Discourse and Affect in Postsocialist Bosnia and Herzegovina: Peripheral Selves 9783030802448, 9783030802455

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POSTDISCIPLINARY STUDIES IN DISCOURSE SERIES EDITOR: JOHANNES ANGERMULLER

Discourse and Affect in Postsocialist Bosnia and Herzegovina Peripheral Selves Danijela Majstorović

Postdisciplinary Studies in Discourse

Series Editor Johannes Angermuller Centre for Applied Linguistics University of Warwick Coventry, UK

Postdisciplinary Studies in Discourse engages in the exchange between discourse theory and analysis while putting emphasis on the intellectual challenges in discourse research. Moving beyond disciplinary divisions in today’s social sciences, the contributions deal with critical issues at the intersections between language and society. Edited by Johannes Angermuller together with members of DiscourseNet, the series welcomes high-quality manuscripts in discourse research from all disciplinary and geographical backgrounds. DiscourseNet is an international and interdisciplinary network of researchers which is open to discourse analysts and theorists from all backgrounds. Editorial board: Cristina Arancibia, Aurora Fragonara Péter Furkó, Jens Maesse, Eduardo Chávez Herrera Benno Herzog, Michael Kranert, Jan Krasni Yannik Porsché, Luciana Radut-Gaghi, Jan Zienkowski More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14534

Danijela Majstorović

Discourse and Affect in Postsocialist Bosnia and Herzegovina Peripheral Selves

Danijela Majstorović Faculty of Philology University of Banja Luka Banja Luka, Bosnia and Herzegovina

Postdisciplinary Studies in Discourse ISBN 978-3-030-80244-8    ISBN 978-3-030-80245-5 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-80245-5 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

To my son, Vuk Istok, and all the “wolves of the East.”

The periphery is where the future reveals itself.

—J.G. Ballard Kad ti je sve potaman, ti stavi jedan kamen u cipelu da te žuljaA kad naiđu pravi problemilako ćeš da ga izbaciš iz cipele. When all is good, put a pebble in your shoeWhen real problems hitYou’ll easily toss it out. —A Balkan Adage (My Translation)

Abstract  This book looks at the making and breaking of peripheral selves in and from postsocialist Bosnia in an empirically rich self-reflexive account of the documented 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 but also past and present resistance via social and personal movement(s). She refers to the former Yugoslav socialist and anticolonial struggles as well as the more recent ones, including the social justice and feminist collective enabling her to engage with workers’ and women’s struggles in postwar Bosnia and the Justice for David movement. She finishes off by analyzing lives of new thirdwave Bosnian migrants to Germany post-2015, which she temporarily became part of, in juxtaposition with non-European migrants in Bosnian reception centers pushed back when trying to cross the EU, 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, powerdifferentiated communities.

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Preface

Two essays have set the coordinates of this book: “Love as Practice of Solidarity: Of Peripheral Bodies, Embodied Justice and Associated Labor” (2020) was an exercise in feminist autoethnography in which I reflected on my activist and academic life in Bosnia and Herzegovina (also BiH or Bosnia) and my migrant life in Germany as situated knowledge (Haraway, 1988), seeking to create a basis for solidarity among various, power-­ differentiated communities. In another essay titled “Postcoloniality as peripherality in Bosnia and Herzegovina” (2019), I attempted to contour how I understood peripheral selves based on different entanglements, encounters, and joint actions with specific activist and resistance groups in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) with which I collaborated or was part of. Under Yugoslav socialism, BiH as a semiperiphery was a relatively stable federal republic in which it was possible to speak about the Bosnian-­ Herzegovinian infrastructure, common identity, culture and education, common literature, and film. People lived, worked, and created together, side by side, marrying across ethnic lines till the 1992–1995 war shattered the former sociality and social infrastructure. In tearing down what was left of the Yugoslav socialist past and centuries-old cohabitation and tolerance despite difficulties, the war further peripheralized the country. Not only was the economy broken and the society impoverished, but xi

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people continued to drift apart in a hostile atmosphere resulting from a seemingly successful effort to sow division, with lies and fabrications legitimizing historical revisionism giving rise to feelings of fear, abandonment, and exhaustion among people. Postwar BiH, however, saw considerable deterioration of social relations as well as of physical infrastructure. While the first couple of years after the 1992–1995 war may have provided grounds for optimism, it soon became clear that enormous portions of international donations for postwar reconstruction of not just infrastructure but also education, healthcare, and the media had ended up in private pockets or paying for dubious policies. The population seemed to have quietly accepted the ideas of exclusionism, patriarchy, and conservativism, which the ethnonationalist elites pushed to the fore. As their pursuit of personal and party interests catalyzed the deterioration, we came to realize that the nationalists would never make good on the promise of “catching up with the West.” Instead, we were told we had our own “blood and soil,” and our own versions of history and truth, which we had to settle for. In this atmosphere of acquiescence to cultural, economic, and physical isolation, generations have grown up deprived of critical literacy skills needed to understand what was happening in their country, “facing a general learning crisis” and entrenched inequality as a consequence of generally impoverished education.1 Instead of strengthening institutions, the ruling elites have leveraged them in their weakened state to serve their interests. While Western Europe and the United States were selling a telos of democracy to the postsocialist world after the war, BiH’s twenty-five-odd years of transition only added to the country’s peripherality, which coincided with the post-2008 political and economic crises in the West. The country struggled to get back on its feet torn between the interests of the neoliberal West, embodied in the obsolete Office of the High Representative (OHR), the European Union (EU), Russia and China to an extent, and conservative patriarchal ethnonationalist political elites in power. No matter what we did in order to stand up against injustice or bring about a more democratic “recognition or redistribution” to borrow from  https://www.unicef.org/bih/en/press-releases/urgent-changes-education-are-necessity

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Nancy Fraser (1997), we would somehow always end up nowhere, which infuriated me at times as it did some of the research participants. Peripheral affects, my own and those of others, were almost palpable. Despite the initial sparks, every initiative would ultimately fizzle out. There was no continuity, the achievements of socialist modernity had not solidified, and there was especially no prospect of building a future in spite of the relative independence of the “superstructure” of society (including ideology and culture) from the economic (or techno-­ economic) “base” (Althusser, 1971). Women’s emancipation, workers’ self-management, or the Yugoslav socialist doctrine of brotherhood and unity was replaced by an amalgam of reimagined nineteenth-century Romantic nationalist traditions based on unquestionable patriarchy, religious values, and conservativism. It was as if the past was more important than the future—in fact nobody really cared about the future or the work that had to be done to improve things, be it in the spirit of capitalism and individualism involving the Protestant ethics of hard work, discipline, and frugality, or in line with a socialist conception of futurity involving collectivized work— postsocialist orientation always somehow seemed to “glance backward” (Rethman, 2015). Indecisiveness regarding this future work of (re)construction coincided with a lot of my personal affective engagement in political activism and the academia, followed by a hiatus due to burnout and exhaustion, which I took as an opportunity to regroup and rebuild from a different place. Whether the struggles were over recognition of difference, or greater social equality and redistribution, or any alternative to the 1995 Dayton constitutional setup, being “stuck” in the periphery was not just sentimental. For many it meant no way of moving forward and no clear sense of direction either—the uncertainty being coupled with the COVID-19 pandemic whose effects on people’s lives globally are yet to be assessed and processed. People had three options: adopt the political vision of their elected leaders, be ambivalent about it, or resist it by protesting or migrating. There are people who have tried to effect a change in spite of their peripheral position, and I dedicate this book to them. I see their struggles as relevant for a future archive and a historical framework providing conditions for statements (Foucault, 1972) to be made and

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knowable to us only in the times to come (Derrida, 1996)—documenting them meant offering contextually grounded insights into a particular slice in time. Before I start theorizing on the selves at the periphery, of which I, too, was one, a few words on my position in academia. As a university professor coming from the periphery, I was always seen as a good native by many Western scholars visiting Banja Luka. Although the universities in Belgrade, Ljubljana, or Zagreb all declined in the postsocialist period in terms of infrastructure, research, and relevance of produced publications, Banja Luka was considered even more peripheral in comparison. Having no formal affiliation with a Western university—now a coveted thing for many scholars in the center too—meant being treated as a second-rate scholar. The only way to temporarily ameliorate this was through occasional international scholarships. I have always been, despite occasional nomadism, firmly shaped by and embedded in the conditions of my production and social reproduction—as a woman, a feminist, a leftie, a partner and a mother, a Yugoslav, a Bosnian-Herzegovinian, a Serb, a former refugee, an educator, Westernand Eastern-educated, and a hurting (and possibly hurtful) body participating in the struggles of my respondents by imagining new possibilities. In addition to being an academic who analyzes, in a supposedly objective fashion, the developments in the field, I am also a contemporary of the post-Dayton times, a temporary migrant, and an activist co-witnessing with the research participants the post-Dayton structure and its impasses, from solidified ethnic-capitalism and privatization to the resistance challenging the present socioeconomic order. The exploration of affect was in this sense crucial for my rethinking of the bodily roots of female subjectivity for whom anatomy is partially a destiny and for whom the thread of desire was always “in an inextricable relation to language and therefore to others” (Braidotti, 1994, p. 56). By opting for the term “periphery,” I inextricably tie it to a geography from which a specific, bodily “politics of location” (Rich, 1994, 2003) is both a result of concrete political and economic forces and a notion mediated in language as an object of imaginary relations. In this sense, I hoped to explain how the practice of protests and migrations and their protagonists, emerging from the post-Dayton condition, are not just the

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direct consequences of but are also embedded in the postsocialist transition from which my respondents speak. They come with a past and a history, which the agents of postsocialism have sought to obliterate through ethnic cleansing, genocide, and privatization, which is why their stories are a testament for the future. Through an eclectic choice of theory and method, I propose a postcolonial reading of post-Yugoslav BiH, using decolonial methods, in an empirically driven account of the documented politico-economic and ideological developments, with the benefit of hindsight to the Yugoslav socialist past. The present situation is the outcome of defrosted ethnic conflicts, repatriarchization, destruction of the working class, street protests, and socioeconomic migrations, which have added to the Bosnian-­ Herzegovinian diaspora of close to two million with a tendency to grow and transform both the supposed “center” and the “periphery.” In this sense, Discourse and Affect in Postsocialist Bosnia and Herzegovina: Peripheral Selves is meant to be a resource for social researchers, discourse and affect scholars, practitioners of cultural studies, peace and conflict studies, political scientists and sociologists, and all those trying to make sense of what goes on in post-Dayton Bosnia. Despite the risk and uncertainty of our times, odds stacked against our projections, expectations, hopes, and dreams, alternative conceptualizing of the periphery can discover uncharted spaces of a past futurity and perhaps catch a glimpse of a future to come, with multiple and often unpredictable intensities. Banja Luka, Bosnia and Herzegovina

Danijela Majstorović

References Althusser, L. (1971). Ideology and the State. Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays. Monthly Review Press. Braidotti, R. (1994). Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory. Columbia University Press. Derrida, J. (1996). Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression. The University of Chicago Press.

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Foucault, M. (1972). Archaeology of Knowledge (A.  M. Sheridan Smith, Trans.). Pantheon. Fraser, N. (1997). Justice Interruptus: Critical Reflections on the ‘Postsocialist’ Condition. Routledge. Haraway, D. (1988). Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective. Feminist Studies, 14(3), 575–599. Rethmann, P. (2015). Wither Left-Wing Nostalgia. In O. Angé & D. Berliner (Eds.), Anthropology and Nostalgia (1st ed., pp. 198–212). Berghahn. Rich, A. (1994). Blood, Bread, and Poetry: Selected Prose 1979–1985. WW Norton & Company. Rich, A. (2003). Notes towards a Politics of Location. In Feminist Postcolonial Theory: A Reader (pp. 29–42). Edinburgh University Press. Majstorović, D. (2020). Love as Practice of Solidarity: Of Peripheral Bodies, Embodied Justice and Associated Labor. On Culture: The Open Journal for the Study of Culture, Summer (9). https://www.on-­culture.org/journal/issue-­9/ practice-­of-­solidarity/

Acknowledgments

The writing of this book spans the seven years following the protests and plenums from the spring of 2014 until the fall of 2020. I returned to Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) following my Fulbright research at UCLA in 2012–2013 and Canada Research Chair in Cultural Studies Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Alberta in 2013–2014. The energy of the protests and plenums shaking the country in the spring of 2014 gave rise to the Banja Luka Social Center (BASOC) in Banja Luka, the second-largest city in BiH, where I worked between 2014 and 2018 as an activist for four more years in parallel with my work as an associate professor at the University of Banja Luka. In 2018, I became full professor, contracted an inexplicable auto-immune disease, became involved with the Justice for David movement in Banja Luka, and moved to Germany while being on a sabbatical. In 2019, I won the Humboldt Scholarship, which enabled me to spend two more years living and studying migrants’ lives in the cities of Offenbach and Frankfurt, but I kept a connection with social change and social movements in Bosnia and abroad. I’d like to extend my gratitude to my mentors and friends, including Imre Szeman, Akhil Gupta, Douglas Kellner, Ruth Wodak, Azra Hromadžić, Marina Antić, Đurđa Trajković, and Aida Hozić for passionate intellectual exchanges and to Merima Ključo for throwing an unforgettable concert with the late Theodore Bikel for myself and Vuk still in the belly in Los Angeles. xvii

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Thinking in new materialist and Marxist terms would not have been possible without the Edmonton community/reading group who kept the flame going, most notably Marija Cetinić and Jeff Diamanti. Four years after the notorious “Bosnian spring” of 2014, I was part of different activist groups and collectives including the Banja Luka Social Center (BASOC) and my special thanks go to Dražen Crnomat, Leila Šeper, Adnan Dervić, and Gordana Katana for rethinking the possibilities on the periphery as well as all the women of BLASFEM, the first feminist festival in Banja Luka. As a unique defascified space in Banja Luka, BASOC hosted Žene Kruščice, who defended their river with their bodies; precarious workers (radnice) from Roza Zrenjanin; Tuzla’s DITA and Gračanica’s Fortuna; feminists such as Tanja Marković, Marija Ratković, Kia, Kosmogina, and Tanja Stupar; and many more dear friends, activists, and artists to whom I am forever indebted. My gratitude also goes to one of my dearest friends who often offered free labor for BLASFEM and different social causes, Mirza Purić, for editing the first version of this manuscript and providing much needed clarity and coherence—something social researchers tend to neglect because of our deep immersion with the data. It would be difficult to thank the vast (post-)Yugoslav and Yugoslav-­ focused intellectual community in the broadest sense of the term, all the dear friends and comrades who helped me shape my arguments over time (and this could not go without arguing) and with whom, hopefully, there is a future to be shared when we meet again post-COVID-19. They are Tijana Okić, Svjetlana Nedimović, Maja Mandić, Nikola Grgić, Almir Bašanović, Aida Sejdić, Elvis Kušljugić, Enes Kurtović, Arijana Forić Kurtović, Goran Zorić, Igor Sovilj, Nidžara Ahmetašević, Gorana Mlinarević, Boris Buden, Jasmina Husanović, Damir Arsenijević, Amir Husak, Hajrudin Hromadžić, Noa Treister, Mitja Velikonja, Sandro Hergić, Srđan Šušnica, Admir Rahmanović, Marizela Kljajić, Adela Jušić, Paul Stubbs, Elissa Helms, Catherine Baker, Eric Gordy, Max Bergholz, and Nebojša Jovanović. I am also grateful to my former students David Pećanac, Danijela Balaban, Dragan Malenčić, Vanja Stokić, and Erna Đogić, and many more, whose minds kept shining even as pressures of their work in cultural studies intertwined with their daily lives and many more individuals who were indispensable for this book and whom I fail to mention.

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My thanks go to my Banjalukans like Aleksandar and Dušica Ilić, Slavica Tutnjević, Zorana Vučković, Irena Zlatanović, and Tatjana Preradović, who kept me grounded; and Aleksandar Trifunović, Kris Lukkarila, and Sofija Grmuša for allowing me to use their amazing photographs, including Bruno Catalano, who kindly let me use his sculpture Les Voyageurs on the book’s cover. This book would be impossible without the Justice for David group (grupa Pravda za Davida), Davor and Teodora Dragičević, and Suzana and Zoran Radanović, whose battle to illuminate the death of their son and brother David Dragičević is a beacon of hope and inspiration shining a light on the future politics of many of their fellow citizens. Many more books will be written about their struggle. I hope the questions they raised in Krajina Square in Banja Luka keep reverberating as loudly as the Black Lives Matter slogan “No Justice, no Peace.” My thanks also go to my respondents, activists, and migrants whose discourses and affect have shaped this book. The book would likewise be impossible without the Majstorović and Vučkovac families, my twin sister, Milijana “Nana” Majstorović, and my lovely niece, Zoi. I am also grateful to the University of Banja Luka English Department for “letting me go for two years” between 2018 and 2020, and my (not-so) German community in Offenbach, both Frankfurt and Giessen, including Edina Čović, Amelie Kutter, Aristotelis Agridopoulos, Nils Kühl, Pia Barthes, Stefan Trajković Filipović, Marie Christine Boucher, Aleksandar Talović, Denis Ljuljanović, María Cárdenas, Silva Opačak Ivičević, Zoran Paskalj, and Lidija Rudolf Sviličić for being great company in pre- and post-corona times. Rethinking postsocialism and migrations would be impossible without Polina Manolova and Philipp Lottholz, whom I met at a conference in Belgrade in September 2017, who eventually became my editors for the special issue of Dversia: Southeast European Decolonial Theory and Practice, which came out in 2019, as we continued to spend time together not just in meetings of the Arbeitsgruppe Europe’s East in Giessen but well into the Corona times. I am very grateful to the Alexander von Humboldt foundation for generously awarding me the Humboldt Fellowship for Experienced

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Researchers 2019–2021 grant, which enabled me to stay and do research at Justus Liebig University in Giessen (JLU) and the University of Vienna. Many thanks to Huub Van Baar, Encarnacion Gutiérrez Rodríguez, and particularly to Andreas Langenohl, my Humboldt host at JLU and a dear colleague who trusted in my project even when I didn’t. Lastly, my love and gratitude go to my husband, comrade, and “partner in crime” Zoran Vučkovac.

Praise for Discourse and Affect in Postsocialist Bosnia and Herzegovina “Peripheral Selves is a brilliant fusion of scholarship and activism and contributes both to our understandings of historical and contemporary Bosnia-Herzegovina and the desires of its citizens for social change and social justice. It brings feminist, Marxist and post-colonial thought together in highly productive ways, refusing simple determinisms and one-dimensional logics to produce an account that is wide-ranging, reflexive, intellectually honest and, above all, rooted in struggles against injustice, oppression and hatred.” —Paul Stubbs, The Institute of Economics, Zagreb, Croatia “Periphery is not the end of the world, a black hole that swallows the meaning of everything. Rather, it is a form of a meaningful life, the one in search of its dignity. Danijela Majstorović’s peripheral selves have found it—in turning the language of critical theory not only against the dichotomy between center and periphery but also against the discrepancy between this theory itself and the practice of political activism.” —Boris Buden, Bauhaus-Universität Weimar, Germany “Speaking both from and about the periphery that Bosnia-Herzegovina has become, Danijela Majstorović theorises the affective entanglements of Bosnians’ responses to peripheralization with a decolonial commitment and an intimate understanding of what it has meant in her own material and social worlds. Protest for civic justice on one hand, and the ‘third wave’ of postsocialist migration from Bosnia-Herzegovina on another, are seen here as interlinked processes of emplacement and displacement that shape ‘peripheral selves’.” —Catherine Baker, University of Hull, UK “Danijela Majstorović shows not only how Bosnia and Hercegovina has become a European periphery whose subalternity in the international system regulates the EU’s access to cheap work force while at the same time keeping migration from the MENASEA region at bay. The book addresses the peripheral positionality as oscillating between the constant consideration of migration as marginalized subjects and collective indignation at power abuses that lead to protest and solidarity, and poses the question of what subjectivities and political alliances xxi

might emerge from this multiple peripherality. Nuanced in its methodology and bold in its activism, this is a social analysis of contemporary European realities that decenters much talk on integration, values, humanitarianism, or security. It is a must-read for anyone interested in having a realistic picture of the conditions and consequences of European politics.” —Andreas Langenohl, University of Giessen, Germany “From Balkan periphery to the new centers of European power; from ineffectivity and ignorance of what is called ‘International Community’ to lethal power of local nationalists and neoliberals; from post-Cold War détente to new frozen conflicts; from postmodernism to post-socialism; from 3rd wave of Bosnian migrants to the West to the masses of Syrian refugees; from David Dragičević and George Floyd to hundreds of thousands of innocent victims of the contemporary ‘New World Disorder’—Majstorović’s answers to all these dimensions in her fascinating, theoretically solid and empirically valid book are clear. She does not stand, as many others, on a very convenient middle-ground, stuck somewhere in between these unbearable liminalities—but she’s taking an active position, both as an academic and as a comrade, deeply involved in social struggles in her country. Combining auto-ethnography with critical theory, outside academic position with the inside activist one, researching both affect and its effects, discourses and practices, ideology and politics, she approaches all of them with a critical materialistic view, upgraded with emancipative aspirations. Such a stance can not be learned only from the books, no matter how critical they may be, but also from her personal experience of being a refugee as a girl and later on an academic nomad. A book on this difficult subject with rare credibility.” —Mitja Velikonja, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia “This book speaks loudly from the cracks between postsocialism and decoloniality, periphery and semiperiphery, to and about a more complex, critical understanding of Europe and Europeanness. In claiming the personal and in theorizing from the material of contemporary mobilities, border struggles and migration regimes in and beyond Bosnia-­Herzegovina, it is a moving and theoretically highly nuanced account of the peripheral European borderland coupled with a passionate and unflinching political commitment to social transformation.” —Manuela Boatcă, Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg, Germany

Contents

1 Introduction  1 1.1 Chapters’ Overview   7 Bibliography 11 2 Peripherality, Resistance, Solidarity 13 2.1 Recasting a Postwar European Periphery  13 2.2 Resistance to Peripheralization  21 2.3 Loving and Leaving in the Periphery  24 Bibliography 28 3 Decolonizing a Future in a European Periphery Between Socialist Interruptions and the Postcolonial Present 33 3.1 Postcolonial Claims, Decolonial Resistance: Salvaging a “Freedom Time”  33 3.2 Socialist-Yugoslav Anticolonial Legacy  40 3.3 BiH from 1992 to 1995 Ethnic War to Neocolonialism: The Postsocialist Impasse  47 3.4 Toward Deep Coalitions  54 Bibliography 63

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4 From Discourse to Body and Back via Critical Materialism: Bringing Discourse and Affect Research Together 71 4.1 Bodies Enter, Assemblages Emerge  71 4.2 Affected: Where Do We Go from Pain?  77 4.3 From New to Critical Materialism  80 4.4 From Discourse to Affect and Beyond  90 Bibliography 96 5 A Short History of a Mobilizable Postsocialist Body Politic: The Banja Luka Social Center103 5.1 Notes Toward Performing Critical Autoethnography 103 5.2 The Embeddedness and Assemblages of the Banja Luka Social Center 111 5.3 Configuring a Space, Finding a Voice 130 5.4 Feminist Epistemologies: Becoming Part of Assemblage, Engaging with the Struggles 135 Bibliography142 6 Justice for David, Justice for All of Us: A Story of Two Bodies147 Bibliography182 7 Our Migrating Laboring Bodies: When Periphery Moves to Center185 Bibliography212 8 Being in This Together: Of Quarantined, Global Southern and Global Eastern Bodies in Bosnia and Herzegovina217 Bibliography225 Bibliography227 Index253

List of Photos

Photo 3.1 Photo 3.2 Photo 3.3 Photo 3.4 Photo 5.1

Photo 5.2 Photo 5.3

Davor Dragičević and Muriz Memić, the father of the late Dženan, stand united in the Krajina square in the summer of 2018 57 David Dragičević done at his request weeks before his death by his friend Sofija Grmuša, now a JFD activist and politician58 Raised fist next to David’s heart as part of David’s shrine in the Krajina square (or David’s square) 59 George Floyd square in Minneapolis. (The courtesy of Kris Lukkarila) 60 DITA workers and Solidarity Union representatives from Tuzla visiting BASOC house in August 2016 with Gordana Katana, Dražen Crnomat, Jasmina Husanović, Pavlina Vujović, Ljupko Mišeljić, Dragana Garić, and others 129 The official opening of BLASFEM II on June 17, 2018, and the opening of the “Women workers speak” panel 136 Amela Zukan from Kruščica and Najila Mujaković from Fortuna Gračanica speaking at BLASFEM II in June 2017 137

