) of the official sources’ line would mean that we intervene and alter the original dataset as it is.
Mela: The map was produced for the purposes of doing spatial analysis of connections between the IEBL and sites of postwar environmental conflicts mapped at the current moment, almost thirty years after the signing of the DPA. Through this analysis, I trace how different actors mobilise the spatial legacies of the Dayton cartography, such as the IEBL, in conflicts over extractive development projects. The spatial analysis is still ongoing and part of a larger research project. In the selection of environmental conflicts, I focused on the most controversial projects in recent years: large mining, hydroenergy projects and deforestation sites which have provoked protests and conflicts between different parties. The selection was based on conversations with environmental experts and activists, media analysis of the most reported cases in the last 10 years, as well as my prior knowledge (as a person coming from Bosnia and Herzegovina with activist experience). I also cross-checked the selection in relation to the cases reported in the Environmental Justice Atlas (see BiH at https://ejatlas.org/). This map shows fourty-five sites of recent and long-term environmental conflicts, over major hydropower and green mining investments, as well as sites of deforestation due to mining and construction. While the map clarifies that some of these sites lie in proximity to the IEBL, its intention is not to claim that the IEBL is the cause of environmental conflicts in BiH. The research is interested in tracing and articulating the connections between the line and new conflicts, and the examples of particular cases described in the mapping reveal some of these connections.
Iaroslav: In the work on the main map the tasks from my side were equally multilayered. I cross-checked the locations using several sources to confirm how each site aligned spatially and whether the reported positions actually made sense on the map. There were numerous small episodes where the georeferencing process was tricky, but overall this was primarily a data-handling challenge — figuring out how to assemble the information so that it could later be visualised clearly and coherently. Ultimately, we brought the map to a clean, generalised form, using intuitive icons to represent existing and planned hydropower plants, deforestation areas, and geological exploration sites. To provide more detail when zooming in, I also incorporated some zoom-level settings with satellite imagery layers and labels that appear smoothly as the story focuses on more partial cases.