This volume affirms the transformative impulse of the February protests and plenums that took place in Bosnia and Herzegovina in 2014. It brings together a range of interventions that materialize a common emancipatory frame in which politics is recuperated against the dominant bureaucratic management of the status quo. The fight for the commons upholds life that refuses to be bribed into accepting the dominant oppression and corruption as the only possibility of social existence in Bosnia and Herzegovina today. Local and international challenges will entail building and proving in everyday life solidarity that targets practices of exclusion, inequality, and injustice. The protests and plenums in Bosnia and Herzegovina mark a new and hopeful moment in asserting a more equitable and just sociality - a fight that is local in its early achievements but global and universal in its implications. Damir ArsenijeviAe is a Leverhulme Trust Fellow at De Montfort University, Leicester, leading a project 'Love after Genocide'.

Exploring recent configurations of social relations in post-socialist, post-war, post-Yugoslav Bosnia and Herzegovina this collection of ethnographic research turns an analytical lens on questions of sociality. Contributions based on long-term, in-depth research projects explore how people in different parts of BiH make and remake social relations and outline how their practices of sociality relate to donor-set priorities and formal human rights provisions. The book explores the socio-political concerns which have emerged within BiH, incites interdisciplinary conversations and sheds critical light on ways of engaging with these concerns and discusses forms of sociality, politics and agency which remain largely absent from the official political discourse and practice of local and foreign actors. Explicitly focusing on social relations in BiH against the historical background of both war and Yugoslav socialism, and directly placing these in relation to authoritative discourses and policies regarding BiH today brings the different strands together while the commentaries of specialists who have studied BiH in different ways explicitly situates the contribution of ethnographic work in the country.

This book examines the making and breaking of peripheral selves in and from postsocialist Bosnia in an empirically rich self-reflexive account of politico-economic and ideological developments. Through world systems and postcolonial theory, historical and new materialist optics, discursive and affective analytical registers, and various qualitative methodological choices, the author analyzes peripheral subjectivity in connection to global proletarianization, as well as past and present resistance via social and personal movement(s). She refers to past Yugoslav socialist and anticolonial struggles as well as more recent ones, including the social justice and feminist collective, engaging with workers’ and women’s struggles in postwar Bosnia and the Justice for David movement. Finally, she analyzes the lives of new third-wave Bosnian migrants to Germany post-2015, placing them in juxtaposition with non-European migrants in Bosnian reception centers and exposing labor and race, border struggles and market as new variables for studying selves in this particular context. Writing about “situated knowledge” and “politics of location,” the author stresses the importance of strong affective ties within researcher-researched assemblages urging for deeper coalitions and solidarity among various peripheral, power-differentiated communities. This book will be of interest to readers with backgrounds in linguistics, sociology, post-Yugoslav history, cultural studies and anthropology.

This book examines the evolution of liberal peacebuilding in the Balkans since the mid-1990s. After more than two decades of peacebuilding intervention, widespread popular disappointment by local communities is increasingly visible. Since the early 2010s, difficult conditions have spurred a wave of protest throughout the region. Citizens have variously denounced the political system, political elites, corruption and mismanagement. Rather than re-evaluating their strategy in light of mounting local discontent, international peacebuilding officials have increasingly adopted cynical calculations about stability. This book explains this evolution from the optimism of the mid-1990s to the current state through the analysis of three main phases, moving from the initial ‘rise’, to a later condition of ‘stalemate’ and then ‘fall’ of peacebuilding.

At a time of dramatic struggles over monuments around the world, this book examines monuments that have been erected in post-conflict Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) since 1996. Examining the historical precedents for the high rate of monumentbuilding, and its links to ongoing political instability and national animosity, this book identifies the culture of remembrance in BiH as symptomatic of a broader shift: a monumentalisation and privatisation of history. It provides an argument for how to account for the politics of contemporary nation-state formation, control of space, trauma and revisions of history in a region that has been subject to prolonged instability and crisis. This book will be of interest to scholars in contemporary art, museum studies, war and conflict studies, and European studies.

When Yugoslavia disintegrated in the early 1990s, competence in English was not widespread. This book explores how English came to be equated with economic survival for many during and after the ensuing war through a range of diverse social and professional contexts, from the classroom to the military to the International Criminal Court. While English provided social mobility for many, its abrupt arrival also contributed to the marginalization of those without the adequate language skills. The high level of international intervention in Bosnia and Herzegovina over the last two decades has contributed to a sense of normalization of the presence of English. Viewed as a far more complex issue than simple linguistic imposition, this book explores the widespread adoption of English and its effects on a nation recovering from war.

Writing regions, undertaking a regional study, was once a standard form of geographic communication and critique. This was until the quantitative revolution in the middle of the previous century and more definitively the critical turn in human geography towards the end of the twentieth century. From then on writing regions as they were experienced phenomenologically, or arguing culturally, historically, and politically with regions, was deemed to be old-fashioned. Yet the region is, and always will be, a central geographical concept, and thinking about regions can tell us a lot about the history of the discipline called geography. Despite taking up an identifiable place within the geographical imagination in scholarship and beyond, region remains a relatively forgotten, under-used, and in part under-theorised term. Reanimating Regions marks the continued reinvigoration of a set of disciplinary debates surrounding regions, the regional, and regional geography. Across 18 chapters from international, interdisciplinary scholars, this book writes and performs region as a temporary permanence, something held stable, not fixed and absolute, at different points in time, for different purposes. There is, as this expansive volume outlines, no single reading of a region. Reanimating Regions collectively rebalances the region within geography and geographical thought. In renewing the geography of regions as not only a site of investigation but also as an analytical framework through which to write the world, what emerges is a powerful reworking of the geographic imagination. Read against one another, the chapters weave together timely commentaries on region and regions across the globe, with a particular emphasis upon the regional as played out in the United Kingdom, and regional worlds both within and beyond Europe, offering chapters from Africa and South America. Addressing both the political and the cultural, this volume responds to the need for a consolidated and considered reflection on region, the regional, and regional geography, speaking directly to broader intellectual concerns with performance, aesthetics, identity, mobilities, the environment, and the body.