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Photo 5.4

Photo 5.5

Photo 5.6 Photo 5.7 Photo 6.1 Photo 6.2 Photo 6.3

Photo 6.4 Photo 6.5 Photo 6.6 Photo 6.7 Photo 6.8 Photo 6.9

List of Photos

Emina Minka Busuladžić from DITA Tuzla speaking on BLASFEM I in June 2017 with the LGBTQ and memory politics activist Goran Zorić, the senior associate of the Gender Center of the RS government Jelena Milinović, the director of the RS Museum of Contemporary Arts Sarita Vujković, and the University of Tuzla’s cultural studies professor and activist Jasmina Husanović Women workers of Fortuna shoe factory in Gračanica, Northern Bosnia, during the March 8 protests in Banja Luka in 2018, which BASOC co-­organized with the local NGOs Oštra Nula and Helsinki Citizens’ Assembly meet with Srđan Puhalo, a prominent political analyst and myself. To the left is my partner and our son drumming at the march Naila Mujaković of Fortuna shoe factory in Gračanica relaxing at BLASFEM II in June 2018 Amela Zukan of “Women of Kruščica” relaxing at BLASFEM II in June 2018 Author with the members of JFD group in Banja Luka in July 2020 Davor Dragičević at JFD protests in the summer of 2018. (The courtesy of Danijel Čuček) Davor holding the poster in front of the RS Ministry of the Interior in Banja Luka with portraits of RS figureheads and the messages, “Who protects the murderers of our children?!” and “Gentlemen, set up new ministries so you can operate legally!” Raised fists during JFD protests The RS police facing JFD protesters in Banja Luka Davor Dragičević at the Krajina square Suzana Radanović, David’s mother, with her daughter, Teodora, at the protests in the summer of 2018 Suzana Radanović standing in front of the RS police on December 25, 2018 (From left to right) Arijana Memić, Muriz Memić, Ifet Feraget, Ozren Perduv and Aleksandra Vranješ in the BiH Parliament in Sarajevo in November 2019 during the public debate “Right to Justice”

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139 140 141 149 152

153 155 156 160 164 164

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  List of Photos 

Photo 6.10 Photo 6.11

Davor Dragičević laying on the spot David was found in Banja Luka Aleksandra Vranješ and Daniela Ratešić during the protests in Banja Luka in 2018

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List of Maps

Map 5.1 Network 5f7 and BASOC’s local civil society environment. (Fritsch, 2016, p. 77) Map 5.2 Code Tree #1—BASOC overview. (Fritsch, 2016, p. 78)

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1 Introduction

There are many ways of theorizing and describing selves on the periphery, just as there have been many peripheries. There is a variety of possible approaches, too, and some of which I have taken situate this manuscript on the border between social science, history, biography, and autobiography. There are multiple structural and cultural peripheries and peripheries within peripheries, inhabited by peripheral selves, bodies conditioned by multiple oppressions, including wars and policing, privatization, denial of justice, as well as various gatekeeping processes from within and without inhibiting the circulation of knowledge and people from such spaces. If my line of theoretical thinking is more traditionally postcolonial, I strived to use decolonial methods for learning with and from peripheral selves1 where possible, however not without difficulty. By delineating BiH’s postcolonial and post-socialist specificity and singularity (Hallward, 2001), which has so far been supported by little empirical analysis  https://www.uni-giessen.de/faculties/gcsc/newsboard/explorative-workshop-decolonialmethods-peripheral-selves-the-migrant-figure-between-south-­­east-european-and-global-southentanglements

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© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 D. Majstorović, Discourse and Affect in Postsocialist Bosnia and Herzegovina, Postdisciplinary Studies in Discourse, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-80245-5_1

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(Stubbs, 2021), I hope not only to add to the “dialogue between the posts” but also to contribute to “critical investigations of the complexities of the socialist period” and the production of “decolonial scholarship in the region” (Karkov & Valiavicharska, 2018, p. 1). The postcolonial turn is “only a turn, not the road” (Stubbs, 2021), and it is one where more empirical analyses of discourses, selves, or societies stemming from peripheral contexts ought to accompany literary studies and historical analyses mostly associated with postcolonial theory. Theoretically, the first aim of the book is to position the previously undertheorized postcolonial optics in the Balkans as a necessity for understanding the complex postsocialist and postwar condition. This book does this by bringing to light new data on the political and economic order, democratic processes, including the rise of new social movements reflective of the class struggles underpinning them, and social em/migrations and imaginations in this European periphery to students, scholars of everyday life in Southeastern Europe and BiH after the bloodiest war in post-WWII Europe and after more than two decades of peace. The data provide insight into the conceptualizations of the constituents and the conditions of the peripherality and postcoloniality in post-­ Dayton Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) in relation to the bygone era of socialist modernity but also in relation to the perpetual “postwar” and “postsocialist” condition following the 1992–1995 war. My other aim was to bridge the supposed gap between representational and non-representational modes of analysis, which is something I attempt in Chap. 4. This chapter provides an anchoring point for my shifting between methods, approaches, and data, ranging from critical discourse analysis to ethnomethodology, autoethnography, and in-depth qualitative interviews. This relatively broad range of perspectives is necessary for understanding social responses in today’s BiH not only discursively but also affectively. Moving beyond the critical discourse analysis of political text and speech toward the politics of affect (Massumi, 2015), I analyze the affective aspects of raising voice, occupying public spaces and protesting as bodily intensities of my research participants, including their consequential experience of persecution, imprisonment, migration, and asylum, but also as my own bodily intensity after falling ill and deciding to leave the country.

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The decision to use different methodological approaches in the remaining three empirical chapters too was driven by different affective entanglements with my research participants as well as the underlying dominant discourses shaping and triggering our actions. Using terminology from new materialism, I wanted to show peripheral selves, their contextual embeddedness, assemblages, and contingencies as plateaus, existing in specific interconnected rhizomatic relationships in which bodies are “assemblages” that arise via the causal force of desire through association and connection of constituting elements (Deleuze & Guattari, 1983, pp.  1–9, 283–96). I positioned myself as an academic and activist involved in the activities in the particular political and social context in Banja Luka after 2009 with different rites of passage and politicization following the trajectory. This was a time when more voices critical of pressing ethnic-nationalism started to emerge on the academic and activist scene, first with the launching of the “Language, Power and Ideology” group at the Faculty of Philosophy in Banja Luka in 2009, the rise of social movements in BiH in 2012, and, for us in Banja Luka, the establishment of the Banja Luka Social Center (BASOC) in 2015. These voices were amplified during the Justice for David (JFD) protests between 2018 and 2021 and the post-2014 migrations from BiH to Germany and from the Middle East, North African, and Southeast Asian (MENASEA) countries to BiH, which continue to this day. While I could not speak their languages, had no access to the camps, and had little power to interact with them and evidentialize their lives, I could not stop thinking about them. Mine was a peripheral body, too, but as a Bosnian citizen, I was allowed to do much more than they ever would be. Our bodies have been competing with other more privileged European bodies on the labor market, and while I was able to access it, they were not. They have been refugees, sans-papiers, people on the move, subject to the international community’s securitization policies, banned from entering the EU. Croatian police treat them with extreme brutality if they catch them attempting the game, that is, crossing the border into the EU. Except the odd individual, most of them do not even want to stay in BiH. They have been freezing for the fourth winter in the row in devastated and otherwise inadequate facilities in BiH next to the impoverished local population who have been

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oscillating between ignorance and arrogance, occasional charity, and at times sheer animosity and racism toward their new neighbors. Deep coalitions are needed for multiple peripheries, as hostages of complex histories, divisive geopolitics, capitalism, and nationalisms producing genealogies of violence, to come together forming a “union of peripheralities” that “becomes once again the global experience of relation” (Glissant, 1997). Yet only via relations, networks, and translation of knowledge about global justice and solidarities “bodies could have chances for life” (Haraway, 1988, p. 580). When meeting my interviewee Davor Dragičević during his time in Vienna as an asylum seeker, after he had escaped from our hometown of Banja Luka, I told him about wanting to write a book about the protests but also migrations, “right now,” I told him, “you are this 3rd wave, and many of your friends who are here are part of JFD movement are 2nd or 3rd wave migrants, I’d like to tell a story about the hopelessness of a perspective but also unity against adversity which was occasionally possible, what do you think about it?” By informing him directly about my intention and asking his opinion, I started thinking about decolonizing academia via methodology. The decision to adopt or even strive for decolonial methodology stems from my own contextual embeddedness, participation, and identification with these struggles. I was unable to approach my topic as an outsider; rather, I wanted, whenever possible, to participate in the struggles learning about and from a variety of data gained from the relationships with my research participants over the past years. It is hard to escape the habitus of a trained researcher in this sense, but I opted out of imposing a strict analytic framework onto their voices wherever possible. This kind of ethics is always messy, yet through organizing a feminist festival like we did with BLASFEM,2 joint “shouting from a place” (Boyer, 2018) during the protests or emigrating in the same wave, the affective ties become joint and sedimentary and the knowledge about what is wrong embodied before it is processed and packaged for publication and distribution.

 BLASFEM is an acronym for the Banja Luka Feminist Festival, which took place in June 2017, June 2018, and August 2019 in the Banja Luka Social Center (BASOC). 2

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The urge to decolonize the knowledge on/from peripheries has been gaining a lot of traction in recent times, echoing activist practices of solidarity in forging new unions despite limitations and seeming incommensurabilities between more and less traditional colonies. As a researcher, I understand epistemic decolonization as a “praxis beyond metaphors,” a political commitment, and a way of “learning with and from” rather than learning about what has been disavowed in the colonialist unfolding of modernity (Vizcaíno, 2020). In giving peripheral selves a voice, I was recognizing my own implicitness, exercising a kind of epistemic humility as “an awareness of the limits and contingencies of one’s beliefs and commitments” (Allen, 2016, p. 76). Speaking from a periphery about the periphery means elevating the politics of location (Rich, 1994) to a radical political function in order to foster a dialogical practice of many different embodied genealogies of peripheralization. The politics of location is first and foremost about experience within certain material conditions—it means that one’s thinking, one’s theoretical process, is not abstract, universalized, objective and detached; rather, it is situated in the contingency of one’s own experience, and as such it is a necessarily partial exercise. In other words, one’s intellectual vision is not a disembodied mental activity; rather, it is closely connected to one’s place of enunciation, that is, where one is actually speaking from. (Braidotti, 1994, p. 237)

“Limited location and situated knowledge” (Haraway, 1988, p. 583) as pathway to feminist objectivity seek to establish “an earthwide network of connections including the ability partially to translate knowledges among very different—and power-differentiated—communities … to build meanings and bodies that have a chance for life” (Haraway, 1988, p. 580). Writing about this situated knowledge, from a political location (Rich, 1994) and through the “rhizomatic” poetics of relation (Glissant, 1997) with my research participants, meant acknowledging my specific researcher-researched assemblage. I was unable to objectively detach myself from the lived experience spanning over twenty-five years of postwar and postsocialism, including some socialist and decolonial struggles

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in the aftermath of war, three and a half years of war itself, and fourteen years of life in Yugoslav socialism. What guided me in the process was a feminist optic, a Marxist commitment, a body-centered and eclectic epistemological approach, which is inevitably about one’s politics and social change within specific historical, economic, racialized, gendered, and social infrastructures of oppression, injustice, and peripheralization. By insisting on the rhizomatic nature of sedimented truths notwithstanding their entangled socioeconomic and political histories, I found myself drawn to genealogies and archaeologies of discourses (Foucault, 1972) as well as the actions and practice emerging from them. What counts as consensus about what counts as truth always arises from a source of power and from negotiations between the stakeholders. As a consequence, this consensus can result in people leaving, or being prohibited from leaving certain spaces. A border is also a plateau, both discursive and material, comprising subjects of border regimes in which “the borders’ outside” has become synonymous with periphery. Studying BiH as a peripheral borderland with nested peripheral selves presents an opportunity for decolonial politics that unites the postcolonial and postsocialist worlds despite their “uneasy” solidarity (Roediger, 2017). Peripheral borderlands are mobile, multiple, and always shifting. They constantly “multiply labor” (Mezzadra & Neilson, 2013) and produce new subjectivities (selves) in or fleeing war, poverty, injustice, and terror becoming “the Black of the world” (Mbembe, 2017, p. 3) in a process of universalized commodification of people. Sometimes the desire is to leave the periphery, due to skepticism about life prospects, economic precarity, or broken social bonds. Some desire a nomadic life, preferring it to a settled one, yet desire alone may not always be enough for those coming from peripheries. Although there is a degree of overlap, a distinction should be made between the involuntary exile of an asylum seeker and a nomad: the former is permanently homeless in his or her nostalgia for a home as the spatio-temporal horizon of elsewhere and in another time (De Lange, 2009) is usually on the move because of war or political persecution, while the latter is “denied the dream of a homeland, with the result that home, being portable, is available

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everywhere” (Peters, 1999, p.  31).3 The fresh Bosnian-Herzegovinian nomads leaving for Germany in their thousands are somewhere in between as their exile is for the most part voluntary despite the tense politico-economic conditions at home. Most of them do not arrive as asylum seekers given that there are work opportunities for them in care work, construction, gastronomy, and information technologies, and they are seen as much needed workforce. Writing on the periphery is nothing new. Yet my motivation to write about the inhabitants or subjects of the periphery was guided by the need to explore the conditions and constitutive elements of peripherality as consequences of wartime destruction and the uncertainty of the postwar period, as well as to look into what happens to people under such circumstances, how they speak, act, and feel. I wanted to see how they are peripheral selves and also how they become peripheral selves. This book is therefore not so much about peripheries but rather about the materiality of peripheral selves as bodies emerging out of such spaces. Peripherality, as the consequence of structural injustice, cruelty, ignorance, and poverty, is both visceral and tattooed on the bodies. Only by recentering those bodies can it be read and analyzed, perhaps even reversed and prevented. This book is a homage to joint struggles and not the closure for any of us.

1.1 Chapters’ Overview The book grapples with several binary oppositions and trilemmas: the one between the notions of center and periphery; between postsocialist, critical theoretical, and post- and decolonial approaches; and, in terms of research, between constructivist and participatory research approaches to studying a shared sense of being/becoming in postwar and postsocialist BiH grounded in discourse and affect. In terms of chapter structure, the book is divided into seven chapters preceded by a preface and an introduction. Whereas the first three chapters are more theoretical, the next  Exile, Nomadism, and Diaspora: The Stakes of Mobility in the Western canon. In H.  Naficy (Ed.), Home, exile, homeland: film, media, and the politics of place (pp. 17–41). New York: Routledge. 3

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three are more empirical followed by the last chapter, which is a theoretical reflection and intends to go beyond in offering ways of thinking peripheral selves in Bosnia. Chapter 2 deals with peripherality from the world systems and urban studies perspectives taking it as a relational concept, a condition characterized or constituted by relations extending far beyond spatially conditioned disparities and nonspatial intersectional axes of oppression. Whereas spatial dimensions are mostly geographical and infrastructural, the nonspatial dimensions are structural, exploitative, and historical, or the so-called longue durée dimensions, including those of the imperial past, colonial legacy, wars, and capitalism in which peripheral selves have been socially nested in post-Dayton Bosnia. Chapter 3 discusses the similarities between Yugoslav socialist and decolonial objectives based on the “freedom time” by analyzing literature on international socialism’s anticolonisalism as contributing to decolonization but also those claiming socialist modernity was also colonial proposing that different politics of location may be crucial in the perception of these two different types of understandings. There were meaningful historical interruptions of BiH’s colonial continuity: BiH as part of Yugoslavia was the site of the revolutionary struggle of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) for national liberation from Nazi Germany and domestic traitors during WWII, which was a prime example of a global anticolonial struggle. Among its outcomes were the emancipation of women and an unprecedented increase in popular literacy via the Women’s Antifascist Front (WAF), the reconstitution of anticapitalist relations by introducing the concept of socially owned property and egalitarian relations of self-management coupled with the ideology of brotherhood and unity, and, finally, the establishment of the Non-aligned Movement (NAM). Chapter 4 explores the biopolitical implications of bodies being articulated through collocations of the “state” (the political body) and “vulnerability” (the corporeal, biological body). Taking the body as a site of operation of affect in culture means understanding body-sites in terms of intensity and relationality. The new materialist shift in social theory is an opposition to realist and constructionist ontologies insisting that social inquiry should focus on how assemblages of the animate and the

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inanimate together produce the world. This new move radically and transversally extends the traditional materialist analysis between structural levels of the social, dissolving the “mind/matter” and “nature/culture” divides by addressing how desires, feelings, and meanings also contribute to social production placing the researcher with an assemblage and discussing bodies and affects accompanying postsocialist struggles in new materialist terms. Political-theoretical alliances across the “old” and the “new” versions of materialism should be built aligning the new materialism into a critical theory that reveals the interrelations between human societies and the nonhuman world. One way to achieve this is by incorporating praxeological versions of historical materialism, which have mostly been ignored by the new materialists or by adding praxis as a main unit of analysis in critical materialism, a praxis which goes beyond the metaphorical and the political as an attempt at epistemic and methodological decolonization. Chapter 5 combines fragments from the interviews with some former members of the Sarajevo and Tuzla plenums reflecting on the February 2014 protests through the lens of self-reflexive, critical autoethnography via membership in the activist collective BASOC and the embeddedness of this collective within the wider left scene in the post-Yugoslav context. The BASOC experience is reflected upon as crucial for developing a particular kind of ethics of the neuralgic spots of Bosnian postsocialism including a relationship to socialist Yugoslavia, privatization and workers’ rights and social justice, and feminist and queer politics. The initiative was a result of various encounters and interactions between individuals and groups since 2008 as a rhizomatic platform (Deleuze and Guatarri 1987) with an unambiguously left agenda. It was shaped by different intellectual and activist genealogies, and as a collective, it shaped different political articulations and struggles attracting people as a fascist-free space in the heart of Banja Luka. It originated as simultaneously a site, a learning space, and a base for an assemblage of activists interested in left politics after the 2014 protests and plenums in BiH. In March 2018, twenty-one-year-old David Dragičević was killed by what his father, Davor Dragičević, called “the state.” Justice for David movement has been pivoted social justice struggles in Bosnia telling the tale of political activism and taking to the streets against the police

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cover-up of David’s murder and their reluctance to launch a proper investigation. It comprises in-depth qualitative interviews with five prominent JFD activists with whom I got into touch in 2018 and became friends with in the meantime supporting the movement whenever possible. In Chap. 6, they narrate their personal histories, their involvement in the movement, and their political views as fully self-aware social actors who wanted their names revealed. Making use of the availability and depth of data while studying resistance in BiH on the ground was possible through an affective conviviality (sociality) of myself and my research participants. Speaking from a shared political location rendered a constellation of multiple relationships and personal intensities, traumas, and solidarity birthing new forms of political agency in the periphery. Chapter 7 explores the life worlds and stories of fifteen third-wave Bosnian emigrants to Germany tracing the trajectories of their migrant lives in the massive post-2015 surge of people from the Western Balkans to Western Europe, including more than 100,000 Bosnians and Herzegovinians after the Western Balkans Regulation by the German Bundestag alleviating people from the region to obtain German work visas mostly in the sectors of cleaning, construction, and care work. In the middle of “emptying” of bodies from socialism to capitalism, I joined this third wave as a temporary emigrant myself documenting my own and my research participants’ migrant experience via legitimation, notions of “here” and “there,” fragmentedness, and volatility of migrant lives in Germany while negotiating new roles at work, leisure activities, and social life via oral histories and in-depth interviews. Most of them were already my friends or family, and others I became friends with during my time in Giessen and Offenbach between 2018 and 2021, and contacting them was relatively easy and their names have been anonymized at their request. Finally, Chap. 8 seeks to extend the notion of peripheral selves onto the migrants and refugees from the MENASEA countries who are currently “stuck” in Bosnia as the new peripheral borderland. Both they and their Western Balkan counterparts have been subjects of different borderings, including a permanent (post)war condition as a state of exception (Fassin & Pandolfi, 2010), division of political ex/inclusions, absence of human rights, and strong authoritarianism and sectarianism of the

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political elites resulting in more migrants “made mobile with their own relative point of expulsion” (Nail, 2015). In the chapter I theoretically reflect on the people who ended up in postwar BiH fleeing wars in their own countries as their bodies became constitutive of BiH as a periphery.

Bibliography Allen, A. (2016). The End of Progress: Decolonizing the Normative Foundations of Critical Theory. Columbia University Press. Boyer, A. (2018). Kansas City. A Handbook of Disappointed Fate. Ugly Duckling Presse. Braidotti, R. (1994). Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory. Columbia University Press. De Lange, M. (2009). Digital Nomadism: A Critique. Unpublished Manuscript. Retrieved October 15, 2020, from http://www.uu.nl/medewerkers/ MLdeLange/0 Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1983). On the Line. Semiotext(e)/Foreign Agents. Fassin, D., & Pandolfi, M. (2010). Contemporary States of Emergency. The Politics of Military and Humanitarian Interventions. Zone Books. Foucault, M. (1972). Archaeology of Knowledge (A.  M. Sheridan Smith, Trans.). Pantheon. Glissant, É. (1997). Poetics of Relation. University of Michigan Press. Hallward, P. (2001). Absolutely Postcolonial: Writing Between the Singular and the Specific. Manchester University Press. Haraway, D. (1988). Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective. Feminist Studies, 14(3), 575–599. Karkov, N., & Valiavicharska, Z. (2018). Rethinking East-European Socialism: Notes Toward an Anti-Capitalist Decolonial Methodology. Interventions, 20(6), 785–781. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369801X.2018.1515647 Massumi, B. (2015). Politics of Affect. John Wiley and Sons. Mbembe, A. (2017). Critique of Black Reason. Duke University Press. Mezzadra, S., & Neilson, B. (2013). Border as Method, or, the Multiplication of Labor. Duke University Press. Nail, T. (2015). The Figure of the Migrant. Stanford University Press. Peters, J. (1999 [2013]). Exile, Nomadism, and Diaspora: The Stakes of Mobility in Western Canon. In H. Naficy (Ed.), Home, Exile, Homeland: Film, Media and the Politics of Place (pp. 17–44). Routledge.

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Rich, A. (1994). Blood, Bread, and Poetry: Selected Prose 1979–1985. WW Norton & Company. Roediger, D. (2017). Class, Race, and Marxism. Verso. Stubbs, P. (2021). Yugoscentrism and the Study of the Non-Aligned Movement: Towards a Post-colonial Historiography. History in Flux, 3(3). Vizcaíno, R. (2020). On Epistemic Decolonization: Praxis Beyond Metaphors. The Peace Chronicle. Retrieved February 1, 2021, from https://www.peacejusticestudies.org/chronicle/article-­6-­vizcaino/

2 Peripherality, Resistance, Solidarity

2.1 Recasting a Postwar European Periphery BiH as a former socialist country and one of the last European countries not admitted to the EU1 is among Europe’s most peripheral. It was mostly rural and agrarian prior to Yugoslav socialism between 1945 and 1992, and even during socialism, it was subject to uneven development and always peripheral vis-à-vis Slovenia, Croatia, or Serbia, where many Bosnians went to seek work. From the fourteenth to nineteenth centuries, it was part of the Ottoman Empire, after which it was annexed Austria-Hungary in 1878. When it subsequently became part of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes in 1918, and as of 1929, the Kingdom of Yugoslavia (Djokić, 2003), it was considered the poorest part of the realm. Since WWII, BiH has been marked by “post-Cold War reconfigurations of power relations and geopolitical fault lines” (Dzenovska & Kurtović, 2018), occupying a particular geopolitical position within the Cold War division (Hinnebusch, 2018; Chari & Verdery, 2009) and during the Eurozone crisis (Kutter, 2020). It is a tangible  BIH’s possible accession to the EU, its terms, and what happens then is a whole other story.

