The socio-political conflicts leading up to and following the Bosnian War stemmed from the 1992 dissolution of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, which in turn followed escalating ethnic conflicts in the wake of the republic’s first free elections in 1990. The elections shifted power to three competing nationalist parties, the Party of Democratic Action, the Serbian Democratic Party, and the Croatian Democratic union. Members of the loose confederation of states (which included modern Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Macedonia, Montenegro, and Slovenia) previously unified under the central socialist government began to agitate for independence, with some factions even favoring the overturn of socialist governance entirely. 

Yugoslavia’s predominant ethnic and religious groups—Serbs, Croats, and Muslims—had enjoyed relatively balanced sovereignty under the centralized republic. However, the possibility of independent states being established meant that any given group might find itself a minority within the breakaway country. In Bosnia, for example, Muslim Bosniaks outnumbered Serbs and Croats, which rekindled long-standing ethnic distrust and sparked rumors of a planned Islamification of Bosnia.

Following the 1990 elections, Serbian nationalists within the Yugoslav People’s Army developed the RAM Plan to arm and militarize Serbians outside of Serbia to consolidate power under the Serbian Democratic Party. Knowledge of this plan alarmed members of the Bosnia Parliament, and in 1991, they approved a memorandum on sovereignty that approved emergency military action against those attempting to implement the RAM plan.