With the end of the Cold War, many theorists of international relations believed that the period of wars and destruction had passed and that the world would embark on a path of increased cooperation and economic progress. However, in the early 1990s, the world was flooded with civil and ethnic conflicts. Because such conflicts were rare in previous international practice, the international community faced a new challenge how to stop them. How inexperienced and unprepared the international community was in resolving these types of conflicts is best indicated by the war that engulfed the territory of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Due to the impossibility of harmonizing the national and political interests of the three large ethnic groups (Bosnians, Serbs and Croats), the crisis that gripped Bosnia and Herzegovina in the early 1990s escalated into a long-running conflict. The fact that the most serious form of crime against one people took place in Bosnia and Herzegovina - genocide against the Muslim population in Srebrenica - also testifies to the devastating effect of ethnic conflict. The paper also describes all the efforts that international community took to prevent the escalation of the crisis into conflict and the conflict was attempted to be remedied after escalation. Although the international community has not made significant progress in preventing and resolving conflicts, the lessons learned from Bosnia and Herzegovina conflict have served the international community in building a framework for resolving future ethnic crises and conflicts in other countries.