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© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 D. Majstorović, Discourse and Affect in Postsocialist Bosnia and Herzegovina, Postdisciplinary Studies in Discourse, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-80245-5_2

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material space of daily social reproduction in Southeast Europe marked by twenty-six years of neocolonial administration, still living the peace agreement. It has been asymmetrical to and belated in relation to the Western capitalist modernity (Harders, 2015) with “nesting Orientalisms” (Bakić-Hayden, 1995), “not quite” white (Baker, 2018) but still “whiter” than the Middle Eastern, North-African, and Southeast Asian refugees coming to BiH en route to the EU. Following the 2004 EU enlargement, “the Eastern parts of the continent have been recast as a region whose political, socio-cultural, or religious institutions are as many proofs of questionable Europeanness and wanting economic and juridical standards” (Boatcă, 2015, p. 220).2 This recasting entails rendering the periphery as a tangible material space of daily social reproduction in an asymmetrical power relation to the West, a European outside in a particular geopolitical position within the Cold War division (Hinnebusch, 2018; Chari & Verdery, 2009) and the Eurozone crisis (Kutter, 2020), culturally delayed in relation to the Western capitalist modernity (Harders, 2015). It has been the consequence of the present migration and border regimes and processes as much as of the underlying political, economic, and cultural forces. Understanding this restructuring is crucial not only for rethinking the future of the EU enlargement and migrations (see Szczepanikowa & Van Criekinge, 2018) but also for the future of the EU as such. More recently, by becoming a country of “double transit,” BiH has often been referred to as Europe’s “dumping ground” (see also Stojić Mitrović, 2020; Leutloff-Grandits, 2020)3 for non-European migrants4 and a “waiting room” (Jansen et al., 2016) for its own citizens who are  More recent work on peripheries as an “emerging transdisciplinary agenda” in the EU from a politico-economic perspective in the aftermath of the Eurozone crisis and the financial crash was done by Amelie Kutter’s project Reconfigurations: Center and Periphery in the European Union http://www.amelie-kutter.net/de/2016/09/marie-curie-project-reconfigurations-of-centre-and-­ periphery-­in-the-european-union-after-crisis/ and at the workshop “European peripheries: transdisciplinary perspectives” held at European University Viadrina, Frankfurt (Oder) https://www. europa-uni.de/de/forschung/institut/institut_europastudien/forschung/Projekte/Peripherien/ index.html 3  https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/12/06/croatia-is-abusing-migrants-while-the-euturns-a-blind-eye/ 4  https://www.infomigrants.net/en/post/20892/bosnia-s-vucjak-camp-migrants-a-garbagedump-and-a-road-to-nowhere 2

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leaving to seek work in the EU.  Although coming from power-­ differentiated communities, there is a potential to fuse or otherwise commonize their “peripheralness” as a collective experience of bodies who for a number of reasons have been oppressed by a center, expelled, hurt, imprisoned, locked, made ill or dead. The rather challenging incorporation of this perspective, however far-fetched, means imagining and crafting alliances among different peripheral selves without recourse to an identity politics of mere counting and classifying. Yet, I believe this is the only way to start producing and broadening shared understanding and meaningful resonances in line with Bauman’s (2016) “fusing of horizons” and Gadamer’s Horizontverschmelzung (2004), and, consequently, to rediscover nodal points to think from and build global solidarities anew. To say that periphery is always constructed vis-à-vis an imagined center renders it as an inherently relational concept, a condition characterized or constituted by relations extending far beyond spatially conditioned disparities. This relational character of core and periphery connotes power and inequality suggesting that periphery should be understood as a “subordinate of the core” in “a vicious cycle created in space over time driven by distance” (Anderson, 2000, p.  92). Center/periphery classifications are further complicated by both spatial and nonspatial intersectional axes of oppression. Whereas the nonspatial dimensions are structural, exploitative, and historical, the so-called longue durée dimensions, including those of the imperial past, colonial legacy, wars, and capitalism in which peripheral selves are socially nested, spatial dimensions are mostly geographical. Center/periphery classifications understood in spatial terms marked differences in terms of regional and national development, the urban-rural divide, and infrastructural discrepancies. Varying degrees of socioeconomic peripheralization due to untrammeled neoliberal capitalism and different biopolitical regimes have produced multiple and shifting peripheries both in the East and the West, depending on whether these contexts were close or distant from communication systems or controlling centers of economy (Fudurić, 2007, p. 4). Similarly, political and economic conditions, including the war, privatization, and migrations since the 1992–1995 war, have strongly affected the former Yugoslavia and BiH as new peripheries notwithstanding the causal relationship between a place and life chances (Wilson, 1987;

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Slater, 2013). In addition to the weak state, the geographical terrain has played a role for refugees en route since 2015, while the local population has suffered because of the destruction of transport networks5 and the lack of access to clean air, water, and communal services6 amid privatization in major BiH cities. This indicates the volatility of internal and external processes which have created a periphery in a nontraditional periphery like BiH as the descendent of the semi-peripheral Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRY). Bernt and Colini’s work on urban peripheries (Bernt & Colini, 2013, pp.  21–22) points to the relational character of peripheries whereby peripherality is not so much about the location or lack of resources but is “the outcome of discriminatory (social) relations.” Whereas people-based approaches to periphery “do well in analyzing the living conditions of economically weak and/or discriminated population groups, place-based approaches have added spatial relegation and concentration effects as an additional source of disadvantage. … It is thus the presence of peripheral groups which makes the place peripheral, so that spatial inequalities need to be explained with societal relations” (Ibid.). The volatility is also reflected in the fact that a “peripheral” status may not always be accorded to all aspects of life in economically peripheral territories (Todorova, 2018). As an example of this is the strong postwar BiH cultural and art scene, which developed thanks to the mobility afforded to the artists and the international recognition for cultural products, including film, music, and theater festivals. There also existed a vibrant intellectual scene, which now operates mostly in the diaspora as a result of brain drain in the nineties. A major fallacy in the debate on peripheries is to view them as static entities and ignore their relational character (Lung & Domanski, 2009, p. 8). First, there is no reason to believe that the periphery has a stable  See http://documents1.worldbank.org/curated/en/300941506408490403/pdf/Project-­ Information-­D ocument-Integrated-Safeguards-Data-Sheet-Republika-Srpska-RailwaysRestructuring-­Project-P161122-Sequence-No-00.pdf and https://www.zrs-rs.com/files/javne_ nabavke/2018/nabavke_po_pravilima_i_procedurama_svjetske_banke/zahtjev_za_izrazavanje_ interesa/13.12.2018/Terms%20of%20Reference%20related%20to%20Organizational%20 restructuring%20of%20Republike%20Srpska%20Railways%20-%20Revised.pdf 6  https://www.unenvironment.org/news-and-stories/story/coming-clean-air-bosnia-andherzegovina 5

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status; rather, there are processes of creation, reproduction, and/or breaking out from peripherality. This may differ for different peripheral selves—while some may favor accession to the EU and NATO, supposedly as a way to reign in the corruption bring in the rule of law, others may be adamantly against it, for different reasons, from leftist to purely nationalistic, that is, the anti-NATO sentiment in \\the Republika Srpska (RS), which mostly exists because of the 1995 bombing of the RS and the 1999 NATO bombing of Serbia (Busterud, 2015, p. 339; Larsen, 2019). Second, the periphery can be understood not only in the context of its relationships to the core and other peripheries but also in relation to “the State” whether it is Yugoslavia or the states created in its aftermath. Belonging to the high echelons of the Party of Independent Social Democrats (Stranka Nezavisnih Socijaldemokrata; SNSD) or the Party of Democratic Action (Stranka Demokratske Akcije, SDA),7 in the current post-Dayton BiH, with access to resources and capital means occupying a more “central” position on the scale while acquiescing to their conservative norms. On the other hand, the opposition has often been just as hostile to marginalized groups such as the LGBTQ community: after the 2020 elections, the new Banja Luka mayor Draško Stanivuković, the youngest in the history of the city, who was critical of Dodik and capitalized politically on the JFD protests, was quoted as saying there was going to be “no gay parade in Banja Luka, because it is not in the spirit of my people”8 while former SDA officials, who broke away in 2018 to form the People and Justice Party (Narod i pravda), part of the winning coalition in the 2020 elections, called for the cancellation of Sarajevo Pride in

 SNSD (Stranka Nezavisnih Socijaldemokrata) stands for The Party of Independent Social Democrats. Although the SNSD came to power in 1998 and again in 2006, it is now considered the most powerful political party in BiH and the Republika Srpska entity as their leader, Milorad Dodik, won in the 2018 elections and became the Serb member of the three-partite rotating Presidency of BiH. SDA (Stranka Demokratske Akcije) or the Party of Democratic Action is the strongest political part in the Federation of the BiH and their current representative in the BiH presidency is Šefik Džaferović. 8  http://rs.n1info.com/Region/a677628/Stanivukovic-Dok-sam-ja-na-celu-grada-nece-biti-gejparade-­u -Banjaluci.html?fbclid=IwAR2HRgbJwI7Zo9orMnN4w10pJLkAA8WtM0 7Bb1-­TMC0wvup6LTDrNWXOWg0 7

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2019 warning it could “escalate political tensions and trigger negative consequences.”9 Opting to use the term periphery in social sciences is inevitably associated with dependency theory, which subscribes to the ideas of uneven development resulting in the existence of developed and underdeveloped countries in relations of dependence. Wallerstein’s world-systems theory (Wallerstein, 1974) accounts for the social structure of global inequality by dividing global society into core, periphery, and semi-periphery whereby peripherality is a state with measurable socioeconomic origins occupying an “in-between” position and is a “permanent feature of the world-system” (Arrighi, 1985, p.  245), characterized by asymmetrical power relations (Jessop, 1994), exclusion from highly developed capitalist networks (Syrett, 2012) in relation to the core, and a greater level of industrialization in relation to the periphery. In addition to the criticism of the developmentalist perspective in social sciences, which takes society as an abstract theoretical unit for the study of social change, the world-­ system perspective makes one more set of claims. It conceives of the world at large as a loose conglomerate of related but basically autonomous societies each following on its own terms a similar path of internal development. “The arena within which social action takes place and social change occurs is not just ‘society’ in the abstract, but a definite ‘world’ as a spatio-temporal whole, whose special scope is coexistent with the elementary division of labor among its constituent regions or parts and whose temporal scope extends for as long as the elementary division of labor continually reproduces the ‘world’ as a social whole” (Hopkins et al., 1982, p. 42). Whereas SFRY, as a Second World, socialist, Eastern European country, was classified as semi-peripheral in the 1960s (Wallerstein, 1974) between the East and the West, recent world-systems scholarship categorizes post-Yugoslav BiH as a “periphery” (Dunaway & Clelland, 2017, p.  415), “super-periphery” (Bartlett, 2009), or even “periphery of the periphery” (Bechev, 2012), as opposed to Croatia and Serbia as “semi-­ peripheries” (Bonfiglioli, 2015; Blagojević, 2009). The reason for this 9  https://today.rtl.lu/news/world/a/1393534.html?fbclid=IwAR1oDJssWc7J6CaB33eOX69MpD SaKy8Y4UbEUXlrkpcCl84vz_2jM74tBzE

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escalating peripherality is not just the terrible devastation suffered during the 1992–1995 war but also the exceptionally high unemployment rate10 and low growth rates during its postsocialist phase marked by incompetent corrupt governments, migrations, and the crises spilling over from the EU.  Whereas the SFRY had a privileged international role after WWII for being situated “between the East and the West,” after its breakup, the newly formed states were removed from this former Second World centrality. Defining peripherality in today’s BiH requires elasticity beyond the world-systems theory, because peripherality as a condition opens up a space for engendering new political imaginaries and, within them, decolonial epistemic perspectives. Granted, BiH is a periphery with a longue durée colonial history, but under what terms can we really talk about its decolonization notwithstanding that the term should not be freely used as a “metaphor,” as Tuck and Yang (2012) warn against? In arguing in favor of anti-imperialist, decolonial, and anti-capitalist struggles in his work on decolonization and development, Samir Amin developed a theory of global economy, articulated in the Centers, where production and control take place, and Peripheries, where there is reception, stressing the necessity for peripheries to have self-centered economies, “disconnected” in relation to the global system (1990). Throughout his work, he advocated for an even more radical decolonization from central capitalist control through an actual, active “delinking” (Amin, 1990) as refusal to subordinate national-development strategy to the imperative of globalization. He saw the division of labor between the economies of the Empire of Capital (center) and the Global South (periphery) as resulting, despite their specificities, in a “generalized proletarianization” (Amin, 2014, paragraph 30), and not in what Hardt and Negri have called multitude (Hardt & Negri, 2004) embodied in various social movements. Even if it “immediately appears as processes of dispossession, exclusion, and pauperization … underdevelopment is not a delay … but a concomitant product of development,” and “social  According to recent (2018) statistics, the unemployment rate in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) averaged 42.39% from 2007 to 2018, reaching an all-time high of 46.10% in February of 2013 and a record low of 35.73% in June of 2018, only because around 150,000 people had left the country in the meantime (https://www.statista.com/statistics/453933/unemployment-rate-inbosnia-herzegovina/). 10

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structures in the periphery” are not “vestiges of the past” but “results of distortion of the earlier societies as shaping the new ones to be useful to imperialist expansionism of global capitalism.” Presently, as Thoburn’s reading of Marx and Deleuze suggests (Thoburn, 2003, p. 68) “the proletariat is left strangely absent: it is stripped down, seems to have no autonomous content, and is given hardly any positive empirical description … the proletarian unnamable … seeks to overcome identity. Far from a weakness of Marx’s position, the ‘absence’ of proletariat is fundamental to Marx’s minor politics—a politics premised on the propulsive condition that the people are missing.” Postsocialist peripheral selves in Bosnia have first and foremost been subjects to this global proletarianization even though social movements in BiH had different understanding of what this meant. As a country with half of its population now diasporic, and a designated borderland for refugee reception camps since 2015, the new social movement in BiH has been migrations (Bojadžijev & Liebelt, 2014). BiH has been a site of recasting of European periphery and center precisely through precaritization as the new global proletarianization, securitization, and humanitarianism—a gendered and racial revalorization of peripheral bodies feeding to the capitalist expansion those who have already left, are preparing to leave, or have been stranded on their route in BiH. How the delinking and relinking will take place, under what conditions, and whether it will happen at all remains a topic for some future debates and research. In order to obliterate “the heritage of polarization which is inseparable from the world expansion of historical capitalism” it is not enough simply to “catch up” by striving to become a center, one must also insist on “a different conception of modernization/industrialization” based on the “genuine participation of the popular classes in the process of implementation” (Amin, 2014, p. 115). Instead of “indefinitely waiting” until “the development of the productive forces has finally created the conditions of a ‘necessary’ passage to socialism, these must be developed right from the beginning with the prospect of constructing socialism” (Amin, 2014, p.  116). And if we look at the conditions prior to the past twenty-­ five years of stagnation in Dayton BiH, the power of the state is, as Amin suggests, “evidently at the heart of the conflicts between these contradictory requirements of ‘development’ and ‘socialism’” (Ibid.). BiH

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statehood is contentious not only because of the country’s lack of sovereignty, the international tutelage, or the Dayton constitutional setup (as a neocolonial byproduct) but also because of the absence of any political and economic vision for the country that looks even remotely socialist— BiH leaders constantly perpetuate discriminatory interethnic relations as well as discriminatory practices within their own ethnic groups in order to secure power for themselves and the lower party echelons through appropriation, privatization, and distribution of jobs and social privilege without fear of punishment or any legal consequences.

2.2 Resistance to Peripheralization In terms of responses and resistance to the postwar and postsocialist peripheralization11 of BiH, while the vast majority of former and current workers have become pauperized and deprived of any future prospects through privatization, some, like the workers of the former Yugoslav giant detergent factory DITA in Tuzla, tried to subvert this process. By actively resisting privatization-induced peripheralization, and in spite of their management’s decisions to drive the factory into the ground and sell it off, DITA workers attempted to reassert their interests by organizing strikes, holding vigils, and using their bodies to protect the factory and prevent “frittering away” of the factory by stopping its sell-off on several different occasions between 2012 and 2019 (Gilbert & Husarić, 2019). Plenums and informal assemblies of citizens emerged out of the February 2014 protests throughout BiH as the most radical experiment in non-institutional politics since the collapse of Yugoslavia. The protests were preceded by the 2012 Banja Luka protests to save a public park and the 2013 protests demanding the BiH Parliament to immediately adopt  More recent work on peripheries as an “emerging transdisciplinary agenda” in the EU from a politico-economic perspective in the aftermath of the Eurozone and financial crisis has been done by Amelie Kutter in her project Reconfigurations: Center and Periphery in the European Union http://www.amelie-kutter.net/de/2016/09/marie-curie-project-reconfigurations-of-centre-and-­ periphery-­in-the-european-union-after-crisis/ and at the workshop “European Peripheries: Transdisciplinary Perspectives” held at European University Viadrina, Frankfurt (Oder) https:// www.europa-uni.de/de/forschung/institut/institut_europastudien/forschung/Projekte/ Peripherien/index.html 11

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the law on citizens’ ID on the national level in an act of collective criticism of the dysfunctional nature of the post-Dayton BiH state.12 They were motivated largely by the so-called white bread allowances for MPs— full salary for six to twelve months after losing their seat or appointment. First, Tuzla workers took to the streets, and were soon joined by students and other young people in the towns of Bihać, Gračanica, Zenica, and Sarajevo, creating a unified front, at least in the early days, and voicing their dissatisfaction with the state Bosnia was by burning several cantonal government buildings (see Arsenijević, 2014). Protesters stated they “were hungry in all three languages” and there was considerable “cross-­ entity” cooperation across Dayton-embedded ethnic divisions. However, what was initially thought of as paving the way for more sense of common citizenship and class solidarity, more social justice, and a redefinition of (left) politics in BiH in a struggle against the peripheral predicament in the end produced modest results. In 2019, women from the village of Kruščica, near the central-Bosnian town of Vitez, defended their river against a private hydropower company that intended to build a micro hydro plant on it. They refused to be intimidated by the police and move from the village bridge for over 500  days and nights. Their fight for the commons and the survival of their own families against the supposed inevitability of privatization reveals a site of resistance in the absence of a restorable past. With the Justice for David (Pravda za Davida) movement in the BiH entity of the Republika Srpska (RS) following the mysterious death of the twenty-one-year-old David Dragičević in March 2018, presumably at the hand of the RS police, issues of police brutality, weakness of the legal system, public security, and trust in public institutions came to the fore and further accentuated citizens’ distrust of the elites immediately before and after the October 2018 general elections. Live streams from Banja Luka’s central square, unofficially renamed “David’s square” by the protestors, showed a scene of private mourning turned into a cathartic public democratic plenum. Popular dissent against the ruling party took  The 2013 protests were triggered by the death of the three-month old Belmina Ibrišević from Gračanica, a baby who needed to travel abroad for urgent medical treatment but could not because she had not been allocated an ID number and therefore could not have been issued a passport. 12

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uninhibited forms and solidarity reemerged as more and more people came to the square for the six o’clock protests, while others brought hot meals and drinks for those who were there around the clock with David’s father Davor. The active role of plenums and peacefully protesting citizens as “bodies that matter” in a “performative power of assembly” (Butler, 1993, 2015) may be the beginning of a more active resistance especially after the banning of public assembly and the increased police brutality following the arrest of Davor Dragičević on December 25, 2018. The situation escalated after December 30, 2018, when Davor went missing after having a search warrant had been out for him for a few days for attempted coup d’état and attempt to violently change the constitutional order of the RS. After the authorities officially prohibited from gathering on the public squares or walking the streets of Banja Luka, a small group of citizens continued to assemble in front of the Temple of Christ the Savior, with the church closed for them. When they were eventually banned from gathering in front of the church, they moved to a small park nearby. After the 2020 elections, JFD activists returned to the Krajina square where they continue to protest after more than a thousand days. In addition to occasional resistance, another response to peripheralization that has gained prominence since 2013 is migration—more and more BiH citizens are moving to the supposed center through permanent or temporary arrangements and by applying and reapplying for work visas in the EU. These new socioeconomic migrants include mostly care workers and domestic and construction workers, as jobs for them are widely available. Migration is a strategy embraced by considerable numbers people who do not appear to view struggle and resistance as a viable means to secure acceptable life conditions. These people seemingly escape their fate at home by taking precarious jobs abroad, thus securing livelihoods and a standard of living they could not have at home. Pressured by the volatility of visa regimes, underpaid work, and uncertain market conditions in Western European countries, they accept marginalization but under their own terms, hoping to create better lives for their children if not for themselves.

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2.3 Loving and Leaving in the Periphery On the ashes of the “Language, Ideology and Power” reading group, my husband and I, together with a few Banja Luka activists, established the Banja Luka Social Center or BASOC in late summer of 2015, after the 2014 protests, plenums and floods hitting and uniting BiH at least temporarily. BASOC emerged as an important center in Northwestern Bosnia and joined other activist groups in Bosnia at the time known as the 5f7 network.13 People from all over BiH and former Yugoslavia came to BASOC to speak about their struggles including activist friends from Sarajevo, Bihać, Prijedor, and Tuzla, railway unionist, workers of the DITA detergent factory in Tuzla notorious for defending their factory, women inhabiting the area near the river Kruščica defending their the river, the Justice for David group and numerous writers, artists, and political workers. In 2020, the BASOC moved across the street because the original house was sold by the owner. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the collective resumed its work through the BASOC radio and sporadic get-togethers. The BASOC experience taught me a particular kind of ethics, an enacted “politics of friendship” (Derrida, 2005) in which the future of the political becomes the future of friends. Once such relationships have been forged with a view to transforming the present-day ethnopolitics and violence, this becomes a lifetime commitment, no matter how jaded all of us may feel at times at the inevitable logic of privatization and ngoization and the proliferation of project-driven management of civil society based on secured funding and donors’ agendas that have affected our work. BASOC activists were the first to cross the Croatian border in November 2015 to bring 100 kg of burek and pita,14 kindly donated by a local pie shop, to Syrian refugees. They hosted the No Border collective, distributed hand-made English-Arabic-Serbo-Croatian glossaries, and  The name 5f7 is used as a reminder of the February 2014 protests, which started on February 5 toppling down four cantonal governments on February 7. See https://rtv7.ba/arhive/25473 and https://www.dw.com/bs/7-februar-2014-izraz-bunta-osiromašenih/a-18242031 14  Phyllo-pie with different fillings from minced beef for burek to cheese, potato, spinach, and so on for different variants of pita. 13

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put up a Refugees Welcome banner on the house. Even with the occasional slipping in terms of “doing good” and “meaning well” in the so-­ called desert of postsocialism (Štiks & Horvat, 2015), the experience of working with the collective made me reflect on the ever-present questions of one’s own ethics and responsibility despite the difference in privilege and personal frailties. The zero sum was trust and further joint action. By committing to an honest politics of friendship, this trust materialized as a collateral of sorts, to play a role in the future perhaps, when new left politics come into being. My encounters and engagements with JFD activists and third wave BiH migrants in Germany were different from the ties with the BASOC members, although they had a similar affective origin. I was never formally a JFD member, although I frequented the protests and felt drawn to the struggle at the Krajina square, where I volunteered to help as a translator. During the period of peak momentum for JFD in September and October 2018, I was actually on a sabbatical leave in Germany with a persistent auto-immune condition and considering my treatment options. Arriving in Banja Luka in December 2018 for Christmas holidays, I saw the movement dwindle. I wanted merely to document it in a series of interviews without any firm idea or commitment to “doing research” until the events from between December 26 and 30, 2018, when the police removed an improvised shrine to David from the public square and Davor Dragičević escaped the country. Incidentally, it was during those five days of December after the protests that my health began to improve. Writing about it, I felt I was supposed to represent my interlocutors’ voices directly by not stabilizing them using any kind of analytical or conceptual grid, which resulted in producing a rather nonstandard piece of academic prose. The third wave of BiH migrants coming to Germany in a response to the (un)frozen conflict in BiH was my research focus when I received a Humboldt scholarship in March 2019 enabling me to stay in Offenbach and interact with my respondents on a daily basis.15 I had seen this trend  The full title of my Humboldt-funded research conducted between 2019 and 2021 at Justus Liebig University in Giessen is “Occupy or Leave?—Dealing with (Un)Frozen Conflicts Through Protests and Economic Migrations on the Margins of Europe: The Case of Bosnia and Herzegovina.” It includes twenty-five interviews with new, third-wave BiH migrants and social protesters, and its 15

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of moving to Germany before among my extended family and friends, who had gotten jobs mostly in the care sector. Then my husband went to Germany in 2017 to do his PhD, and our son and I joined him in May 2018, less than a year before I received a positive decision from Humboldt. As a counterpoint to the movement from BiH, Middle Eastern, North African, and South-East Asian refugees were moving to BiH, where they were largely accommodated in the often-horrific ad hoc facilities provided by the International Organization for Migrations (IOM) under the United Nations mandate and local authorities. They were located in several camps in Northwestern BiH, including the hotel Sedra, the now-­ closed Vučjak camp, the BIRA factory, the camp in Lipa, which has recently been burnt, and other places. The refugees were largely inaccessible to me, I could access their world only by proxy, their brown, weary, barefoot figures, an embodied reminder of Bosnia’s recent past which we were so keen to forget. They haunted me: I could neither speak about them nor their plateaus, I could perhaps only speak nearby, following Trinh T. Minha, mostly through metaphors and abstract language. Yet they were familiar to me, helping me understand migrant’s affect, as a particular, translatable consciousness about bodies and justice as “the form in which and through which love performed its work” (Tillich, 1954, p. 71). I do not claim different refugee experiences are commensurable, although war genealogies are like tattoos different peripheral selves wear. As an intellectual, I have been a “privileged nomad” (Pels 1999), very different from many others in refugee camps around my former hometown of Bihać just as I was more cushioned during the 1992–1995 war than most of my fellow citizens experiencing daily shelling and hunger. Although Bosnian war was not the same as the 2011 war in Syria, both of them have produced peripheral subjects in the Balkans and in the Middle East, as frontier and migration regions (Dunaway & Clelland, 2017; Wallerstein, 1974). goal is to look at some of the deeper rationalities, systems, and logistics supporting the third-wave especially among women. I analyzed around twenty interviews conducted between March 25, 2019, and November 12, 2020, in Frankfurt, Mühlheim, Linden Holzhausen (Limburg), Ratzeburg (Lübeck), and Munich. The respondents’ age is their age at the time of interview in 2019 and 2020.

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The decision to examine migration to BiH, and the new refugees situated among former refugees, however unsettling, provided a racial perspective on migration as the key to understanding the coloniality of power and the European border regime. BiH as a European periphery was to all of us a spatiotemporal point of elsewhere, like Derrida’s l‘ailleurs or Bekim Sejranović’s nowhere,16 a nowhere from where I was able to assess and write about the migrant’s affect as a structure of feeling (Williams, 1977) simultaneously marked by an excess of love for the (unbearable) place one has left due to injustice or a grievance, and feeling “peripheral” in the new place one has arrived to with little or no hope of justice either. This made me reconsider Tillich’s ontological analyses of justice as “the form in which and through which love performed its work” (Tillich, 1954, p. 71). Justice is “the channel through which the compulsive and forceful power of love was necessarily directed” (Dalton, 199417) and whose violation meant rejection of another’s power of being. For him, love exists in the polarity of estrangement and reunion, whereby a human being is always bound by the conditions of existence (Tillich, 1954, p. 25). With the experience as estrangement from all other beings, love is then the “drive towards the unity of the separated” (Ibid.). Love constantly moves toward reunion and, in this way, finds itself “united with the compulsory elements of power” in order to “destroy what is against love” (Ibid., p. 50). Destroying what is against love for me meant protesting, migration, and rethinking new unions and solidarities. Despite living in a common language and the common post-Yugoslav culture of coffee, humor and friendships more intimate than anywhere else—a fuller not necessarily better life as some Yugoslav buen vivir—this often came with a price if one was engaged in resisting the nationalist h ­ egemony  The title of Bekim Sejranović’s famous 2008 novel is Nigdje, niodkuda (From Nowhere to Nowhere, Sandorf Passage 2021, tr. Will Firth), which could be read as a short history of his many nomadic experiences, his life as an asylum seeker, fleeing from Bosnia to Croatia, Oslo, and back to his place of origin that does not exist anymore, as Yugoslavia is gone, and the place where he currently is or is heading for a permanent nowhere. 17  W.  G. Dalton, book review of Paul Tillich, Love, Power, and Justice: Ontological Analysis and Ethical Applications (Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press, 1954), accessed June 20, 2020, http://people.bu.edu/wwildman/tillich/resources/review_tillich-paul_love_power_justice. htm#Review_by_WGD 16

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in BiH or had powerful enemies. Living among the remnants of a better past of the former socialist state was coupled with a burning desire for a future revolutionary political practice that would produce a new era (nastati će novo doba18), new grammars of the social and a tingling potential of what is to come but also of what had been irretrievably lost.

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 A line from a famous partisan movie The Battle of Neretva while the soundtrack is the old Croatian revolutionary song “Fall of force and injustice” (originally titled: “Padaj silo i nepravdo”), https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=cRPW5YPrEhc 18

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Bojadžijev, M., & Liebelt, C. (2014). Cosmopolitics, oder Migration als soziale Bewegung: Von Bürgerschaft und Kosmopolitismus im globalen Arbeitsmarkt. In Kultur, Gesellschaft, Migration (pp. 325–346). Springer VS. Bonfiglioli, C. (2015). Gendered Citizenship in the Global European Periphery: Textile Workers in Post-Yugoslav States. Women’s Studies International Forum (WSIF), 49(March–April), 57–65. Busterud, I. (2015). Defense Sector Reform in the Western Balkans—Different Approaches and Different Tools. European Security, 24(2), 335–352. https:// doi.org/10.1080/09662839.2014.893428 Butler, J. (1993). Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex. Routledge. Butler, J. (2015). Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly. Harvard University Press. Chari, S., & Verdery, K. (2009). Thinking between the Posts: Postcolonialism, Postsocialism, and Ethnography after the Cold War. Comparative Studies in Society and History, 51(1), 6–34. Dalton, W. G. (1994). A Book Review of Love, Power, and Justice: Ontological Analysis and Ethical Applications by Paul Tillich. Oxford University Press, 1954. Retrieved June 20, 2020, from http://people.bu.edu/wwildman/tillich/resources/review_tillich-­p aul_love_power_justice.htm#Review_ by_WGD Derrida, J. (2005). The Politics of Friendship (G. Collins, Trans.). Verso. Djokić, D. (2003). Nationalism, History and Identity in the Balkans: An Overview of Recent Histories of Europe’s South-East. The Slavonic and East European Review, 81(3), 511–524. Dunaway, W., & Clelland, D. (2017). Moving toward Theory for the 21st Century: The Centrality of Nonwestern Semiperipheries to World Ethnic/ Racial Inequality. Journal of World-Systems Research, 23(2), 399–464. Dzenovska, D., & Kurtović, L. (2018). Lessons for Liberalism from the ‘Illiberal East.’ Cultural Anthropology. Retrieved January 29, 2021, from https:// culanth.org/fieldsights/series/lessons-­for-­liberalism-­from-­the-­illiberal-­east Fudurić, N. (2007). Entrepreneurship in the Periphery: Characteristics and Trends. Paper Presented at International Conference: Regions in focus?, Lisbon, Portugal. Retrieved November 12, 2018, from http://vbn.aau.dk/ files/13219787/ENTREPRENEURSHIP_IN_THE_PERIPHERY.pdf Gadamer, H. G. (2004). Truth and Method. Bloomsbury Publishers. Gilbert, A., & Husarić, H. (2019). Care, Publicity, and Worker Politics in Late Industrial Bosnia and Herzegovina. Society for the Anthropology of Work. Retrieved January 12, 2021, from https://doi.org/10.21428/1d6be30e. e8c8d4dd

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Harders, C. (2015). Provincializing and Localizing Core-Periphery Relations. Middle East—Topics & Arguments, 5, 36–45. https://doi.org/10.17192/ meta.2015.5.3790 Hardt, M., & Negri, T. (2004). Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire. Penguin Books. Hinnebusch, R. (2018). Core and Periphery: The International System and the Middle East. The International Politics of the Middle East. Retrieved January 5, 2020, from https://doi.org/10.7765/9781526137760.00007 Hopkins, T., Wallerstein, I., Bach, R., Chase-Dunn, C., & Mukherjee, R. (1982). World-Systems Analysis: Theory and Methodology. Sage. Jansen, S., Brković, Č., & Čelebičić, V. (Eds.). (2016). Negotiating Social Relations in Bosnia and Herzegovina: Semiperipheral Entanglements. Routledge. Jessop, B. (1994). Post-Fordism and the State. In A. Amin (Ed.), Post-Fordism: A Reader. Blackwell. Kutter, A. (2020). Legitimation in the European Union. Springer International Publishing. Larsen, H.  B. (2019). NATO’s Democratic Retrenchment: Hegemony After the Return of History. Routledge. Leutloff-Grandits, C. (2020). Die zeitlichen Dimensionen von Grenzen und Grenzüberquerungen. In M.  Klessmann et  al. (Eds.), Grenzforschung. Handbuch für Wissenschaft und Studium (pp. 419–435). Nomos. Lung, Y., & Domanski, B. (2009). The Changing Face of the European Periphery in the Automotive Industry. European Urban and Regional Studies, 16(1), 5–10. Slater, T. (2013). Your Life Chances Affect Where You Live: A Critique of the ‘Cottage Industry’ of Neighbourhood Effects Research. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 37, 367–387. Štiks, I., & Horvat, S. (2015). Welcome to the Desert of Post-Socialism. Verso. Stojić Mitrović, M. (2020). The Dark Side of Europeanization. Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung Southeast Europe. Syrett, S. (2012). Conceptualising Marginalisation in Cities and Regions. In M. Danson & P. de Souza (Eds.), Regional Development in Northern Europe: Peripherality, Marginality and Border Issues (pp. 65–77). Routledge. Szczepanikowa, A., & T. Van Criekinge. (2018). The Future of Migration in the European Union: Future Scenarios and Tools to Stimulate Forward-Looking Discussions. EU Policy Lab. Retrieved January 20, 2020, from https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/bitstream/JRC111774/kjnd29060enn. p d f ? f b c l i d = Iw A R 3 c P F s L k B 5 P F w ZC n P g v Q o Q 9 w Mo x 6 M N Vy XlH0-­QfToGUZSFlYjdJIFc0dNM

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Thoburn, N. (2003). Deleuze, Marx and Politics. Routledge. Tillich, P. (1954). Love, Power, and Justice: Ontological Analysis and Ethical Applications. Oxford University Press. Todorova, M. (2018). To the Center via Periphery: An Interview with Maria Todorova. Retrieved November 3, 2018, from https://www.europenowjournal.org/2018/06/24/to-­the-­center-­via-­the-­periphery-­an-­interview-­with-­ maria-­todorova/ Tuck, E., & Yang, K.  W. (2012). Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor. Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, 1(1), 1–40. Wallerstein, I. (1974). The Modern World System, Bd. 1: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century. Academic Press. Williams, R. (1977). Marxism and Literature. Oxford University Press. Wilson, W. J. (1987). The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, the Underclass and Public Policy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

3 Decolonizing a Future in a European Periphery Between Socialist Interruptions and the Postcolonial Present

3.1 P  ostcolonial Claims, Decolonial Resistance: Salvaging a “Freedom Time” There is a lot to learn from the specter of socialist Yugoslavia, yet this knowledge somehow seems to be missing. Perhaps this is what needs to be decolonized in the first place, not only for the sake of striving for a more polycentric world, but because the Yugoslav revolution and socialist modernity were at heart anticolonial, and because Yugoslavia was never an empire despite the uneven development of its republics. Can we afford to dismiss this legacy? Will we opt to see the postcolonial, and by extension also postsocialist condition, as the workings of the coloniality of power in which post-Yugoslavs found themselves historically, after the end of socialism, over which they had little power of choosing in reality? How do postcolonial and socialist/communist imaginations overlap in peripheral selves’ struggles in postsocialist BiH? If we shift our focus back to the present, twenty-five years since the war ended, on the one hand, we see struggles for the commons and against injustice with decolonial undertones, mostly carried out by social movements fighting against

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 D. Majstorović, Discourse and Affect in Postsocialist Bosnia and Herzegovina, Postdisciplinary Studies in Discourse, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-80245-5_3

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ethnonationalist kleptocratic elites who continue to rule without punishment, resulting in people leaving BiH. On the other hand, there is the neocolonial international interventionism, which has left BiH in the lurch, enabling the ethnonationalists to secure enormous power while funneling in money through the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, while turning a blind eye to injustice and corruption, including the David Dragičević case and many others. With Joe Biden as the new US president, the Dayton constitution is apparently to be “fixed”1 by a new deal drafted by some fifteen individuals including international policy advisors and some diasporic and international scholars (Hamilton et  al., 2020). Incidentally no Serbs, Croats, and Bosniaks actually living in BiH were included in the draft of this New Deal, which although rightly pointing to some of the neuralgic spots of Dayton still has a highly problematic, top-down, elite-driven approach to resolving the situation: through EUFOR2 units and the Bonn Powers3 (see Gilbert, 2017). In questioning the socialist past, postcolonial present and decolonial struggles, shouldn’t we borrow from ZAVNOBiH’s simple claim on whose Bosnia it should be, laid at the beginning of the chapter and thus resolve the ethnic impasse? The overlap of postcoloniality and postsocialism is not a specificity of BiH. What has been specific to BiH, however, and begs for a closer reading, is the way they intertwine with peripherality, and the way this trifecta has shaped the country’s present-day condition. Following and analyzing these trajectories and their respective genealogies in this particular  https://www.wilsoncenter.org/publication/fixing-dayton-new-deal-bosnia-andherzegovina?fbclid=IwAR0anze9jf-HXsDTAOtZI-­fnPadd03ZaGA1FlZj5s4Jmqbvov1YLEHA6 3Go 2  European Union Force in Bosnia and Herzegovina http://www.euforbih.org 3  A critical moment in the expansion of the HR’s powers was at a December 1997 Peace Implementation Council meeting in Bonn when the Council welcomed “the High Representative’s intention to use his final authority in theatre regarding interpretation of the Agreement … in order to facilitate the resolution of difficulties by making binding decisions, as he judges necessary” (Gilbert, 2017). The exercise of this authority became known as the “Bonn powers” and with them the HR could now remove officials, including democratically elected politicians, from public office and ban them from future government roles; impose legislation; and take other measures, including executive decisions and financial sanctions. Behind the Bonn powers stood a NATO-led military force and UN police force ready to back up any decree made by the HR (Gilbert, 2017). 1

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context, especially since the signing of the Dayton Accords, may shed light on the specific constellations of power, as well as offer novel theoretical insights on the dyad of socialist/anticolonial-­postcolonial-­decolonial. With this aim, the chapter reflects on the overlaps and (dis)continuities as well as the specific constituents of and conditions for BiH’s peripherality in relation to its colonial past and neocolonial present, and examines Yugoslav socialism and anticolonialism as an interruption. The decolonial option (Mignolo, 2011) in research is an active and conscious ethical, political, and epistemic position whose goal is to decolonize thinking, being, perception, gender, and memory. It is an epistemic and emancipatory commitment to a better, and more just life. It started as a cry against slavery and racism but has since become a pathway to global solidarity that “an uneasy, reserved and unsettling matter that neither reconciles present grievances nor forecloses future conflict” (Tuck & Yang, 2012, p. 3). Seeing BiH through the decolonial lenses would entail recognizing and critiquing practices of ethnic cleansing, appropriation, and colonization, conducted during and after the war by the international and local elites through warfare, abolition of social ownership, privatization, accumulation of debt with complete disregard for people and the environment. It would mean rethinking a future of greater emancipation of women and other marginalized groups, of anti-imperialism, antifascism, and antiracism. BiH has been peripheralized and colonized multiple times and from multiple sides, not only from the outside, by neighboring Serbia and Croatia with their expansionist appetites and the external tutelage of the international community. The Office of the High Representative (OHR) was part and parcel of the Dayton Agreement with a forced democratization through the international community’s liberal imperialism (Knaus & Martin, 2003) acting as the middleman and holding a “stick and a carrot” in response to a near-permanent state of emergency and “failed” Europeanization (Majstorović, 2007). From the inside, peripheralization was carried out by comprador political elites thriving on ethnonationalist capitalism seeking total control4 over the police, the media, the  Dodik’s speech in which he threatened to cut off communal heating for the city of Banja Luka after Draško Stanivuković of the PDP became mayor in November 2020 defeating the incumbent mayor from Dodik’s SNSD https://www.slobodnaevropa.org/a/porazeni-dodik-prijeti-banjojluci/30953343.html has quickly become notorious. 4

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universities, and property and assets gained through privatization of socially owned property. Insisting on “interconnectivities which link these places to processes nested at other spatial scales into the research design,” research on peripheries should not merely “limit itself to the description of ‘peripheral’ places,” but instead “integrate this with a study of the changing function of these places in larger socio-spatial configurations” and processes of peripheralization and coloniality, which “demands a historical perspective” (Bernt & Colini, 2013, p. 23). Historically, BiH was a nonconventional, hybrid type of colony beset by many contradictions, including different racialization strategies5 and complex forms of exploitation. In Ottoman times, they included the kharaj, a poll tax on non-Muslims, the devşirme system of recruiting Christian youths into janissaries (Erdem, 1996),6 as well as the Jus Primae Noctis as institutionalized rape of Christian women, a strategy of “occupying the land by grabbing the (female) body” employed by the Ottomans as “ravishers of Balkan women” and “invaders of Christian virgins” (Močnik, 2019, p. 97). The female body thus became a disposable place of colonization in the post-Ottoman times, most intensely during the 1990s wars in BiH, when mass rape in fact “doubled the colonization” in a “Christian man-versus-Muslim woman interpretative frame” as a discourse “seeking historical revenge” (see Močnik, 2019, p.  98; Bringa, 2002). During the Austro-Hungarian rule, BiH was a proximate colony where “at the heart of the Habsburg administrators’ approach to their colonial subjects was a pervasive paternalism” (Donia, 2007, p.  3), economic exploitation “to bolster the Austrian and Hungarian industry and their moneylenders” and where “the main wealth of the country, the huge Bosnian woods, was yielded at unbelievably low prices to foreign firms” (Ćorović, 1925, p.  16). Reflecting on Serbian, Croatian, and Bosniak  Despite being predominantly white, Bosnians and Herzegovinians are both racialized and racialize, displaying what Balibar calls “racism without race” (see Balibar & Wallerstein, 1991). This is visible in chauvinistic and nationalist attitudes bordering on racism toward visible Others but also the urban/rural divide, reflecting cultural racialization, including ethnic nationalism. For more on contemporary structures on eastern European othering, see Kolodziejczyk and Sandru (2016). 6  The janissaries were members of an elite corps in the Ottoman Empire’s standing army until the seventeenth century. 5

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historians’ view on the colonial role of the Austro-Hungarians, Stijn Vervaet (2004) relies on a number of local and international sources. He quotes a Croatian historian Anto Malbaša (1940, p. 14), who draws on an 1898 article by Eduard Richter, a geographer and professor at the University of Graz,7 saying BiH “is neither Java, nor India. But when Bosnia is compared with the colonies that other European states obtained during the last decades, we have to admit that Austria acquired a region that is of much more worth and much more favorably situated than the majority of the other countries did.” Vervaet (2004, p.  5) thus concludes that “Yugoslav historians, even those outside of the nationalist discourse, refer to the economic policy of Austro-Hungary in the occupied and later annexed provinces of BiH mainly as ‘colonial’ and ‘exploitative’” and not as a “polemic epithet or in a metaphorical sense of the word”: According to them, Bosnia literally was a colony of the Dual Monarchy. The fact that they experienced Austro-Hungarian rule as colonial and present it as such in historical works is a factor of importance in reconstructing (the development of ) the self-image of the Bosnian/South-Slav periphery of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy. The extensive use of the colonial discourse in Yugoslav historical literature shows that, at least according to the historians cited here, a post- colonial approach to the Dual Monarchy seems to be justified. (Ibid.)

Strictly speaking, rather than a colony of Austria-Hungary BiH was more of a protectorate, if only because of its proximity to the imperial center and on the account of South Slavs’ whiteness, albeit considered second-rate and not quite European. Still, the Austro-Hungarian rule is in many ways reminiscent of the colonial policy of Western powers elsewhere in the world (Detrez, 2002, p. 1). Why is this contextualization of BiH’s former coloniality relevant both from historical and sociological perspective? Sociologist Manuela Boatcă (2012, p. 133) argues that a growing body of world-systems authors, in history and postcolonial and critical development studies, “have revealed  Richter 1898 in Malbaša 1940, p. 14.

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that the economic, political, and ideological domination that different parts of Eastern and South-Eastern Europe experienced at different times beginning in the sixteenth century followed a sequence that went from protocolonial to the neo-colonial at best despite the absence of formal colonization.” Maria Todorova, as a historian, mentions liberal application of notions such as colonial and postcolonial to “hinge them to a broader universal theory,” whereby “one can use decolonization as a metaphor and as a synonym for the struggle against subjugation and exploitation” (Todorova, 2018), acknowledging to the consequential methodological conundrum and the risk of any form of subjugation and hegemonic power being termed colonial. Critical education scholars Tuck and Yang (2012, p. 3) warn even more explicitly against the metaphorical use of decolonization, because “when metaphor invades decolonization, it kills the very possibility of decolonization.” Despite the discourses and frameworks preceding it being “critical, even if they are anti-racist, even if they are justice frameworks … when we write about decolonization, we are not offering it as a metaphor; it is not an approximation of other experiences of oppression” and “it doesn’t have a synonym.” Acknowledging “the deeply unsettling work of decolonization” (Tuck & Yang, 2012, p. 4), I propose that the struggles against colonization in BiH should not in any way be positioned as equal to other struggles in more “traditional” colonial contexts such as Africa, Asia, or Latin America. Instead, they should be read within this optic because they share traits of peripherality and mobilize “a colonial wound” (Gagyi, 2016; Anzaldúa, 1999). Moreover, adopting a comparative perspective facilitates better understanding of the workings of “the coloniality of power,” including privatization and appropriation, racism, ecocide and injustice, and political acts of resistance to that power. Such peripheral encounters may open a space for future global productive synergies and emancipatory politics beyond the essentialism of multiculturalism where we can learn from one another and be in struggles together. Locally, it may provide insight into why BiH has been assigned the role of a “double transit” country, of either containing unwanted bodies or supplying Europe with those desirable as workforce, whereby both groups are to a different degree peripheral selves, which I discuss in Chaps. 5–8.

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The paternalism, extractivism, and tensions between different ethnic groups that marked the colonial past of the South Slavs (e.g., under the Dual Monarchy) invite parallels with today’s impoverished, war-torn, only partly sovereign European periphery with ethnonationalist leadership, run by the Austrian diplomat Valentin Inzko as the High Representative. Ever since the signing of the Dayton Agreement, BiH has been a hotspot for international diplomats, policy makers, and foreign scholars, as a place where interventionism and extractivism have often coopted and naturalized peace and state building without considering the internal dynamics of its people, just like the internal dynamics of subalterns were not considered in the colonial project (Cusicanqui, 2012, p. 104). In addition, by pointing to some current struggles with decolonial undertones on the ground and the grounds on which these struggles could or not be read as decolonial, I hope to enter a dialogue of solidarity with other similar contexts, despite incommensurabilities, if only by recognizing positionalities and politics of location (Rich, 1994). Non-traditional colonizers have been engaged in aggressive recolonization often concealing the mechanisms of the new forms of colonization. With strong support of the state apparatus, “the elites adopt(ed) a strategy of crossdressing and articulate(ed) new forms of cooptation and neutralization” … rendering “the new rentier and aristocratic class … more colonial than that of Spanish aristocracy” (Cusicanqui, 2012, pp. 99–100). It was a tug of war between the new BiH elites and the international community over who was more colonial, but both of them were nonetheless instrumental in colonizing post-Dayton BiH with narratives of “impossible state” due to “Islamic fundamentalism” (Kecmanović, 2007) or through the unrestricted powers of the OHR. To illustrate this absurdity, the consociationism of the Dayton constitution was presented as multiculturalism made official, in ethnically cleansed territories, after tens of thousands of dead. In the post-Dayton context there was little room or desire for bottom­up forms of justice, a Bosnian version of indigenous justice in which Srebrenica or Jasenovac could never happen again because the local community would have assumed responsibility coming to a fuller understanding of ethnic cleansing and genocide that was never to be repeated “in their name.” Instead, in the absence of a genuine communal

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reconciliation, the externally imposed retributive or tribunalized justice of the Hague Tribunal (see Okić, 2020) filled the void stripping the community that had to come to terms with its past of all responsibility. If the term “coloniality of power” were to encompass racial and epistemological hierarchies entangled within longue durée structural hierarchies of global capitalism, with a continuing effect after the period of decolonization (Quijano, 2000b), then the current postsocialist struggles in BiH seem to be about salvaging residues of socialism as much as about opposing perceived colonization. Such residues were brotherhood and unity,8 as a guiding principle of Yugoslavia’s postwar inter-ethnic policy (Mesić, 2004, p. 246) and socially owned property (javna svojina) belonging to all the working people. Fighting against nationalism and capitalism in postsocialist BiH today means trying to salvage a “freedom time … (as) a distinct type of time and political tense required or enabled by decolonization” (Wilder, 2015, p. 1).

3.2 Socialist-Yugoslav Anticolonial Legacy This brings us to the question of whether socialist and decolonial objectives can be commensurable on the basis of this “freedom time” and, if so, under what terms. Whereas some scholars see international socialism’s anticolonisalism as contributing to decolonization taken as a broad term meaning riddance of colonial oppression (Imlay, 2013), others argue that socialist modernity was also colonial (Tlostanova & Mignolo, 2012, pp. 137–138)—different politics of location may be crucial in the perception of these two different types of understandings. Discussing postcoloniality as a human “condition … which we often have no power of choosing” and decoloniality as “as an option, consciously chosen political, ethical, and epistemic positionality as an entry point into agency” (Tlostanova, 2019, p. 165), Tlostanova argues that decolonial option has nothing to do with socialism and socialist modernity, which she equates  “Brotherhood and unity” was a popular slogan of the League of Communists of Yugoslavia coined during WWII, which was also Yugoslav People’s Liberation War. It subsequently evolved into an ideologeme representing Yugoslavia’s official interethnic policy. 8

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with coloniality: “in both Western liberal and Socialist versions (of modernity/coloniality) are vectorial time and progressivist teleology; the absurdly rationalized management of knowledge and subjectivity; the sanctification of technological development, the cult of the future and the dismissal of negatively marked tradition” (Tlostanova, 2019, pp. 166–167). Placing the Yugoslav or BiH case in this equation further complicates things, as the revolutionary struggle of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) for national liberation from Nazi Germany and domestic traitors during WWII was a prime example of anticolonial struggle.9 Among its outcomes was the emancipation of women and an unprecedented increase in popular literacy (Majstorović in Okić & Dugandžić, 2016). Yugoslav socialism brought a reconstitution of anticapitalist relations by introducing the concept of socially owned property coupled with the ideology of brotherhood and unity—it experimented with radically egalitarian relations of self-management (Samary & Leplat, 2019, pp. 8–9) and played a key role in the establishment of the Non-aligned Movement (NAM). All of these achievements were historical interruptions of BiH colonial continuity. In being anticolonial, socialism is not necessarily always decolonial, yet decolonial and anticolonial struggles and goals have historically overlapped despite the differences in their theoretical, political, and contextual assumptions. Whereas historical analyses of their respective genealogies have been largely missing, I will try to unpack the entanglements of the anticolonial and socialist trajectories in the Yugoslav case and, by extension, in BiH’s, case, pointing at possible nodal points for a dialogue with decolonial scholarship. Historically, socialist and anti-­ imperialist struggles and mobilizations from Russia to Yugoslavia and Latin America have relied on the internal strength of popular, bottom-up initiatives, many of which have had anticolonial undertones. The Bandung project, started with a view to promoting Afro-Asian economic and cultural cooperation and opposing (neo)colonialism by any nation,

 I am grateful to Branimir Trša Stojanović for pointing this out during our meeting in Tuzla in the summer of 2009. 9

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later indirectly led to the creation of the NAM, and counted among the results of these entanglements: In reaction to the first long crisis of historical capitalism (1875–1950), the peoples of the periphery began to liberate themselves as from 1914–1917, mobilizing themselves under the flags of socialism (Russia, China, Vietnam, Cuba) or of national liberation, associated to different degrees with progressive social reforms. They took the path to industrialization, hitherto forbidden by the domination of the (old) “classic” imperialism, forcing the latter to “adjust” to this first wave of independent initiatives of the peoples, nations, and states of the peripheries. From 1917 to the time when the Bandung Project (1955–1980) ran out of steam and the collapse of Sovietism in 1990, these were the initiatives that dominated the scene. (Amin, 2014, pp. 110–111)

Samary and Leplat (2019) go so far as to extend the notion of “decolonialization” outside the field of decolonial studies, while foregrounding the need to fight against any remaining trace of (neo)colonialism in the relations between formerly or presently dependent and/or dominant countries. “Decolonial orientation can and should be integrated into a ‘communist’ orientation, defined as being opposed to all forms of domination and exploitation.” By premodifying the noun “communism” with the adjective “decolonial,” she urges us to revisit the October Revolution and the other revolutions of the short twentieth century (Samary & Leplat, 2019, p. 345) so as to better understand the “non-aligned decolonial struggles as connected with Tito’s partisans’ struggles emerging locally and bottom-up on several fronts on the basis of a real socialist/ communist project.” In trying to contextualize Yugoslav socialism, it seems inevitable that any examination of the relations between the decision-making factors in place since 1992–1995 will have to be done with one eye on the 1941–1945 war and the struggle against fascism. One a war of revolution, the other of counterrevolution, they resulted in two very different versions of the modern BiH state, but they nevertheless ensured the continuity of its statehood. These wars constitute two events, in Badiouian terms (Badiou, 2005), when socially excluded groups, like the

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Communists and Partisans of the early 1940s, or the Serbs, Croats, and Bosniaks of the early 1990s, burst onto the scene, rupturing the previous state of normalcy (e.g., insurgent fascism and capitalist relations in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, or socialist self-management and brotherhood and unity in SFRY). These new actors took over, brought about social change, and in their hijacking of the subsequent social relations, different and intertwined “truths” emerged as foundations of contemporary epistemes of new nationhoods (Majstorović, 2019b). Yugoslav socialism drew moral legitimacy from the struggle against Nazism in World War II (WWII) and was the foundation of the Socialist Republic of BiH (SRBiH) within the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRY). In 1943, Zemaljsko antifašističko vijeće narodnog oslobođenja Bosne i Hercegovine (ZAVNOBiH) or, in English, the State Antifascist Council for the National Liberation of BiH, became the highest governing body of the antifascist movement in the country. It laid down the famous founding principle of the Socialist Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina (SRBiH), namely that the country belonged to “neither Serbs, nor Croats nor Muslims, but to Serbs and Croats and Muslims.” As a result of these changes, three assemblages to borrow from the new materialist vocabulary (Fox & Alldred, 2015) emerged trying to salvage the freedom time of each according to their own historical possibilities: the proletarian brigades and their “hunger for freedom” (Kirn, 2020), the Women’s Antifascist Front (WAF) (in footnote Antifašistički ženski front or AFŽ) emancipatory potential (Okić & Dugandžić, 2016), and the Non-aligned movement’s commitment to decolonialism, antiracism, and global socioeconomic justice (Stubbs, 2021). The proletarian brigades, guerilla-style movements, which “opened new horizons and nurtured revolutionary political subjectivity on a global scale” (Kirn, 2020, p. 12), were formed by an executive decision of the Central Committee and Supreme HQ. The first was formed on December 22, 1941, in the town of Rudo in Eastern Bosnia, marking the beginning of the transformation of the revolutionary Partisan army into the revolutionary People’s Liberation Army (PLA) with two goals: liberation and revolution “to unify the people along the broadest possible lines, the unity thus forged being reflected in the People’s Liberation Front. The policy of fratricidal war, pursued by the forces of occupation and quislings, was countered by

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the Communist Party’s policy of brotherhood among all the peoples of Yugoslavia in the struggle against the common enemy” (Trgo, 1966). The PLA embraced the socialist idea and it was an authentic anticolonial response to fascists, including Italians, Germans, Chetniks, as well as the forces of the Independent State of Croatia (ISC). It was a politically reliable, multinational mobile force that was not tied to a particular geographic area in terms of the collective action and mobilization during the national liberation struggle of 1941–1945. With today’s prevailing historical revisionism, which tries to eradicate the legacy of Partisan and socialist struggles, and with Yugonostalgia understood reflexively, as something that is about the future, not as something that restoratively commodifies the past (Boym, 2001), a way to fight back is through the archival counter-evidence. “The partisan counter-archive” of the people’s liberation struggle and later socialist periods serves as “the counter-­ archival surplus and revolutionary remainder” for the Benjaminesque history of the oppressed (Kirn, 2020) and another reason to learn from former anticolonial efforts in future decolonial struggles. The colonial matrix of power is not just about control over the state and the economy; rather, it is “an encompassing phenomenon, since it is one of the axes of the system of power and as such it permeates all control of sexual access, collective authority, labor, subjectivity/intersubjectivity and the production of knowledge from within these intersubjective relations” (Lugones, 2007, p. 191). Whether women’s struggles of women in socialism were feminist or not has been debated (see the 2014–2015 debate between Nanette Funk and Kristen Ghodsee in the European Journal of Women’s Studies), however, Yugoslav women’s participation in the PLA both as rear echelon troops and as frontline fighters, the mass literacy campaigns of the Women’s Antifascist Front (WAF), and the way issues such as women’s suffrage, right to divorce, and access to education were handled remain worthy of further reflection. None of these rights and freedoms were given freely, but were the result of bottom-up resistance against the patriarchal and capitalist oppression. The majority of women of the antebellum period, especially rural women, were in many ways subalterns due to the colonial legacy and peripherality of the place. Further expansion of state schools and universities (Demiragić, 2016) and women in Yugoslavia and BiH entering the world of paid labor (Okić

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& Dugandžić, 2016) after WWII offer grounds for reexamining the intersection of gender, class, and nationality. To illustrate the progress made during this period, as early as 1951 the official statistics claimed that “the number of female workers was 90 percent higher than in 1939” and that “in Bosnia and Herzegovina the number of women in work had increased two and a half times” (Dobrivojević, 2011, p. 19) in comparison with the “1931 census data showing BiH had 1,138,515 female (around 46 percent) and 1,185,040 male inhabitants” and that “84.1 percent of the total population [was] made up of peasants living from agriculture, logging and fishing” (Ibid.) Following the socialist industrialization in SFRY, women were encouraged to enter the public sphere and participate in political and economic decision-making. Although Yugoslav socialism failed to do away with patriarchy, one could argue that it had some “depatriarchalizing potential” (Majstorović, 2016) just as the 1941–1945 revolutionary struggle had elements of decolonization. However, this potential was short-lived, as in real socialism, “the bourgeois family form including the gender division of labor persisted” (Okić, 2020, p. 203)—women were still double-burdened despite exceptionally progressive legislation (in SFRY). From the principally socialist, not to mention communist perspective, none of these things are to be viewed as exclusively socialist … the privileges from the socialist period have been in great part results or products of what East-Bloc, Yugoslav and West European societies already had. The entire system that we know on one hand as real-existing socialism and on the other as the welfare-state has been based on these principles. The fact that the state intervened in some traditionally female sectors should not be confused with the socialization of the burden of reproduction. That burden has always been delegated to the private sphere (or house). (Okić, 2020, p. 204)

While the degree of women’s emancipation during WWII and later in the SFRY is subject to debate, it has now become obvious that in postsocialism, women’s roles have once again been rehierarchialized, and the reproductive work naturalized as solely women’s (Burcar, 2014), which has ensured a continuity of patriarchy in both periods, and now only a

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more organized feminist revolt can interrupt it. As was the case before WWII, an alliance of institutionalized religion and the ruling elites in the new postsocialist era, in which power is evenly distributed between the clergy and ethnocapitalists, has retraditionalized society, triggering a rising in poverty and unemployment. Misogyny, discrimination, exploitation, and violence have become integral parts of the process of restoration of patriarchal capitalist relations. The associated peripheralization of women canceled out the benefits women had achieved during Yugoslav socialism (Majstorović, 2016), suggesting that struggles, which came afterward, were about an “even better socialism” or simply better lives for the marginalized. The Non-aligned Movement (NAM), with all of its contradictions (Vučetić & Betts, 2017; Baker, 2018), was a movement that during the Cold War era “advocated for the recognition of an international right to development as part of the creation of a new economic order following the demise of colonialism” (Fuchs, 2013). From its very beginning, it was unambiguously “both a product of and catalyst for the struggle against, and emergence out of, colonialism” advocating “for independence for all colonial states, however small; supported, to some extent, those fighting against colonial domination; and even warned of the dangers of an institutionalized and internalized neo-colonialism” (Stubbs, 2021). In revisiting NAM and its afterlives, Stubbs’s cultural historiography drawing from the archival research is a work of “recovery, reframing and remembering, a kind of conjunctural translation” that does not suggest linear “lessons to be learned” but, rather, a “humble offering for a renewed internationalist ethics and politics of emancipatory solidarity” and a “technique of negotiation and a strategy of survival” (Stubbs, 2021) inseparable from further debates on socialism/communism and decoloniality. A short history would focus on the rapid progress between the Conference of Asian and African states in Bandung, Indonesia in April 1955, the meeting between Tito, Nasser and Nehru on the island of Brijuni in July 1956, and the first summit of the Non-Aligned in Belgrade from 1–5 September 1961. A deeper, broader, and longer perspective on non-alignment and decolonialism would include a focus on the Congress Against Colonial

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Oppression and Imperialism held in Brussels in February 1927, leading to the formation of the League Against Imperialism and Colonial Oppression, as well as the Pan-African congresses organized by W.E.B. Dubois in the nine years before the Brussels congress. (Dinkel, 2019 in Stubbs, 2021)

3.3 B  iH from 1992 to 1995 Ethnic War to Neocolonialism: The Postsocialist Impasse Following WWII, unlike many other peripheries, socialist Yugoslavia, including SRBiH, at least for a few decades, took the path of socialist, not capitalist modernity, as a form of an “alternative” or “peripheral” modernity. This was strongly felt in BiH with the rise of housing, roads and railways, schools, and hospitals appearing where there had been almost none. Close to fifty years of relatively peaceful Yugoslav socialism nevertheless gave BiH the infrastructure, industrialization, jobs, and a distinct culture having effects both on its social base and on the superstructure. The country ceased to exist in 1992 when militant Serbo-Croatian nationalism, including other brewing nationalisms, coupled with readily available munitions of war dismantled SFRY leaving only BiH with a death toll of close to 100,000 war casualties (Tokača, 2012) and over 1.5 million diaspora (Bougarel, 2018; Domazet et al., 2020). The new “ethnopolitical entrepreneurs” (Brubaker, 2002, p. 166) benefited financially and in every other way from ethnic nationalism and ethnic cleansing, others, those who lost everything during the war or those who could not accommodate these new identities in their exclusivity becoming also losers in transition, were not so lucky. Yet the transition itself has not been so smooth—the SFRY as a lived experience, a state of mind, and a figure of thought has remained an open wound that kept reappearing as a haunting apparition. The 1992–1995 war seemed to have represented the symbolic death of the Yugoslav socialist legacy with the international community’s blessing. This rings especially true in light of the recent ruling of the Dutch

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Supreme Court about the Dutch troops’ liability for the Srebrenica massacre.10 Moving away from the horizons of socially owned property and self-management—two imperfect but real features of Yugoslav socialism—the 1992–1995 war in BiH and the transition of the country to a free-market economy and liberal democracy—orchestrated by the international community and implemented by the local ethnonationalist elites have in fact produced not one but several peripheries in the former Yugoslav country and have peripherialized its population in multiple ways. There are no studies on BiH specifically, but the economic crisis in the SFRY of the 1980s was particularly felt among the working classes (Archer & Musić, 2017; Archer et al., 2016; Jansen, 2015; Obradović-­ Wochnik, 2013; Bougarel et al., 2007) who abandoned their long-term class interests for the new appeals of nationalism. This was perhaps best summed up in October 1988 by journalist Jagoš Đuretić in an article about blue-collar workers who gathered in front of the Federal Parliament in Belgrade to meet Slobodan Milošević. They came in a “militant mood to speak about their economic grievances,” but instead they “arriv[ed] as workers and [left] as Serbs” (Musić in Archer et al., 2016, p. 133). The destruction of the 1992–1995 war and postwar deindustrialization brought about political as well as economic reorganization with ethnic differences between the three main ethnic groups and economic motives often played overlapping roles in it. During the 1992–1995 war, what had been defined as socially owned was declared by various laws as state-owned property or private capital—a practice of dispossession through which the political elites and warlords robbed Bosnian citizens of what had previously been understood as the socially owned property (Begić in Arsenijević, 2014, pp. 35–36). Zlatan Begić, a university professor of economics and a politician on the passing of the 1994 Law on Ownership Transformation by the Parliamentary Assembly of the Federation of BiH moved by the Government’s proposal, says the following:  https://www.npr.org/2019/07/19/743413444/dutch-troops-were-10-liable-in-srebrenica-­ massacre-­supreme-court-says?t=1607955803759. Also the important 2020 film Srebrenica by the Bosnian movie directress Jasmila Žbanić offers an interpretation of their involvement and culpability.

10

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Why is this law, which was passed during a period of all-out war, so important? Because this law represented the preparation for what was to follow after the war ended, and what is now considered as the biggest robbery ever witnessed in this territory, since there was first mention of Bosnia and Herzegovina in the history books. This assertion of course, refers to the privatization, which was conducted after the war, but the preparation for its implementation was carried out during the fiercest warfare, when the public focus was directed simply towards survival. By passing this law, the legal institutions of Bosnia and Herzegovina in its capital city, Sarajevo, conducted the transfer and legal transformation of all public-owned property into state- owned property. Simply put, they granted themselves the legal right to dispose of an enormous amount of property, composed of all the means of production, which was transferred out of the workers/citizens hands and placed into the hands of the state, i.e., the means of production were then owned by the state in the shape of its institutions—institutions that were structured along the logic of political parties. After that, the state would issue shares—the mechanism used to privatise the companies, after which the majority of these companies were ruined. (Begić, 2014, p. 36)

In postsocialism, therefore, socially owned property was passed into the hands of private individuals or political parties, making the new ethnonationalist elites the legal successors of the country they helped abolish. The old socialist working class has practically disappeared (Stenning, 2005) as “today’s workers are not only the few employed in industry, but also represent a huge number of unemployed, unpaid, and precarious workers in the service sector” (Škokić & Potkonjak, 2016, p. 129). During the peace talks in Dayton, Ohio,11 the Dayton Peace Agreement (DPA) was drafted by the US Army Judge Advocate General’s Corps12 over a period of several months, binding the signatories to commit to legal changes, military justice, transition to market democracy, and so on, in effect legitimizing the ethnonationalist division of the country brought about through militant nationalism, ethnic cleansing, and genocide. The  General Framework Agreement for Peace in BiH or the Dayton Agreement is the peace agreement reached at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base near Dayton, Ohio, United States, on November 21, 1995, and formally signed in Paris, France, on December 14, 1995. This agreement ended the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina after close to four years. 12  https://www.goarmy.com/jag/milestone-cases/dayton-peace-accord.html 11

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Dayton Agreement became the country’s constitution, dividing it into two fairly ethnically homogenous entities, the Republika Srpska (RS) and the other being the Federation of BiH (FBiH), along with the Brčko district.13 As such, Dayton was an upgrade to the 1994 Washington Agreement that saw the creation of the Bosniak-Croat federation, keeping the discourse about the separate, Croat entity alive and potentially useful for political disputes and secessionist rhetoric. After the DPA was signed in late 1995, the international community’s Office of the High Representative (OHR) was created to oversee the implementation of its civilian aspects and, when necessary, intervene in peace building and state building in BiH, quickly becoming the most powerful international body and the final authority in the implementation of the Dayton Agreement and BiH’s subsequent bid to join the European Union (EU). For the sake of illustration, between 1998 and 2005 inclusive, successive High Representatives, acting in a neocolonial manner, “issued 757 decisions, removing 119 people from public office and imposing 286 laws or amendments to laws, with a gross lack of due process in exercising these powers” (Parish, 2007, p. 15). Moreover, the international community’s strong involvement in the peace and state building process has not only failed to alleviate the social and economic devastation but has locked the country in a protocolonial situation (Majstorović, 2019a; Boatcă, 2012) and made it subject to the long-term structural and ideological effects of “global as well as local hierarchies” (Gagyi, 2016). The ZAVNOBiH created a BiH that could only function embedded in the SFRY as an amalgam of its ethnic particularities. In contrast, with the SFRY dismantled, post-Dayton BiH was founded on the exclusivity principle—one could argue that the country now exists as exclusively Serb through the RS and at the same time as Bosniak-Croat through the FBiH. The Dayton Agreement brought peace to BiH but has failed to deliver on the promise of being a mere transitional phase, and has made possible the creation of the new elites. Right-wing populists in the vein of Donald Trump, unabashed misogynists, and ethnic nationalists came to power in BiH long before the most recent rise of the far right in the West  https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2014/may/14/brcko-bosnia-europe-only-free-city

13

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and have been running the country with toxic political visions of ethnic segregation and purity, while immensely benefiting from such rhetoric. As Edin Hajdarpašić remarks: If someone had said in 1995 that the politicians of this small war-torn and impoverished country heavily scrutinized by the international community would go on to make themselves the proportionately highest paid representatives in Europe, to expropriate the country’s key economic resources with impunity, to take out staggering loans for unrealized projects, and to block any attempts at changing this situation—all in less than 20  years after the General Framework Agreement for Peace—most experts would have dismissed such statements as ‘unrealistic’ and ‘impossible’. Yet that is precisely what happened with the formation of new political forces after GFAP. (Hajdarpašić in Arsenijević, 2014, p. 105)

The Dayton Agreement has divided the post-Dayton political time into three phases of politico-economic restructuring (Majstorović et al., 2016). The first phase included a neocolonial style Europeanization and democratization effort by the international community spearheaded by the OHR. It was in this phase, between 1996 and 2006, that issues such as the return of refugees and displaced persons and the introduction of common passports and uniform license plates were dealt with, while the country was transitioning to democracy and free-market capitalism with the EU and NATO as guarantors of its peace (Majstorović, 2007). The second phase, which started in 2006 and peaked in 2014, was characterized by the weaker OHR involvement (Parish, 2007), and strengthening of ethnonationalist elites who barbed up their rhetoric and fortified their positions with the spoils from the privatization of strategic enterprises and cemented the dominant mutually irreconcilable discourses revolving around equally irreconcilable visions for the country’s future. The rise of two political leaders in 2006, Milorad Dodik of the SNSD14 and Haris Silajdžić of the now moribund SBiH,15 marks the  SNSD (Stranka nezavisnih socijaldemokrata) or the Union of Independent Social Democrats was founded in March 1996 by Milorad Dodik. 15  SBiH (Stranka za BiH) or the Party for Bosnia and Herzegovina was founded by Haris Silajdžić in April 1996. 14

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impasse these discourses have created: in the RS, absolute genocide denial was the norm, while in the Federation of BiH the prevailing attitude was that the RS should be abolished as a “genocidal creation,” while further fissures emerged when the Bosnian Croats started to voice demands for a “third entity.” With the Dayton constitution legitimizing the apartheid-­ like segregation in BiH, most clearly visible in projects such as the Two schools Under One Roof scheme (Benedetti, 2019), the European Court for Human Rights’ 2009 ruling on the Sejdić-Finci case further exposed the need for constitutional reform, which emerged as the main precondition for further EU accession talks. This was soon put off the agenda as the protests and plenums of the 2014 called for a different international approach to BiH. A different approach was duly taken, resulting in the Compact for Growth and Jobs, which was subsequently transformed into the Reform Agenda for BiH,16 as part of the British-German initiative to move the country back on to the Europeanization track (Majstorović et al., 2016). Coming closer to the EU, discursively constructed as the locus amoenus, an idyllic space of well-being and prosperity was often recontextualized as accession to NATO, as the guarantee of peace, security, and stability for BiH once in the EU (Majstorović, 2007). The third, still ongoing, phase is marked by a proliferation of social movements and protests (Arsenijević, 2014; Majstorović et  al., 2016; Mujanović, 2018), including the Justice for David (JFD) protest, which continues in Banja Luka at the time of writing and is preceded by several others such as the 2008 protests against increasing rates of violent crime after the killing of a youth named Denis Mrnjavac in a Sarajevo tram in 2009, the 2012 Park Is Ours protests in Banja Luka, the June 2013 Baby Revolution in Sarajevo where citizens demanded ID numbers for newborns, and the February 2014 protests and citizens’ plenums in the FBiH that resulted in the burning of several cantonal government buildings, and little else despite its initial appeal of activist citizenship and direct democracy. Neoliberal capitalism with its intrinsically violent processes of capital creation and capitalist modes of production by and large dissolved socialist Yugoslavia assisted by ethnic nationalism. Ethnic cleansing and  https://europa.ba/?page_id=547

16

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genocidal practices were utilized, along with, for instance, acts of different parliaments following privatizations (Begić, 2014), to create “legal” grounds for expropriation and dispossession, further refined by the international community that strategically promoted capitalist violence under the label of transition to democracy. This is a classic Luxemburgian Landnahme moment, one that cries for help to decolonization. In the outer markets, the principle of equivalent exchange, that is, exchanging values of similar magnitude, applies to a limited degree at best; arbitrariness and even open violence are predominant here (Luxemburg, 2015, p.  137): “Such violence aims to at least temporarily maintain social groups, territories or even entire countries at a pre-capitalist or less developed stage” (Dörre, 2010, p. 47), or, we may add, at a stage of peripherality. Ethnonationalist and capitalist hegemony eventually won out, and the mainstream political vision, which included postwar historical revisionisms of the socialist period, became a tool of the new hegemonic order, paving the way for the processes of privatization and destruction by the elites at the expense of most citizens. As with the rest of the former Yugoslavia, the most visible axis of oppression in BiH was not “classic” racism (see Baker, 2018), but rather ethnic nationalism coupled with neoliberalism that was used as a category of oppression toward “other” different social groups (Majstorović & Turjačanin, 2013), accumulate capital, and produce a small yet stable salariat (Standing, 2011) of permanently employed and paid workforce associated with the ruling parties, “the projectariat” (Baker, 2014)17 but mostly “the precariat.” The postwar period saw a terrible infrastructural devastation of infrastructure, loss of major industries, and pauperization of the population coupled with brain drain. Under the pretext of trying to provide ethnic justice among the three divided BiH peoples, ethnonationalists’ postwar rule became complicit in shady privatizations and the irresponsible selling-­off of natural wealth such as forests, waters, and energy (see Clancy, 2004).18 With the public sector firmly in their grip, they distributed jobs to their political clientele and left many people on the brink of

17 18

 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13533312.2014.899123  http://www.worldwatch.org/node/545

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poverty, contributing to the third wave of BiH emigrants19 leaving the country to become new workforce in the EU, which further peripherialized the country.

3.4 Toward Deep Coalitions Examining postsocialist peripheralization, the haunting specter of the SFRY and its revolutionary communist surplus corresponds with the absence of a socialist political horizon in the works of postcolonial and decolonial thinkers focusing on Eastern Europe. Some have tried to reconsider the complex historical pathways of socialism and communism and their achievements, now considered spent, by introducing, mediating, and connecting “various un-freedom conditions” such as the so-­called postdependence (Nycz, 2014). This concept is “a pluriversal term applicable to many situations such as the post-apartheid, post-­dictatorship, or postFordism” reflective of “traumatic dependence” (Tlostanova, 2019, p. 173) with the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). Additionally, different scholars have regarded growth as being a byproduct of both capitalist and socialist modernity, with direct impact on the environment (Mastini, 2017; Sekulova et  al., 2013) so that the economy has had to change through the degrowth debate (Richter, 2019; Demaria et al., 2013), calling for an environmental justice in the Global South (Richter, 2019, paragraph 7), that would hinge on degrowth in the Global North. Still, these debates notwithstanding, communism, as a proscribed Denkverbot, has been largely absent from much decolonial and postcolonial scholarship. The term postsocialism has also suffered from acceptance and rejection. Some have insisted that postsocialist scholarship becomes a recognized scholarly and theoretical reservoir, similar to postcolonial scholarship, offering new understandings and giving voice to “the natives” (Hann et al., 2002). Others were saying good-bye to it, dismissing postsocialism as a useless analytical tool of Western scholarship to help them “make  The first wave of BiH gastarbeiters after WWII happened during the 1960s and 1970s, the second wave was a result of the war-related migrations, whereas the third wave started in 2013. Although there are no official statistics, some 300,000 people have left BiH since 2013 contributing to an already-existing BiH diaspora of almost 1 million people (see Bougarel, 2018). 19

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sense of what was happening in the formal socialist countries in the early 1990s” (Müller, 2019, p.  11). Addressing the need to internationalize knowledge production by institutionalizing intellectual pathways to certain locations in the world, Jennifer Suchland (2015) offers an interesting comparison between aspects of transition and development discourses associated with postsocialist and postcolonial/decolonial ones laid out in Table 3.1: The choice of terminology, varying between political scientists and sociologists who prefer the term “postcommunism” and geographers and anthropologists who preferred “postsocialism,” mirrors according to Müller, “Marxist thinking insofar as ‘socialism’ referred to the lived experience of ‘actually-existing socialism,’ a transitional stage to ‘communism’ as the programmatic ideology and the ultimate goal (Marx, 1962)” (Müller, 2019, p. 6). The transitional and postsocialist condition occasionally merged, whereby the prefix “post” was to be understood as a temporal marker, that is, referring to something that came after socialism, as if socialism was never to return while we were peacefully transitioning to market capitalism and liberal democracy. More recently, the post in postsocialism came to be understood as a conceptual term Table 3.1  Aspects of transition and development discourses: a comparison Point of comparison Presupposition Target Historical referent Economic appeal

Policies

Transition

Development

Progress narrative Disavowal of socialist modernity Postsocialist

Progress narrative Disavowal of premodernity

Economic intervention to dismantle state socialism

Economic intervention to modernize subsistence-based (i.e., failed alternative to capitalism) and/or reorder colonial-based economic arrangement Structural adjustment Structural adjustment programs; foreign direct investment; liberalization of market

Structural adjustment Structural adjustment programs; privatization; liberalization of market

Postcolonial

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designating the complex processes occurring after socialism including privatization and democratization noticeable in the BiH case as well. According to Müller (2019, p.  4), the aim of postsocialism as a concept was: not to present one general theory of postsocialism, but rather to challenge received ideas developed in a Western context—democracy, property, civil society, class and so on—with the experience of postsocialist societies (Verdery, 1996). Postsocialism stressed the openness of the postsocialist moment, an important principle at a time when the future of the ex-­ socialist countries seemed to lie in privatisation, liberalisation and democratisation—the holy trinity of the transition that Western institutions such as the IMF and Western economists had foreseen.

Yet, the socialist idea as a political alternative to capitalism is interesting both as a (re)imagination and an agenda worth pursuing (Gibson-­ Graham, 2006; Fraser, 1997; Buden, 2012), not just in the peripheries but also in the liberal West where the democratic socialism of Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez is gaining currency and more traction after decades of neoliberal capitalism. It shows that socialist grammars and solidarity cannot just be thrown out with the postsocialist bathwater, not only in terms of rethinking North and South, East and West but also because they are the only alternatives to capitalism, in postsocialist as well as in postcolonial worlds, in peripheries, as well as in the center. Communism should be viewed more broadly than real socialism in SFRY or state socialism in the USSR, not just because the ideology of postsocialist or postcommunist transition is “repressively infantilizing the societies recently liberated from communism” whereby “children of communism remain … marionettes in a historical process that happens independently of their will and drags them with it to a better future” (Buden, 2012) but also because actually existing socialism was “a far cry from its utopian, communist ambition” (Müller, 2019, p. 9). If “deep coalitions” (Lugones, 2003) are ever to be established, this needs to change—recognizing the specificities of political subjects of decolonial struggles does not preclude dismissing other anticolonial struggles, many of which have socialist roots. Adopting a new vocabulary and

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grammars should not in any way divorce peripheral selves from future political struggles of which they might otherwise be agents, but should instead bring them together in solidarity and dialogue. Speaking about decolonial potentials and communist political horizons (Dean, 2012) in postsocialist post-Dayton BiH, we must bear in mind that the “axis of coloniality … overdetermines the network of social relations that deal with control over labor, nature, gender and reproduction, subjectivity and knowledge, and authority with all their products and resources” (Quijano, 2000a, pp. 344–45), and these networks beg for analyses over and across specific geographic spaces, including the less traditionally colonial ones. The slogan “no justice, no peace” shouted by the Black Lives Matter protesters following the murder of George Floyd on May 25, 2020, in Minneapolis resonated with the 2018 protesters’ shouts in Bosnia “justice for David and Dženan,” signaling an acute lack of justice globally. Dženan Memić was David’s peer from FBiH who also died under mysterious circumstances at the age of twenty-two in Sarajevo and whose father Muriz has also been seeking justice like Davor Dragičević (Photo 3.1).

Photo 3.1  Davor Dragičević and Muriz Memić, the father of the late Dženan, stand united in the Krajina square in the summer of 2018

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Many of the third-wave emigrant BiH parents reflected on these cases saying their emigration was for their children’s sake. Late David’s dreadlocks and reggae aesthetics and prophetic rap lyrics from a song “Kid from the ghetto”—JFD’s anthem—reflected the young man’s understanding of his identification and location: “It looks like I won’t make it far because I am just a pawn in this story, I’m not going anywhere, I made a mess, I’m just another kid from the ghetto” [Izgleda da neću daleko stići jer sam ja samo pijun u ovoj priči, ne idem nikud, načinio sam štetu, ja sam samo još jedan klinac u getu] evocating abandonment and resistance with material origins in African-American experience (Photo 3.2). In these cases, a politically articulated excess of love has been politically articulated and mobilized against police brutality and hate crimes against bodies to be fervently repudiated through the work of justice. Interestingly, the symbol for both David Dragičević in Banja Luka as well as for George Floyd in Minneapolis is a raised fist (Photos 3.3. and 3.4). Parallels of this kind are useful as they critique “developmentalism, of Eurocentric forms of knowledge, gender inequalities, racial hierarchies,

Photo 3.2  David Dragičević done at his request weeks before his death by his friend Sofija Grmuša, now a JFD activist and politician

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Photo 3.3  Raised fist next to David’s heart as part of David’s shrine in the Krajina square (or David’s square)

and the cultural/ideological processes that foster the subordination of the periphery in the capitalist world-system” (Grosfoguel, 2008). A decolonial approach that “dissolves the anti-capitalist postcolonial dichotomy in postsocialist studies by locating simultaneous origins of capitalism and coloniality” (Karkov & Valiavicharska, 2018, p. 5) is a possible way out but socialist horizons and histories must not be overlooked. In the light of the present struggles going on BiH as a Balkan periphery, I see them as opening space for “multiple, heterogeneous, and even conflictive pressures or logics” (Quijano, 2000a, p.  347  in Karkov & Valiavicharska, 2018, p. 5) foreshadowing future resistance, not as mere acts of restoration nostalgia for the past (Boym, 2001). The decolonial perspective does not neglect the problems of the actually lived state socialism in the SFRY (Karkov & Valiavicharska, 2018) but rather values its socialist emancipatory potential, which is in stark contrast

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Photo 3.4  George Floyd square in Minneapolis. (The courtesy of Kris Lukkarila)

with the period after 1995 marked by repratriarchalization and retraditionalization, international interventionism, and ethnonationalist capitalism. Furthermore, these struggles and resistance should not be viewed as attempts at “becoming the center” but as an opening of “space(s) of resistance and alternatives to both capital and coloniality from the locale of Eastern Europe” (Țichindeleanu, 2011) and an “organisation of alternative and resistant modernities” (Karkov & Valiavicharska, 2018) able to offer people different, better lives. In light of the current attempts at rearranging the Dayton setup, and twenty-five years of foreign intervention, it is becoming increasingly apparent that the current crop of political and economic elites, irresponsible and incapable as they are, has come to represent the interest of the people of BiH and yet is incapable of doing it. Perhaps there is potential in postsocialist BiH as a space where the socialist and the postcolonial intersect in the middle of the post-2015 migrations and the COVID-19 pandemic, as the most recent crises of

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capitalism. With or without the international community, the peripheral selves on the margins of Europe will have to deal with difficult histories, contest ethnic capitalism, and carve a space for a dynamic emancipatory politics if they want to decolonize this space by creating more social justice, less poverty, better lives, and opportunities for serious social reconstruction. In the meantime, all of this remains nothing but a wish list unlikely to be fulfilled merely by accessing the EU, either strengthening or deposing the ethnocapitalists by a force of arms, diplomacy or a Bonn Powers decree to be obeyed and implemented by the locals. Instead, not voting for them in the upcoming 2022 elections and expressing dissatisfaction about isolation, peripheralization, injustice or corruption through social protests could be the only two ways of putting pressure on BiH politicians. “Nothing will be named after you,”20 Sarajevo and Tuzla protesters were shouting in February 2014 to their politicians, just as Davor Dragičević, interestingly a Republika Srpska army veteran, rose from a wailing father to a political activist who bravely and loudly repeated on the main square in Banja Luka that “the RS is a criminal state and the RS police a narco-cartel killing children and youth.” While the protests provide a glimpse into thinking the periphery by pointing at struggles on the ground, they are dispersed and localized, up against the power of the ethnonationalist elites, and it seems that the struggle will be long and hard. Danson and de Souza (2012, p. 4) highlight the need to see the periphery not just as “the outcome of the center’s development” but a “space with the past, present and future” where people who live there. grow up, eat, go to school, make love. … Periphery is created, experienced and continuously present. There is always something to be done about the periphery in the periphery, whatever its appearances or circumstances, and this is also true—or maybe even more so—in an intellectual capacity.

For defining the relationship between the core and the periphery, various triggering factors and political influences, as well as the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, may also determine the nature and course of this  “Po vama se ništa neće zvati” was an allusion to a line from the famous Bijelo dugme song “Pristao sam biću sve što hoće.” 20

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relationship stirring the effect of future agents of revolt. Whereas World War II (WWII) was a revolutionary event, making previously invisible agents of revolt, including Yugoslav partisans and communists and for whom the ethnic identifications and values were secondary, not only visible but victorious, the 1992–1995 war was a counterrevolution. It obliterated SFRY, created new nation states from the previous SFRY republics, and mobilized ethnic nationalists as new agents of revolt, who in identifying themselves as Serbs, Croats and Bosniaks were denouncing and rejecting the socialist Yugoslav past. “The position of the periphery is also not determined once and for all. The peripheral status of countries may be subject to change if they manage to achieve success in enhancing their position and change their relations to the core” (Lung & Domanski, 2009, p. 9). But this also applies to the way peripheral selves on the margin of Europe understand their role as the disenfranchised, pauperized, other waiting at the EU’s door. They have been inhabitants of a symbolic rest stop on the road to the center just as many Middle Easterners, North Africans and Southeast Asians (MENASEA) en route have following the 2015 migrations as a process most reflective of the crisis of late capitalism. In recent years, the response of the peripheral selves trying to resist the structural violence of this system has been to either occupy through protests or leave, which will be explored in more detail in the chapters that follow. Whereas obedient and interest-driven individuals in the periphery can survive and thrive because of their uncontested relationship with the elites as their political clientele, the question here is for how much longer? BiH has become not only marked by protests and civic unrest but has also become the country of double transit of both emigrants and immigrants. It has become sort of a “waiting room” (Jansen et al., 2016) supplying white Bosnians and Herzegovinians as labor force to the center (EU) and a place containing racialized and injured bodies of the MENASEA migrants and refugees, currently prohibited from entering the EU, but who may at some point become valued again. Stoler’s (2016, pp. 4–5) insistence on reexamining “what constitutes contemporary colonial relations, what counts as an imperial pursuit, and which geopolitics rest on residual or reactivated imperial practices” urges us to further inquire into the relationship between the postcolonial, the decolonial, and the

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peripheral. These debates and their historical precepts continue to be relevant for the contemporary left, for progressive internationalism, as well as for more comprehensive, antiracist decolonization projects toward a no longer colonial future making sure that “material and immaterial, presential and virtual expressions of solidarity multiply and last” (Ferreira Da Silva, 2020) on the smoldering ashes of colonialism. Any practice of solidarity needs to foster dialogues embracing the deep differences in the way we live, make sense of the world, and envision specific futures. Only by recognizing the differentiated affective attunements to global oppression, the differences and limitations, as well as the overlaps, can we see the other and recognize their pain and struggle, not ours but similar to ours; only then can we unite and be truly solidaristic.

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4 From Discourse to Body and Back via Critical Materialism: Bringing Discourse and Affect Research Together

4.1 Bodies Enter, Assemblages Emerge Labor power (Arbeitskraft) is a key concept used by Marx in his critique of capitalist political economy as an attribute of living persons and a peculiar commodity because people own themselves in their living bodies. “By labor-power or capacity for labor is to be understood as the aggregate of those mental and physical capabilities existing in a human being, which he exercises whenever he produces a use-value of any description” (Marx, 1906, p. 186). For Marx, labor is an activity and cannot be sold but labor power is what the worker actually sells on the market as a commodity (Brewer, 1984, p. 36). Laboring bodies have been living and dying, protesting and migrating, and loving and losing their loved ones conditioned by their structural peripherality. Discussing “peripheral selves” as “peripheral bodies” begs asking how much of this politico-­economic peripherality is contained in those bodies (our bodies), our discourses, and desires and what happens when we start to think of bodies as being of different politico-economic and ideological but also affective predicaments? How can the condition of such bodies yield itself as the basis for a © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 D. Majstorović, Discourse and Affect in Postsocialist Bosnia and Herzegovina, Postdisciplinary Studies in Discourse, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-80245-5_4

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livable life and how can one deal with the structural and random violence inflicted over time for which no one is to be held accountable? Lastly, what is it in the residue or surplus of affected bodies that develops at different levels from the personal and interactional to the macrosocietal (De Landa, 2006, p.  5) and what is to be done with it? Engagement with bodies, focusing firmly on social production rather than social construction, and the concern with “material workings of power” (Fox & Alldred, 2014, p. 399; Coole & Frost, 2010, p. 7) particularly crystalized during my research on the Justice for David movement starting in 2018 (see Chap. 6), where “the defense of living conditional and physical integrity” permeated the agendas of this social movement more tangibly than “any of the more conventionally understood ideological precepts” (Vishmidt, 2020, p. 33). With the (re)emergence of “the body” as the contemporary locus of sociopolitical agency and a “key heuristic in much post-struturalist and post-foundationalist cultural theory and philosophy” (Vishmidt, 2020, p.  33), with traction in both activism and academia, one is inevitably drawn to inquire more about the biopolitical implications of bodies being articulated through collocations of the “state” (the political body) and “vulnerability” (the corporeal, biological body). Taking the body as a site of operation of affect in culture means understanding certain political body-sites in terms of intensity and relationality to use Deleuzo-Guattarian terminology (Deleuze & Guattari, 1996). A cultural theory of affect is a theory of the body whereby the affective body is an event (Erdbauer, 2004)—“if there were no escape, no excess, no remainder, … the universe would be without potential, pure entropy, death. Actually existing, structured things live in and through that which escapes them. Their autonomy is the autonomy of affect” (Massumi, 2002, p. 35). The new materialist shift in social theory developed as an opposition to realist and constructionist ontologies insisting that social inquiry should focus on how assemblages of the animate and the inanimate together produce the world. In a seminal article on incorporating new materialism into social inquiry with respect to the role of the researcher, “research-­ assemblage” comprising researcher, data, methods, and contexts is key to their exploration (Fox & Alldred, 2014, p. 400). This new move, radically and transversally, extends the traditional materialist analysis between

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structural levels of the social, dissolving the “mind/matter” and “nature/ culture” divides (Braidotti, 2013, p. 3) by addressing instead “issues of how desires, feelings and meanings also contribute to social production” (Braidotti, 2000, p. 159; De Landa, 2006, p. 5). The world impinges (affects and has effects) on the body first (Massumi, 2002), whereby the emotions as crystallizations of affect can be felt in “every transition …(being) accompanied by a feeling of the change in capacity” (Massumi, 2002, p. 213). This feeling of change also has affects; it increases the intensity of affect, “[giving] the body’s movements a kind of depth that stays with it across all its transitions—accumulating in memory, in habit, in reflex, in desire, in tendency” (p.  213, original emphasis). Affects can have the force of a contagion and can be carried through multiple channels, such as public gatherings, and flows, such as through voice, bodily movement, touch, and texture (Connolly, 2002, p. 75), and testimonies can operate in this way too, creating connections between the person testifying and the recipient. Viewing new materialism as also “transversal to a range of social theory dualisms such as structure/agency, reason/emotion, human/non-human, animate/inanimate and inside/outside” as it shifted the focus of social inquiry away “from an approach predicated upon humans and their bodies, meant examining instead how relational networks or assemblages of animate and inanimate affect and are affected” (De Landa, 2006, p. 4; Mulcahy, 2012, p. 10, p. Youdell & Armstrong, 2011, p. 145 in Fox & Alldred, 2014, p. 399). Another appeal of new materialist approach was its shifting away “from conceptions of objects and bodies as occupying distinct and delimited spaces, and instead seeing human bodies and all other material, social and abstract entities as relational, having no ontological status or integrity other than that produced through their relationship to other similarly contingent and ephemeral bodies, things and ideas” (Deleuze, 1988, p.  123). Deleuze and Guattari positioned assemblages (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 88), as relations as unpredictable relations developing around actions and events (see Fox and Alldred, 2014, 401) between bodies, things, and ideas, which are affected by or affect others in the assemblage. These flows of affect territorialize the body’s capacities creating “a kind of chaotic network of habitual and non-habitual connections, always in flux, always reassembling in different ways” (Potts, 2004, p. 19).

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By adding the assemblage to the subject, or vice versa, and not subtracting from it was a way for the old and new materialist analysis to show that resolving most of today’s social production problems could not happen without dissolving of capitalism, for which subjects still remain important as agents. A Deleuzo-Guattarian view of society is described in terms of plateaus, whereby a “plateau is an assemblage that organizes intensive processes into temporary stable states that can be given specific dates but can neither persist nor be repeated. Among these plateaus … the rhizome is an image of thought for assemblages that organize themselves in non-­ hierarchical lateral networks that experiment with new and heterogeneous connections that may mix ‘words, things, power, and geography’” (Adkins, 2015, p. 25). A rhizome has no beginning or end; it is always in the middle, between things, interbeing, intermezzo. The tree is filiation, but the rhizome is alliance, uniquely alliance. The tree imposes the verb “to be,” but the fabric of the rhizome is the conjunction, “and … and … and….” This conjunction carries enough force to shake and uproot the verb “to be” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 25). The multiple must be made, not by always adding a higher dimension, but rather in the simplest of ways, by dint of sobriety, with the number of dimensions one already has available—always n − 1 (the only way the one belongs to the multiple: always subtracted). Subtract the unique from the multiplicity to be constituted; write at n − 1 dimensions. A system of this kind could be called a rhizome. A rhizome as subterranean stem is absolutely different from roots and radicles. Bulbs and tubers are rhizomes. Plants with roots or radicles may be rhizomorphic in other respects altogether: the question is whether plant life in its specificity is not entirely rhizomatic. Even some animals are, in their pack form. Rats are rhizomes. (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 6)

Rhizomes are founded on the principle of connection and heterogeneity and “any point of a rhizome can be connected to anything other, and must be. This is very different from the tree or root, which plots a point, fixes an order” (ibid., p. 7). To study peripherality as being part of, coming from, fighting and going with, empirically meant giving voice and

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documenting the relationships between left activists and migrants from the country to which I belonged too. As parts of these plateaus in rhizomatic lines, we were positioned in unique alliances based not only on our discursive choices but also on our affective attunements and choices of action and our backgrounds (roots) and consequent trajectories (routes). Plateau or rhizome connects Rich’s Politics of Location and Glissant’s Poetics of Relation (1997) via his elaboration of the root system harkening back to Clifford’s cosmopolitan paradox of one’s roots always preceding one’s routes (1997). Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari criticized notions of the root and, even perhaps, notions of being rooted. The root is unique, a stock taking all upon itself and killing all around it. In opposition to this they propose the rhizome, an enmeshed root system, a network spreading either in the ground or in the air, with no predatory rootstock taking over permanently. The notion of the rhizome maintains, therefore, the idea of rootedness but challenges that of a totalitarian root. Rhizomatic thought is the principle behind what I call the Poetics of Relation, in which each and every identity is extended through a relationship with the Other. (Glissant, 1997, p. 11)

Affect researchers emphasize assemblage, relationality, articulation, and entanglement (Latour, 2004; Thrift, 2008; Blackman, 2012) as a “new vocabulary” and a new way of thinking social research, and this chapter therefore builds on a broader discussion of why discourse analysis studying textual representations needs to include theorizing of bodies in the more comprehensive study of the social. If discourse on “bodies” offers only a pseudo-concreteness and acceptance of fragile, vulnerable bodies, perhaps the next question should be about these assemblages, or why and how peripheral selves are produced, which processes are they produced in, and what materialities are they parts of? One way of understanding it would be through viewing assemblages as particular “territories” (Guattari, 1995, p. 28), stabilized and destabilized or deterritorialized (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, pp. 88–89). Within these territories, the body is never alone, it is always part of an assemblage, always deterritorialized by novel relations added to the assemblage just by the series of historical overlaps between the colonial, socialist, and

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postcolonial described in Chap. 3. The body resists through a line of flight (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987), as the link between affect and action, affect and protest, and affect and revolution in an always becoming world (Fox & Alldred, 2014, p. 401; Thrift, 2004, p. 61). Post-Dayton space-time has been recolonized and approaching it via affect was a way to symbolically decolonize it by learning what these assemblages were like and what kind of “affective capacities” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p.  400) they generated. Affects “produce further affective capacities within assemblages (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 400); and because one affect can produce more than one capacity, social production is not linear, but ‘rhizomic’ (ibid., p.  7), a branching, reversing, coalescing and rupturing flow” (Fox & Alldred, 2014, p. 401). With this in mind, in addition to the discursive elements shaping social reality, affective attunements (Massumi, 2015) too play a role in the production of the social and are relevant for assessing the researcher’s understanding of her agency in addition to understanding human agency in general. What is it then about “peripheral bodies” that connects lines of flight with lines of fight,1 as for was the case with, for instance, the Paris Commune of 1871 or the Yugoslav WAF assembling two millions of women to fight and sustain reproduction during WWII? An assemblage is always larger than the sum of its parts and its properties, interactions, or as De Landa (2006) puts it, its relationships include those between assemblages (exteriority) and within an assemblage (interiority), their extensive properties (borders or a constitution), as well as their intensive properties (wars or migrations). To speak of periphery-as-assemblage would entail taking this dynamic view to explain these properties in terms of different processes and networks, such as was done in the previous chapter but also in terms of the peripheral bodies inhabiting these spaces. In Marina Vishmidt’s words, perhaps the focus should be on thinking about “what other bodies are possible if these are seen as the consequence, rather than the precondition, of a socially and historically mediated mode of production,” thus redefining “the political salience of experience as something collective, intractable and principally indeterminate rather than self-asserting, self-owning and claim-making” (2020, p. 45).  I am grateful to Tijana Okić for pointing me in this direction.

1

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4.2 Affected: Where Do We Go from Pain? According to Sedgwick (2003), p. 16), “experience is organized inarticulately, it is felt and intuited rather than systematized, hovering ‘below the level of shape or structure’” in which “affect as excess is a kind of intensity, making a difference below the threshold of consciousness, thrusting the subject into particular kinds of relations with the material, and social world.” Yet however alluring it may be to articulate the contemporary neoliberal, pandemic-beset predicament in terms of bodies as opposed to some other political subjectivation, there are pitfalls to prioritizing vulnerability and isolation. If political actors organize solely on the basis of their vulnerability—and we have seen this in postsocialist BiH both on the left and the right side of the spectrum, more specifically in the victimization and tribunalization discourses after the 1990s wars (see Helms, 2013; Okić, 2020)—“then no common horizon beyond pain management can be envisioned” and “blaming the outsiders, blaming the different—hovers close at hand” (Vishmidt, 2020, p. 34). Pain management has been an efficient mechanism materialized through the Dayton Agreement, and it has been the policy of managing the needs of the abandoned, impoverished, traumatized, and humiliated populations through a specific kind of bordering under the guise of political liberalism so long as political capital could be extracted in the process (see Harney & Moten, 2013), for which the local political parties as well as the international community organizations are held equally accountable. The images of and political legibility of the abused bodies (raped, murdered, injured) of the 1992–1995 war that drew the international attention and resulted in a divided BiH at the same time obscured and rendered politically illegible other peripheral bodies in the war’s wake. Pain management has disabled the politics of the wound, anesthetizing it indefinitely. Affective entanglements referring to bodies and politics in the periphery have always been personally embodied; the question was how to write about them theoretically with an awareness of the affective intensity, often autobiographical, as well as of the political potentials that may be used as a basis for future organizing. After years of my own political

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activism in BiH, my tenure was politically contested in March 2018, and I almost lost my job.2 A twenty-one-year-old man named David Dragičević was killed by what his father called “the State.” My nausea at police brutality and unwillingness of the post-Dayton state to punish it only grew. Around the same time, young men from the region, David’s age and older, were already en route to Germany and Austria in their thousands, leaving never to return. As the country was “emptying” (Dzenovska, 2020) of bodies, the protests started against the apparent police cover-up of David’s murder and their reluctance to launch a proper investigation. I joined the protest and was then asked to translate David’s autopsy reports pro bono.3 Two movements arose out of these entanglements: the social movement Justice for David that aimed to shake up the stagnant political scene in Banja Luka and the country despite the police repression, and my own personal movement toward becoming a postsocialist migrant (Drnovšek Zorko, 2019, pp. 151–167 in Manolova et al., 2019)—with all the inadequacies of the term postsocialism. It was a tale of two bodies,4 mine and David’s, as I felt myself entangled with his, the body fluids both poisonous and remedial. On December 30th, 2018, after five days of riots in the city, Davor Dragičević, David’s  During the tenure procedure, despite having a sufficient number of required publications, five of my book chapters were dismissed as they had been published in the vacuum between my being an assistant and associate professor, even though they were not “absorbed” in my associate professorship and were left hanging and unaccounted for. This was done at the insistence of a senior Senate member, former member of the Serb Radical Party, to whom at the time no Senate member objected. I had articles published after 2017 when the tenure started but I was unable to include them post factum as they would apparently result in “meddling with an already started procedure,” as I was unofficially told by an administration clerk. They finally accepted an older paper that would fit in the gap, but then the problem was that my internationally published papers “did not have a statement from the journal editors that these indeed were scientific papers.” Getting written confirmations from the journal editors would have dragged the procedure unnecessarily beyond the six-month window, during which I would have lost my job, and I resolved the problem by obtaining a letter from the Republika Srpska Ministry of Education that my papers were “indeed scientific, high-rated journals belonging to SSCI and AHCI lists” and that such practice was in fact discriminatory “towards those who were internationally promoting RS.” 3  My “tale of two bodies” began during this tenure hearing procedure, and only a couple of months afterward, my blood turned against my body staging an autoimmune, body against itself attack, developing into the still-persisting cold-agglutinin anemia. 4  I am grateful to Azra Hromadžić for pointing me to think in this direction. 2

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charismatic father, was accused of attempting a coup d’état, which laid ground for his own exile too. He was on the doorstep of the Radio Television of Republika Srpska, but never entered the building as he knew there was a detail of special police waiting for him inside. After December 30th he disappeared in the Ferhadija mosque yard only to reappear as a political asylum seeker in Austria in January the following year. David’s remains were buried in Banja Luka on April 7th 2018 but with Davor in exile, the parents decided to rebury him in Wiener Neustadt on March 15th 2019, where his mother Suzana lived. On March 15th 2020, when I finally stood at David’s grave in Wiener Neustadt, Austria, marking the first anniversary of his reburial, the coronavirus entered into our lives. Buses of people from Banja Luka were supposed to arrive to the cemetery that day but instead only David’s and my family stood there, in silence so loud, on a windy sunny Sunday afternoon. (Majstorović, 2020)

The intensities of WWII, which brought socialism to Yugoslavia, and those of the 1992–1995 war, after which the country was dismantled followed by the neocolonial rule of the international community since 1995, ultimately resulted in the peripheral post-Dayton BiH emerging from the ashes of SFRY an extension (De Landa, 2006) with specific borders and constitution. Everything that was subsequently established or developed—discourses, institutions, electoral setups, politicians, academia, police, the armed forces and the media—worked along the lines of territorialization and deterritorialization, as results of different “pressures” or intensities brewing underneath contributing to the country’s new morphogenesis and the periodic turbulent flows of “subjective labor” and “objective capital” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1977; Smith, 2011, p. 39). Thinking in terms of affects produces an awareness of the degrees and the transition of states produced by violence, of “being ‘asphyxiated and blinded’ [by tear gas] to the state of having your ‘arms locked more tightly’, which seems to represent an increase in the power of acting” (Hynes & Sharpe, 2009, p. 8), violence being an intensity whose presence was strongly felt in the periphery. Affect is not a force that can be directly observed or documented and it operates in “a zone of indiscernibility” (Connolly, 2002, p. 64), which makes it extra difficult to study in social science, nor is it an a priori quality of the political as affectability that does not immediately convert into resistance, especially not into

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sustained resistance, regardless of how common affects may be. Yet as politics, affect creates a sense of possibility in the context of a hegemonic ideology and hopelessness (Anderson, 2006; Gibson-Graham, 2006) provisionally expanding the political field by introducing awareness of endless possibilities in every moment and by bringing attention to practices that might capture some of these possibilities to create change. Wetherell (2013) takes affect to be the presumed direct hit of events on bodies and on what is sensed rather than known. Dowling (2012, p. 110) likens affect to the work of a waitress, saying: I’m not simply on display. I create in you not just a state of mind, I create a feeling in your body, invoking or suppressing my own feelings in order to do so. What I produce is affect and that is the value of my work. Crucially, I can’t do this on my own. I need you to be part of this process. I use my capacity to affect and your capacity to be affected, and vice versa too. You’re not just on the receiving end … we’re in this together: adrift in the negotiation of our desires only to be hauled back by the complex power relations unfolding as we play, we are locked in a relationship.

We begin to recognize research, with its own affect economy, as a territorialization that shapes the knowledge it produces according to the particular flows of affect triggered by its methodology and methods.

4.3 From New to Critical Materialism The materialist analysis of research-as-assemblage is pivotal to how research is understood and nested within a critical framework of materialist social inquiry. The centrality of “bodies” as the minimal unit of the political (Vishmidt, 2020, p. 37) and “assembly” as the privileged site of contemporary politics (Butler, 2015) needs further clarification in the Bosnian case. As for my generation’s transgenerational memory, two genocides set its coordinates: the burden of the genocide committed against the Serbs, Roma, and Jews in WWII monumentalized primarily in the Jasenovac memorial complex, of which I knew second hand, from my parents and extended family, some of whom had been born in the

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immediate aftermath; and the one that was committed in Srebrenica in 1995 by the Serb paramilitaries when I was a teenager, but of which I only learned in my mid-twenties. “Memory does not happen to a body, it subsists through it” (Parr, 2008, p. 1). Because of the official policy of denial in the RS where I lived for most of my life, no public mourning on the Serb side has ever been possible, which is why learning about Srebrenica and the war in BiH in general came as a shock to my generation. The grand framework of the 1995 genocide and all the individual stories it created have been made a priori antagonistic and dehumanizing, centered on enemy stereotypes. The voices of survivors were absent from the public sphere in the RS and the second wave of migrations to Europe and the United States had already happened in another emptying of people who could not acquiesce to living on the Yugoslav ashes because of political or personal/family reasons. Just as “the epic quality of trauma forces culture to stutter and historical consciousness to stumble” the available memory in post-Dayton BiH, “tumbled around mixing up the specificity of the present with the complexity of the past” did not even “reduce our society to tears,” as Parr would hope (2008, pp. 3–4); there were no tears to cry the other side, just a mere denial, tearing the BiH society apart. In parallel to the insufficiencies of representation in memorial culture, “The phenomenon of secondary and tertiary mass graves that render precise and scientific language of forensics inept and insufficient for both the victims and survivors,” according to Arsenijević (2011) all stood in “stark opposition to the language of trauma management and ethnonationalist biopolitical regimes” (Vučkovac, 2021, p. 249). In the absence of official public commemorations organized by the state, there needed to be a Croat or a Bosniak as a living monument of understanding and piety for the Serb civilians during WWII in BiH and Croatia just as there has needed to be a Serb who would break through the present denial, speak truth to power, and repent for the pain and losses of the Bosniaks who lost family in Srebrenica or Prijedor. Just knowing this as a possibility, something that the Prijedor author Darko Cvijetić5 has done in carving his specific poetics of relation, beyond  Contributions to the Skender Kulenović literary prize critique (by Darko Cvijetić, translated by Danijela Majstorović and Zoran Vučkovac) 5

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a­ nything else, would be a collateral, a promise, and the potential for more wounded bodies to carve politics beyond pain, feeling the wound but going beyond the paralysis of pain management materialized in the Dayton agreement, which has resulted only in massive migrations and no chances for the now peripheral countries to ever move forward. As opposed to a realist or constructionist ontology, new materialist approaches have proven more useful for analyzing peripheral selves in a postwar, postsocialist European periphery but not without A raincoat’s been given to the one who showed where the mass grave in Tomašica was To the one who’d been silent for twenty-two years For heavy rain came down when he showed it - there, there it is, he said Fifteen meters deep Nearly an acre with a thousand bodies But I am writing to you, Hava, you who was told yesterday they’d found the bodies of your six sons and their father in it Hava’s mound of bones My mother Stojanka would have said to cut our orchard to give you the planks For tabuts and nišan tombs Of your six wombs They could’ve failed to find them They could’ve loaded them on wagons with iron ore and then off to blast furnaces in Zenica and Sisak They could’ve been smelted to rods of iron and shipbuilding plates of steel They could’ve returned once, in Rostfrei, polished, welded one onto another And he would be only taxed for sonnets The palms that petted rabbits The grains in a pigeon’s belly And the balls of bread under the tongue I am writing to you Hava of Trnopolje, the mother of six skulls, twelve eyes, twelve arms There, as Knešpolje, Briševo, Zecovi and Mrakovica darken with night It’s me, Stojanka’s aged daughter, who’s writing to you And Skender’s statue shivers in the rain under the cross Wishing to pull its hair, but it’s armless, handless, with nothing to pull it with To you, Hava, whose hand gives the raincoat To that child of someone So he wouldn’t get wet Fifteen meters above her scattered children

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epistemological problems. In Chaps. 2 and 3, the Bosnian periphery was described as relational and dependent on a multitude of factors including the macro- and micro-political, geopolitical, as well as politico-economic and sociocultural factors, including the dominant ideologies. But the recent rise of social movements in BiH especially since 2012, in BiH, the struggles over memory politics fueled by the trope of history repeating itself (Majstorović, 2019) invoking potent affective repertoires, Yugoslav and post-Yugoslav architecture (Kapetanović, 2015) as palimpsestic material residue, and reminders of transition and material artifacts understood as the commons to be defended (like the factory, the river or justice), all call for a more comprehensive approach as a frame of analysis. New materialism seems to decenters the issue of peripherality away from an identitarian or overtly structuralist matrix by recognizing the Deleuzian “lines of flight.” Moreover, when the box of affect is open, the issue of the researcher’s ethics and positionality, especially in action-­ oriented and participatory research, necessarily pops out. The insistence on this relationality adopted by Latour’s Actor Network Theory, for example, is of paramount importance if we are to understand what is going on in a space loaded with history, with a very grim present politico-­ economic situation with nationalism as one of its most dominant affective discharges. Yet, despite new materialism inspiring fresh debates about the configurations of the social and about forms of human sociality, much of my previous understanding of the notion of periphery had to do with the repertoire of Marx’s historical materialism as well, which brought to the fore the question of how to dovetail the two for the purposes of this analysis. In his sixth thesis on the philosophy of history, Benjamin (2009) writes that “to articulate the past historically … means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger. Historical materialism wishes to retain that image of the past which unexpectedly appears to man singled out by history at a moment of danger. The danger affects both the content of the tradition and its receivers.” There is also some disagreement between those who say “the ‘new materialisms are discontinuous with the earlier historical materialism of Hegel and Marx” (Fox & Alldred, 2016) and those who believe in a continuity between the two. In a 1990 interview, Deleuze himself remarked: “Félix Guattari and I have remained Marxists, in our two different ways,

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perhaps but both of us. You see, we think any political philosophy must turn on the analysis of capitalism and the ways it has developed. What we find most interesting in Marx is his analysis of capitalism as an immanent system that’s constantly overcoming its own limitations, and then coming up against them once more in a broader form, because its fundamental limit is capital itself ” (Deleuze, 1995, p. 171). Politics and production are at the core of Deleuze’s relation with the Marxian thought, and not the post-Marxism of Hardt and Negri, for instance. For Deleuze, the capitalist socius is premised not on identity—like previous social formations—but on a continuous process of production— ‘production for production’s sake—which entails a kind of permanent reconfiguration and intensification of relations in a process of setting, and overcoming limits … Deleuze and Guattari’s assertion that the ‘line of flight’ is primary in, and functional to, capitalist assemblages echoes Marx’s famous description of capital as a state of being where ‘All that is solid melts into air…’ (Thoburn, 2003, p. 2)

Furthermore, Marx’s communism is called by Deleuze and Guattari “as the calling forth of a ‘new earth’ … the project being not reducible to a political solution, but … rather a process of engagement with the social totality” (Thoburn, 2003, p. 6). Deleuze’s being interested in left politics involved “a perception of the ‘horizont’, of thinking and acting within worldwide assemblages, and as presenting life in terms of minoritarian becomings. It is in this interrelation of a perception of global assemblages which include ‘everybody’, and an emphasis of minor overcoming (or becoming) of this everybody, conceived as a plane of minorities, that Deleuze’s resonance with Marx’s communism is the most apparent” (Thoburn, 2003, p. 9). The disagreement started with an assumption that for Marx, power was a top-down phenomenon and that a broader politico-economic context of material production and consumption affected the relationships between the base and the superstructure, including the way in which they are mediated by ideology. Yet, with neoliberalism on the rise, older Marxism no longer seemed sufficient to grasp “a reality fully subsumed by capital.” In the words of Huehls and Greenwald Smith (2017, p. 10):

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The critical power of poststructurally inflected Marxism, feminism, postcolonialism, and other politically committed theoretical approaches loses purchase on a reality fully subsumed by capital. Consequently … the 2000s witnessed the full ascendance of a set of philosophical realisms—affect theory, biopolitics, ecocriticism, object-oriented ontology, embodiment theory, actor-network theory, and animal studies—all of which reformulate politics primarily as a way of being rather than as a way of thinking.

“New materialism was to neoliberalism what Marxist materialism was to classical liberalism,” whereas “Marxism and new materialism should be situated as plot points in a unified and much longer history of materialism” (Mullins, 2018, p. 4). The logic of neoliberalism persists, as Mullins argues “because its critics have failed to demystify one of its most fundamental orthodoxies: humanism.” In fact, some of the most prominent challenges to neoliberalism do not question its humanist logic at all: When David Harvey (2005: 2) describes neoliberalism as a political project ‘that proposes that human well-being can best be advanced’ by policies that promote free markets, free trade, and strong private property rights, he does not contest that ‘human well-being’ should be the goal of politics, only that neoliberal policies are the best way to achieve it. Similarly, when Wendy Brown (2015: 30) joins ‘Michel Foucault and others in conceiving neoliberalism as an order of normative reason’ that extends economic values to ‘every dimension of human life’, she does not dispute the primacy of human life, only the best means of theorizing and practicing it. (Ibid.)

Critiques of the way posthumanism has flattened “all forms of material agency—be it the agency of worms, bacteria, bicycles, humans or matter itself ” and employed a false universalism ignorant of “relations of domination, power and difference within and among human societies” (Lettow, 2017, p. 107) have been echoed in the work of other scholars such as Susanne Lettow. Drawing on Engels’ parallelization of nature and history (Engels, 1987 (1873–1883) in Lettow, 2017, p. 112), Lenin’s rejection of any static conception of the matter, which is “eternally moving and developing” (Lenin, 1967 (1908), p. 136 in Lettow, 2017, p. 113), and the Blochian assumption that “matter has an inherent teleology” (Bloch, 1972, p. 467 in Lettow, 2017, p. 113), Lettow stresses the praxaeological

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turn in Marx’s Theses on Feuerbach, which conceived of reality “as sensuous human activity, practice” (Marx, 1976 (1845–1846), p. 3 in Lettow, 2017, p. 114). As humans “act, produce materially … and work under definite material limits, presuppositions and conditions independent of their will” (Marx & Engels, 1976 (1845–1846), pp. 35–36), “the adjective ‘material’ functions as a placeholder for a whole bundle of bodily, natural, technological and social issues” (Lettow, 2017, p.  114). Subsuming new and old materialisms under the notion of critical materialism, she called instead for “reformulating some of the insights of the new materialism from the perspective of critical theory” and a “new sensibility” (ibid.), and a “different mode of being-in-the-world” (Coole, 2013, p. 462) where matter was “the actual, sensuous, corporeal milieu of everyday survival” (ibid., p.  455). “Milieu” here refers to Marx and Engels’ “material conditions of life” and “an ensemble of social and natural contexts which precede the actions of individuals and which include ‘nature’ as always already modulated and modified” (Lettow, 2017, p. 116). In discussing the decades-long struggles in postsocialist BiH, I share with Lettow the stance that critical materialism needs to “build political-­ theoretical alliances across the ‘old’ and the ‘new’ versions of materialism” while “reconfiguring the heterogeneous field of the new materialism” aligning “the new materialism into a true critical theory that reveals the interrelations between human societies and the nonhuman world by analyzing the various relations of power and domination and the contested knowledges that shape these interrelations” (Lettow, 2017, p.  118). Moreover, Deleuze and Guattari’s conception of the minor and the proletariat is not “a suggestion that these minorities should somehow amass as group to form a larger group of the proletariat.” It is, rather, that the global plane of the proletarian unnamable is at any one time populated by, or composed of, a multiplicity of cramped, complex, minor uses of engagement and proceses of political invention. As minorities’ intrigues, inventions, self—criticisms, polemics, and creations problematize, and seek to deterrirorialize, the manifold social relations which traverse them, they actualize a proletarian mode of composition in capital. It is in this sense that we should understand Deleuze and Guattari’s proposition in Anti-Oedipus (1977, p.  255) that “the problem of a proletarian class belongs first of all to praxis” (Thoburn, 2003, p. 66).

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In practice, this is of course complex, difficult, and uncertain work, and the tendency to fall back on identity, as orthodox Marxism well exemplifies, is always present. But, ironically—given the certainties of the orthodox Marxist narrative it is perhaps one of Marx’s greatest lessons that politics emerges not from the self-certainty of identity, but from cramped and impossible positions where the people are missing, and must remain so if the ‘secret’ (Marx 1975a, p. 256) of the proletariat movement of its own abolition—is to be actualized. (Ibid.)

One way to achieve this is by incorporating praxeological versions of historical materialism, which have mostly been ignored by the new materialists, or by adding praxis as a main unit of analysis in critical materialism, a praxis which goes beyond the metaphorical and the political as an attempt at epistemic and methodological decolonization, which I further develop in Chaps. 5–7. A practice approach to affect “focusing on processes of developmental sedimentation, routines of emotional regulation, relational patterns and ‘settling’” (Wetherell, 2013, p. 22) has been developed in other social sciences, including social psychology. It highlights the interconnected nature of social life being defined as the “figuration where body possibilities and routines become recruited or entangled together with meaning making and with other social and material figurations” (ibid., p.  19). Furthermore, affect as practice is an organic complex where bits of the body, feelings, interaction patterns, social relations, interpretative repertoires, personal histories, and ways of life are relationally assembled and ordered (ibid., pp. 3–4, 19–20), making affective practices relatively, if not entirely, observable for fieldwork research (Li, 2015). Embodiment, entanglement, the middle ranges of agency, patterns that organize but cannot necessarily be articulated, and the importance of taking action complexes (Wetherell, 2013) suggest strong resonance between affect research and notions of social practice. Yet, the mere recognition of bodies as vulnerable entities, whose pain is to be managed, who have no collective power other than “the relentless exposure (to harm, to one another) and the inescapability of this kind of life” (Vishmidt, 2020, p. 45), and whose only subjectivity as “surplus population” (Rajaram, 2015; Apostolova, 2017) is its “surplusness calls for the

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recognition of such political cul-de-sac but also the potential counterpraxis. While writing the book, I had a moment of recognition in an affective episode, which resulted in me writing a poem about fellow BiH immigrants coming as workforce to Germany,6 and I don’t write poetry,  Recognition (Annerkennung)

6

I recognize them I see them on the street They’ve bought plastic toys for the kids They’re unwrapping them in the back seat. They are in Germany With the Covid rampant Lights somehow shine brighter As the streets dampen. Nobody cares about their names. Nor where they come from any more. But how much overtime they can put At Flughafen, Pflegeheim or in a store. Rasim dreams of Livno horses While he does maintenance for Deutsche Bahn At weekends, he drinks at a lady friend’s He mostly drinks, “here, one starts in deep shit.” Tatjana buys an orchid at Rewe She knows how to submerge them, the ideal light “Don’t move them a lot and never leave them in cool night” She used to manage a flower shop for 500 Now she cleans a condo for a Schwabian Frau Shelving at a pharmacy Is my dream job, “genau”! Josipa is on a scholarship For her Oxford English and a thesis on memory politics Nobody here really cares She can be a Mitarbeiterin for a famous Heidelberg Chair Get an Eigene Stelle for a limited term When she’s done, she’ll be 50 and without anything firm But even that’s better than where… I recognize them By their almond eyes, by their high cheekbones While they rummage for change

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which my friend, the journalist Dragan Bursać, shared on his wall in November 2020 generating an interesting debate in a series of hundreds And “sammeln die Punkte“ Beautiful, alone. Radenko supports Frau Kraemer Who does not know her son but remembers the war and family silver Radenko would gladly row a dajak on the Vrbas river But there is only the muddy Main There are no rapids on the Main. They need not say a word, nor are they “gefragt” I recognize them in a bit when buying markers for my kid Frau Muller hat das gesagt They’ve come to work To run away and askew To make themselves anew Thousands of memories don’t mean much In an endless, Offenbach November night Into which we fled from tyranny and plight I don’t mind it, there is still life to be had At least for the kids When David could not have a tad After work, I’ll do another Baustelle shift Another 100 EUR, in Corona no one’s a spendthrift I recognize them My homeland’s bodies that will never go on collective work activities Nor rise against a hundred times stronger enemy Who couldn’t find employment Without connections with the party They work their fingers to the bone in conditions dire In Germany they know their effort’s worth Of their basic rights there is a dearth Ah, leave it, we’ll go back when they retire They recognize me, too Their look at me longer than people here do There are no people there who I once knew.

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of likes, shares, and responses7 of which stands out the one by Ljerka Jagić who said “when they kill and keep killing your homeland(s), then you write such kind of poetry” (kad ti ubiju i opetovno ubijaju domovinu/e, onda pišeš ovakve pjesme).

4.4 From Discourse to Affect and Beyond Starting as a critical theorist and a discourse analyst trained in critical discourse analysis (Wodak et  al., 2009; Fairclough, 1989, 2003; Van Dijk, 2009) as a theory and methodology for studying social praxis strongly embedded in social theory and triangulation, it was only through the critical materialist lens that I could understand affect as a companion of discourse, to be studied together and not separately, striving for some impossible textual objectivity. Critical discourse analysis (CDA) is by default committed to triangulation in the sense of obtaining multiple perspectives on the phenomenon under observation (Reisigl & Wodak, 2001, p.  33; Van Dijk, 2009; Wodak, 2007, p. 203), or “constant movement back and forth between theory and data” (Meyer, 2001, p. 27). In doing CDA, one could, for instance, study tropes as figurative language use and their circulation in the public sphere, such as various topoi or argumentation strategies defined as “as reservoirs of generalized key ideas from which specific statements or arguments can be generated” (Richardson, 2004, p.  230) or content-related warrants securing the transition from an argument to a conclusion (Žagar, 2009). Even though qualitative, the validity of these findings should, if rigorously adhered to, lead other critical discourse analysts with appropriate training, expertise and knowledge of the context to similar conclusions. But the choice to propose peripheral selves as a theoretical concept and then support it via discursive evidence reflecting on the affective entanglements with my research participants was a step beyond CDA practice. I was not just a disinterested, objective researcher there but someone trying to get my own political voice out without feigning the distance but, rather, embracing the closeness. This was reflected in  https://www.facebook.com/dijalekticar/posts/769395850312314

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my conscious choices to make selections of texts (based on my years of fieldwork and in-depth interviews), depicting particular affective units, sometimes analyzed and sometimes just standing on their own to speak for themselves. In this sense, new materialism helped me depart in a way from triangulation toward a different central imaginary, which Laurel Richardson (1997, p. 92) calls a transgressive form of crystallization: The crystal (which) combines symmetry and substance and an infinite variety of shapes, substances, transmutations, multidimensionalities, and angles of approach. Crystals grow, change, alter, but are not amorphous. Crystals are prisms that reflect externalities and refract within themselves, creating different colors, patterns, arrays, casting off in different dimensions. What we see depends upon our angle of repose. Not triangulation, crystallization. … Crystallization provides us with a deepened, complex, thoroughly partial understanding of the topic. (Richardson, 1997, p. 92)

This crystallization that extended to incorporate non-representational forms of analysis was also crucial for finding the right voice literally as a “struggle to figure out how to present the author’s self while simultaneously writing respondents’ accounts and representing their selves” (Hertz, 1997, pp. xi–xii). Having not just researched but also cooperated with some of my respondents and having participated in the protests, and, more recently, having temporarily migrated myself, I felt as if reflexivity was to go beyond postmodern textual representation, toward the realm of asserting validity as authenticity (Guba & Lincoln, 2005, p. 207) in producing messy texts (Clifford & Marcus, 1986) about a “messy, heterogeneous and emergent social worlds” (Braidotti, 2011, p. 137). Emphasis on the interweaving of the material, the social, the biological and the cultural enabled me to perceive processes of their co-joint figuring and articulation (Haraway, 2004, 2008) in which human affect figured as a kind of “extra-discursive” event (Massumi, 2002; Thrift, 2004). Adrienne Rich’s (1994, 2003) concept of “politics of location” as speaking with the body of a particular living human emphasizes the personal as a source of knowledge whereby oneself is embodied within textured sensations. Affect researchers recognize these textured sensations as

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central in social research (Wetherell, 2013)—texture is perceived by the body and involves a repetitive pattern. It means researchers should “theorize their locations by examining their experiences as reflections of ideology and culture, by reinterpreting their own experiences through the eyes of the others, and by recognizing their own split selves, their multiple and often unknowable identities” (Kirsch & Ritchie, 1995, p. 8). For Brown et al. (2009), the key, then, is to find ways of researching that connect embodied experience (actions and discrete memories) with the whole activity complex in which the experience is embedded. Research on embodied experience must begin in a different place—not with a stimulus or with a response, but with the whole pattern unfolding or coming into being, and one way to situate it is to provide some context in what Lauren Berlant (2011) calls a “national present tense.” For peripheral selves living in postwar BiH meant living in an assemblage comprising the intensity of the most recent 1992–1995 war with an estimated death toll of 95,940, out of whom more than 38,239 were mostly Bosnian and Herzegovinian civilians (out of whom 31,107 Bosniaks, 4178 Serbs, 2484 Croats and 470 others) (Tokača, 2012). It also meant living in the echo of WWII with the total death toll of 600,000–1.1 million8 out of whom 300,000–600,000 of mostly Serbs in WWII9 (Hayden, 2013, p.  139). The materiality of living amidst genocide(s) as the “order-word” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, pp. 75–76) meant living in an intensity of bodies easily incited and mobilizable for “preemptive military action” whenever the state was to make a point. Oral traditions and private narratives of family and friends intertwined with the public discourse produced by the elites and the media, as, for example, in using the trope of “history repeating itself ” to justify the past wars and future wars. The perceived threat of mass killings lingering among the general population strongly resonated during my family  http://www.muzejgenocida.rs/images/01zrtve%20rata%201941-1945.pdf?fbclid=IwAR3OColS zOcCWIAIJ1PGUkfHB78hgDFkQRy8RbirEPv-­4uTUS0wPANjF6oM 9  https://l.facebook.com/l.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fmaticarproslosti.files.wordpress. com%2F2012%2F12%2Fi20v-2002_1-cvetkovic.pdf%3Ffbclid%3DIwAR3OColSzOcCWIAIJ 1PGUkfHB78hgDFkQRy8RbirEPv-­4uTUS0wPANjF6oM&h=AT2r1VIneEGYesFm7zSUVwq qsuBQxadsp3yoJG3JDkOe6SkmocKPHwFrsTYEo_BfmF0Kj9eAoR7kOV5nY6PuENkeS360xj TzhcD0c1M5H8EFJqQg51QpCKlJFv71q7Ii2qMIq0a_6YGUO0o 8

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gatherings in the eve of the 1992–1995 war as I remember my father saying “the Serbs will not just willingly lay their head on the block like they did in the past war.” As a thirteen-year-old in the early 1990s, I was appalled thinking about the chopped-off heads of innocent people but I remember these as the oft-repeated legitimations for the imminent war at my aunt and uncle’s house when they stated that “Garavice10 should never happen again.” My male family members, including my father, were born ten or even twenty years after WWII. They heard about what happened at Garavice and particularly around Kulen Vakuf, where my father was born, secondhand from family members who remembered the Ustasha violence committed against the Serbs of that region in the summer of 1941 (see Bergholz, 2016). Referring to personally inexperienced history trope, my father and many others as the “generation after” described the relationship with the personal, collective, and cultural trauma of those who came before, in a form of “postmemory” (Hirsch, 2012) easliy mobilizable on the eve of the collapse of the SFRY in a seemingly blind acquiescence to the inevitability of history that repeats. Every part of Bosnia11 had its own Garavice, Jasenovac, or a similar site of atrocities committed in the near or distant past (see Duijzings in Bougarel et al., 2007) that was going to proverbially generate and justify another Srebrenica. The trope of history repeating itself, which, as an extended metaphor, also realizes its argumentative potential and becomes a topos of history (Wodak et al., 2009, p. 36)—legitimizing the Srebrenica genocide, which happened as an event “preempting12 the potential Serb pogrom like the one in World War II” (Majstorović, 2019)—secured the epistemic warranty of contemporary Serb nationhood providing a raison d’être for  Garavice is a graveyard and an extermination location established by the Independent State of Croatia (ISC) during WWII near my hometown of Bihać where over 12,000 Serbs, Jews, and Roma civilians were murdered in 1941 at the beginning of WWII https://jadovno.com/zaboravljen-­ ustaski-­zlocin-nad-12-000-srba-na-garavicama/#.X1Ffii1h00Q . See more in Dedijer (1992)). 11  Interesting work on these topics was done in a theoretical and artistic assemblage “Mathemes of Reassociation: Towards the Matheme of Genocide” done by the Monument Group 2009. Available at https://grupaspomenik.wordpress.com/mathemes-of-re-assotiation/%20towards-­the-­mathemeof-genocide/ 12  Saying that the civil war was in fact pre-emptive echoing Semelin’s argument of the “actors destroying ‘them’ in order to save ‘us’” (Semelin, 2007). 10

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the Republika Srpska as well as the Bosniak-Croat Federation of BiH as the two entities in post-­Dayton Bosnia. Accounting for the totality of social discourse by “connecting the literary, scientific, philosophical and political fields … to extrapolate transdiscursive rules, to discover vectors of change and to set up a global topology of the prevailing sayable” (Angenot, 1995, p. 3) sets out the ground for a discourse analysis embedded in critical materialism that “studies and generates differential cultural relations” (Leps, 2004, p. 264) within the limits of sayable or thinkable (Foucault, 1972) with bodies as its preoccupation.13 The trope is often invoked when trying to explain the Balkans, most often in the shape of the “ancient hatreds” or the “powder keg” metaphor14 presupposing that if something is not done about the repeating history, it will continue to repeat itself through contained, easily mobilizable, never-changing and almost historical affects and the literalness of the metaphors and their use in our knowing the world. The peripheral selves who took part in the conflict because of the repetitive nature of history were forever “stuck in the past,” whereby the extended metaphor of history repeating itself is “an argumentative confirmation of relevance with epistemic implications.” Consequently “if every mapped conceptual property is found relevant, chances are that this will also count as a justification of the overall  A trope or “commonplace” is a semi-logical, semi-ideological proposition, recognized as probable by a social formation, which serves to ground various arguments (Leps, 2004, p. 283). A topos of history (Wodak et al., 2009, p. 36) as an argumentative strategy in legitimating the past and projecting it onto the future beside the topic also reveals the ideological character of history. Instead of establishing some sort of positivistic knowledge aiming to arrive at a “historical truth,” it establishes what Foucault calls “regimes of truth” or truth effects, which are further linked to statements of power (Foucault, 1981). 14  “Invocation of larger set of ethnically targeted mass killings … as part of the late 1980s and early 1990s nationalist political mobilization of Serbs in hostility to Croats and Muslims” (Hayden, 2013, p. 138) was part and parcel of a strong, media fuelled moral panic (Cohen, 2011) of the early 1990s and the fear that “history would repeat itself ” and that Serbs would be exterminated by Croats and their Muslim accomplices like it happened in the Independent State of Croatia (ISC) (Dedijer, 1992; Denitch, 1994, p. 368; Dulić, 2005). Interestingly, this fear of a repetition of the extermination of Serbs, as carried out by the ISC in 1941–1945, existed even though ethnicized victims and atrocities against specific ethnic populations had not been part of an official master narrative in the SFRY. Instead, victims of ethnicized violence were represented as general victims of German and local fascists, according to Ranka Gašić’s (2010) analysis of Serbian history textbooks in the 1990s that reveals that past and present were connected in a way that suggested the “inevitability” of these developments, with an ongoing war as a “longue durée” phenomenon in post-­ Yugoslav Serbia (Ibid.). 13

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extended metaphor’s relevance … and … as an attempt to convince the addressee, in light of a complex correspondence matrix, that the proposed construal can in fact be taken as literal” (Oswald & Rihs, 2014, p. 145). For many of us who stayed and continued our lives in a segregated society after the war, living in the absence of war meant living in what Berlant (2011) saw as an extremely violent promise, norm, or fantasy of the “good life,” as coming through of our affective attachments that do not exist in our present; rather than helping us go beyond the confines of unequal and exploitative relationships, we find ourselves in affective attachments of the illusion of a better future to come or in the affective relationship of “cruel optimism” (Berlant, 2011, p. 24)—not even with the past weighing “like a nightmare on the brains of the living” (Marx, 1963), but with the “weight of the present” (Ashbery, 2005) and all of its contradictions. Embodied states such as these, historically loaded ones, were to be turned into analyzable units and it was only to be done via selves understood as material bodies. For Brown (2009, p.  202), “the body and its sensed felt engagement with the world” (Brown et al., 2009, p. 202)” needed to be “converted into either talk around the body or as the embodied grounds of talk” (ibid.). Social inquiry needed remake its vocabulary to reflect this shift from agency to affect, and adapt its methods to attend to affective flows and the capacities they produce. Based on my decade-long experience of studying peripheral selves in postwar, postsocialist Bosnia and Herzegovina, I stress this interconnectedness as I personally have moved along the subjective/objective axes in terms of proximity and epistemological commitment, transitioning from a position of “an activist researcher” and someone actively involved in opposing nationalism, patriarchy and privatization of socially owned property to becoming a body under research, as someone who suffered illness and became a temporary migrant as a result of political and economic uncertainty and lack of prospects after twenty years of working and living in the country. Also, in seeing the struggles and their protagonists as a particular assemblage and not a collection, new materialist thought helped me think of them as arising from the BiH’s postsocialist condition. By providing genealogical insights into what constitutes or textures a European periphery having effects on peripheral selves who live in the

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region by using the case studies delineated in Chaps. 4–6, I highlight the historical, sociopolitical, economic, and cultural causes shaping bodies and discourses in postsocialist Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) not only through the postwar restructuring but in regard to the new “crises” such as the post-2015 migrations, resurgent right-wing populism and the COVID 19 pandemic. I do it from a critical materialist perspective, aware of the structural and “macro” level of social phenomena but accounting for the relational, uneven, unpredictably emerging contents and features of the material world, politically located in the European periphery. Peripheries after all “do not constitute a separate world, but are rather an essential component of the world-wide capitalist machine … the center itself has its organized enclaves of underdevelopment, its reservations and its ghettos as interior peripheries” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1983, p. 231). For all those reasons critical and new materialism afforded me a more productive view because I was able to speak in terms of relationships and assemblages, (de)territorializations, desires, and lines of flight in the periphery, hoping that it could point to the power(s) that shapes them in the way that the deterritorialization of capitalism has created peripheries. This theoretical perspective decidedly left critical realist ontology aside for the view of the world as a socially constructed space and the one in which embodied peripheral selves were results of new postwar territorializations. Through crystallization more than triangulation (Richardson, 1997), I take affective practices to be accompanying discourses and assemblages as units of analysis in contributing to the development of a sociocultural framework that is “materially embedded and embodied” (Braidotti, 2011, p. 128), situated in a historically conditioned politics of location, and that in recognizing the autonomy of peripheral selves still may have a chance for a better future despite the present turbulences.

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Massumi, B. (2002). Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation. Duke University Press. Massumi, B. (2015). Politics of Affect. John Wiley and Sons. Meyer, M. (2001). Between Theory, Method, and Politics: Positioning of the Approaches to CDA. In R. Wodak & M. Meyer (Eds.), Methods of Critical Discourse Analysis (pp. 14–31). Sage. Mulcahy, M. (2012). Affective Assemblages: Body Matters in the Pedagogic Practices of Contemporary School Classrooms. Pedagogy, Culture & Society, 20(1), 9–27. Mullins, M. (2018). From Old to New Materialism: Rethinking Freedom after Neoliberalism. Open Library of Humanities, 4(2). Retrieved November 2, 2020, from https://olh.openlibhums.org/articles/10.16995/olh.350/# Okić, T. (2020). Politika, analogija, periodizacija. S onu stranu tribunalizacije historije. In A. Sasso & N. Kujović (Eds.), Socijalna demokratija u BiH: historijski pregled i razmatranja za budućnost (pp. 181–209). Retrieved December 24, 2020, from http://library.fes.de/pdf-­files/bueros/sarajevo/16515. p d f ? f b c l i d = Iw A R 1 x j n s _ G 3 j G K _ f F K AT t -­F D l E Q k t Y w R a F 7 3 _ IrzfcVsUXmVMITtkDCv8fU8 Oswald, S., & Rihs, A. (2014). Metaphor as Argument: Rhetorical and Epistemic Advantages of Extended Metaphors. Argumentation, 28(2), 133–159. Parr, A. (2008). Deleuze and Memorial Culture: Desire, Singular Memory and the Politics of Trauma. Edinburgh University Press. https://www.yushanth.org. tw/templates/cache/26459/images/562cdb544280c.pdf Potts, A. (2004). Deleuze on Viagra (or, What Can a ‘Viagra-Body’ Do?). Body & Society, 10(1), 17–36. Rajaram, P.  K. (2015). Common Marginalizations: Neoliberalism, Undocumented Migrants and Other Surplus Populations. Migration, Mobility, & Displacement, 1(1), 67–80. Reisigl, M., & Wodak, R. (2001). Discourse and Discrimination: Rhetoric of Racism and Antisemitism. Routledge. Rich, A. (1994). Blood, Bread, and Poetry: Selected Prose 1979–1985. WW Norton & Company. Rich, A. (2003). Notes towards a Politics of Location. In Feminist Postcolonial Theory: A Reader (pp. 29–42). Edinburgh University Press. Richardson, L. (1997). Fields of Play: Constructing an Academic Life. Rutgers University Press. Richardson, J. (2004). (Mis)Representing Islam: The Racism and Rhetoric of British Broadsheet Newspapers. John Benjamins.

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Sedgwick, E. K. (2003). Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity. Duke University Press. Semelin, J. (2007). Purify and Destroy: The Political Uses of Massacre and Genocide (C. Shoch, Trans.). Columbia University Press. Smith, D.  W. (2011). Flow, Code and Stock: A Note on Deleuze’s Political Philosophy. Deleuze Studies, 5(Suppl.), 36–55. Retrieved November 2, 2020, from https://philpapers.org/archive/SMIFCA-­3.pdf Thoburn, N. (2003). Deleuze, Marx and Politics. Routledge. Thrift, N. (2004). Intensities of Feeling: Towards a Spatial Politics of Affect. Geografiska Annaler, 86B(1), 57–78. Thrift, N. (2008). Non-Representational Theory: Space Politics and Affect. Routledge. Tokača, M. (2012). Bosnian Book of the Dead. Research and Documentation Center. Van Dijk, T. (2009). Society and Discourse. How Social Contexts Control Text and Talk. Cambridge University Press. Vishmidt, M. (2020). Bodies in Space: On the Ends of Vulnerability. Radical Philosophy, 208, 33–46. https://www.radicalphilosophy.com/wp-­content/ uploads/2020/09/rp208_vishmidt.pdf Vučkovac, Z. (2021). Against Institutionalised Forgetting: Memory Politics from Below in Postwar Prijedor. In Europeanisation and Memory Politics in the Western Balkans (pp. 231–262). Palgrave Macmillan. Wetherell, M. (2013). Affect and Discourse—What’s the Problem? From Affect as Excess to Affective/Discursive Practice. Subjectivity, 6(4), 349–368. Wodak, R. (2007). Pragmatics and Critical Discourse Analysis: A Cross-­ Disciplinary Inquiry. Pragmatics & Cognition, 15(1), 203–225. Wodak, R., de Cillia, R., Reisigl, M., & Liebhart, K. (2009). The Discursive Construction of National Identities. Edinburgh University Press. Youdell, D., & Armstrong, F. (2011). A Politics beyond Subjects: The Affective Choreographies and Smooth Spaces of Schooling. Emotion, Space and Society, 4(3), 144–150. Žagar, I. (2009). Topoi in Critical Discourse Analysis. Šolsko polje, 20(5/6), 47–75.

5 A Short History of a Mobilizable Postsocialist Body Politic: The Banja Luka Social Center

5.1 N  otes Toward Performing Critical Autoethnography A politics of location is crucial for defining the researcher’s epistemological position—in order to analyze peripheral selves, I need to present some genealogy of my own relationship with periphery and explain what drew me toward critical autoethnography as a method and critical materialism as a framework exposing the vulnerable researcher’s self (Tilley-Lubbs, 2016). Pursuing quality in the constructivist grounded theory of Thornberg and Charmaz (2014) focusing on how interaction, shared experiences, and relationships make meaning and create realities has led to claims that “neither data nor theories are discovered, but researchers construct them as a result of their interactions with their participants and emerging analyses” (Thornberg & Charmaz, 2014, p. 154). Different approaches to studying postwar BiH from cultural and social anthropology, sociology, and political science came from mainly Western-­ trained social science researchers, either BiH diasporic or Western. They have produced a more or less integrated body of knowledge on a variety

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 D. Majstorović, Discourse and Affect in Postsocialist Bosnia and Herzegovina, Postdisciplinary Studies in Discourse, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-80245-5_5

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of socially relevant issues in postwar Bosnia (Bieber, 2005), from gender and feminism (Helms, 2013), NGOization and protests (Milan, 2019) to political violence and youth segregation (Kurtović, 2020; Hromadžić, 2015), from international community (Gilbert, 2017, 2020) to the štela system of informal favors (Brković, 2017), from everyday life in a Dayton state (Jansen, 2015) to transitional justice as socioeconomic justice (Lai, 2020), all indispensable from any serious inquiry on postsocialist and postwar BiH. The question of “insiders” versus “outsiders” often came up in discussions on Bosnia, with the pitfalls of extractivism and exploitation and “knowing the Balkans and Bosnia otherwise,”1 and so I, as a scholar from the periphery affected by the postwar and postsocialist peripheralization, had to come clean about my own position and approach. When an “insider” sets out to do research or reflect on her research in terms of theorizing postsocialism, the issues of methodology and positionality are as relevant as they would be for an “outsider”—the difference between the two is that the latter may enjoy a more privileged and better paid position in the “West” and be publishing for “legitimate” English-­ language, peer-reviewed journals and publishing houses, which counts toward appointments and promotion, while the former has the “luxury” of the proximity and interaction, whereas publishing in the local language excludes him or her from relevant journals and networks other than the local ones, which are not internationally recognized. The former can also be more easily exploited through tokenism and exclusion from major conferences and other gatherings that promote academic work, while the latter needed to realize their need for self-scrutiny before they jumped on the “decolonial bandwagon” (Moosavi, 2020, p. 3) especially because they quote next to none of the local scholars. A caveat on positioning here begs for a short description of my own hybrid status: I have been trained for the most part in the Balkans, but  A workshop entitled “Samo vjeran pas” took place in St. Gallen between February 5 and 7, 2020, gathering a large group of scholars working on these topics and the issues of neoliberal academic selves and possibilities of “knowing the Balkans otherwise” were discussed at great length. https:// www.researchgate.net/publication/333104674_Samo_vjeran_pas_Workshop_on_ Post-­Yugoslav_Neoliberal_Academic_Selves_and_Possibilities_of_Knowing_the_Balkans_ Otherwise 1

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also in the West, and from 2001 until 2020, I mostly worked at a university in the periphery. My training in visual anthropology and documentary film has transferred onto a lot of the social and cultural research I have done through in-depth interviews, focus groups, and discourse analysis. In the broadest sense, research for me has always been about finding voice(s) to hear, listening to them, and then me voicing what has been documented, systematized, and classified through a set of methodologies and editing and storytelling procedures. Living in BiH meant interaction and forming meaningful relationships on a daily basis. Through my work in the community, I tried to embody participatory action in which I shared my research results, organized and participated in reading groups, politically educated others, and was politically educated through interacting with my research participants and offering pro bono work. In the process, I knew viscerally that one’s method always reflected one’s politics just as in documentary film, even the framing of a shot was already a director’s intervention. Working in and around the Banja Luka Social Center (BASOC) made me more attuned to listening and understanding not only the struggles daily taking place on a daily basis in my own country but also what it meant being an immigrant in Germany after I left the Center. My political activism and encounters with friends and co-fighters fine-tuned my understanding of more global struggles, including the 2015 refugee crisis in which the Balkans and BiH became part of the route. This understanding in return led to a pressing need to find a voice to articulate and write about the complexities happening in our periphery while also attuning my ear to other voices from peripheries. It also brought up the issue of gaze, that is, establishing the subject/object relationship between the researcher and the researched and taking this relationship further toward something like a friendship in which “the work of the political, properly political act or operation, comes down to creating (producing, making etc.) the most possible friendship … this telos— seems, in the same move—to bind friendship to politics—in their origin as well as their end” (Derrida, 2005, p. 199). On the other end of the continuum stood enmity, visible in exploitation, curtailing and abandonment. While I felt a strong urge to analyze the turbulent territorial and political demarcation processes of nation-state borders but also of social,

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cultural, and temporal demarcations shaping and being shaped by life in post-Dayton BiH, the issue of ethics persisted and I felt ethics was always already compromised in research especially in the periphery. “If yesterday’s drama of the subject was exploitation by capital,” says Mbembe, “the tragedy of the multitude today is that they are unable to be exploited at all” (Mbembe, 2017, p. 3) languishing as abandoned subjects relegated to the role of superfluous bodies. In the process of supposedly producing research on the ex-Yugoslav conflicts, the transition to capitalism, peripheralization, reconciliation, repatriarchalization, (forced) migration, increasing competition, precarity, marketization of ideas, concepts, and academic selves produced bizarre results—it turned out advantageous to produce knowledge on the former Yugoslavia as an “indigenous” (and also migrant) scholar equipped with the relevant linguistic and cultural competence (Laketa et al., 2019). Aware of how negligence and exploitation have further objectified and colonized those who have been researched, I did not want to repeat the imperial codes and grammars that have shaped research on the so-called postcolonial, or peripheral condition and selves claiming the supposed intellectual “decolonization without decolonizing” (Moosavi, 2020) literally anything. A practical way out of the conundrum was resorting to feminist and participatory methodological solutions including the discourse-­to-affect methodological shift explained in Chap. 4—yet there were no guarantees and no easy way out other than via politics and activism. In proposing any sort of decolonial methods in social science and humanities research (see Gutiérrez-Rodríguez, 2010; Smith, 2013), one’s politics is always put on trial—this was true of myself, as well as of others who came to study BASOC. Felix Fritsch, a young Vienna activist, an MA student of political science at the University of Amsterdam, and part-time employee of the Ludwig Bolzman Institute, which temporarily financed BASOC and the 5F7 network, joined BASOC in the fall of 2015 in two capacities. He was an activist working at BASOC and he conducted participant observation based on constructivist grounded theory (CGT) publishing his thesis in 2016 (see Fritsch, 2016). In describing his approach, Fritsch (2016, p. 39) notes that “several scholars have already combined participatory research and grounded theory, resulting

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in merged approaches like ‘Grounded Action Research’ (Butterfield, 2009), ‘Transformational Grounded Theory’ (Redman-­ MacLaren & Mills, 2015) or simply ‘Grounded Action’ (Simmons & Gregory, 2005)” with variegated ontological and epistemological underpinnings, stressing “the compassionate [my emphasis] positioning of the researcher as amongst comrades in a political struggle, and the element of reflection that replaces the focus on one core problem.” Fritsch produced a very interesting mapping of the assemblages that BASOC was part of within BiH and the region, as well as of the relationships with and within its internal relational organization, self-understanding, means, and aims (see Maps 5.1 and 5.2), something which I would have never been able to do due to my affective proximity. My work as an activist in Banja Luka from Banja Luka strongly embedded in the community as a university professor, a wife, daughter, mother, and a friend, went far beyond showing compassion, maybe giving some money, and then going away. I was from “there,” living “there,” and I wanted social change, just like many of my fellow citizens. Therefore, the only available methodology was the one deriving from critical materialism more than social constructivism as I already knew the context so there was no need to construct from below. It also meant extending the assemblage (Fox & Alldred, 2015), by inserting one’s own body (activist-­ in-­the-periphery), which is why I opted for autoethnography through intense reflexivity and introspection trying to internalize the gaze and examine myself as I would others. A peripheral self, I was a Yugoslav-­ born, middle class, a woman, trained in cultural theory and linguistics both in the center and the periphery. I was living and working mostly in the periphery, except for brief periods I spent student exchanges or postdoctoral training after which I would always come back to live in the periphery. Starting from the bottom-up, opting not just for triangulation but, rather, for crystallization (Richardson, 1997) in attempting to provide a heavily contextualized genealogy of peripheral selves, I could not produce research that would ignore the layers of private and public histories, networks of friends, colleagues, students and acquaintances, academic research, activism and lived experience inscribed upon my own body. I simply could not start bottom-up: the context, the terrain and the selves were too complex and their historicities not easily dismissible.

Map 5.1  Network 5f7 and BASOC’s local civil society environment. (Fritsch, 2016, p. 77)

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Map 5.2  Code Tree #1—BASOC overview. (Fritsch, 2016, p. 78)

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The issue of the researcher’s affect also needed to be entered into the equation, the “somatically sensed” body inclusive of perceptions, memories, feelings, forms of muscular movement, and proprioceptive responses as vibrations and rhythms of different biopolitical mechanisms, that is, a new class of ethnonationalists seizing most power and deciding on life and death expecting us to dance to the sugared tune of a nationalist anthem while never allowing us to process the trauma of the war(s), mourn, and move on. The affect often translated into a paralysis, most notably a movement of muscles, a paralysis even signaling an embodied state of fear of the police or right-wing groups, and no amount of discourse analysis could ever help in investigating such embodied states. I would have to say that my greatest fear was that I would be silenced if I stayed, that my voice would not be heard because it would have a completely different frequency, and that there would be no other voice to engage in a dialogue with. Underneath the waterbed on which I slept there were real sharks and alligators swimming and an unfathomable depths to fathom. Aside from the affects, sometimes I felt all the legitimacy and authenticity of our work exclusively rested not on what was said and done but on the very relationships and friendships forged in the process. The relationships formed within BASOC, its core but also the wider outer circle, were crucial for our political coming of age. The initial statute was drafted in the summer of 2015 with a help of several activist friends from the region and then different people came and went but the core included Dražen Crnomat, Leila Šeper, Gordana Katana, and Zoran Vučkovac although Stefan Gvozden, Adnan Dervić, Sandro Hergić, Enes Kurtović, and Arijana Forić Kurtović also participated in some activities. BASOC was a platform where the public could learn about the struggle of DITA factory workers against illegal privatization, the women of Kruščica defending their river from hydro plant owners, of the Justice for David movement pointing to the issues of police brutality and state accountability, and the third wave of migrants silently leaving BiH for Germany in their hundreds or thousands, as Middle Easterners, Southeast Asians, and North Africans were arriving in BiH. All of us had duties and obligations, which included maintaining a strong left anticapitalist and antifascist political course, organization and programming, and opening up to the wider community, even if it came at a price. In the words of Leila Šeper:

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BASOC had clear rules: right-wing populism, nationalism and patriarchal norms were banned, which often put us in an antagonistic relationship with the community we tried to reach out to, and also caused problems with most civil society sector in BiH who did not want to uphold these values because funding was deemed more important. Another problem was when certain members of the NGO scene in Banja Luka and around were trying to appropriate and exploit the joint efforts and pass them off as their own personal achievements without providing the history and genealogy of these struggles.

Personally, I felt was an insider, a contemporary, a comrade, standing by and cleaning the toilet of the social center just like everyone else, standing at the protests or deciding to temporarily leave in 2018—I hoped these embodied states along with my felt intensities could count as authenticity in insuring the validity of theorizing and of the political claims made. To have my child, partner, family, and friend around the social center meant to embody the belief in the social center and to support it with my living labor, with my body as a “divine prerequisite,” as Marx would say. The relational character of peripheral selves, that is, those of us who worked, gave birth, looked for jobs/food/housing, and otherwise inhabited the periphery, is crucial when speaking about the activism as libidinal labor and the production of desire embedded and embodied in BASOC. And it makes sense to speak about BASOC as an idea, a platform and a physical space of gathering before one could speak about DITA, Mittal, Kruščica, and migrations in an “ambitious” attempt to theorize peripheral selves.

5.2 T  he Embeddedness and Assemblages of the Banja Luka Social Center In the summer of 2015, drawing on a legacy of the “Language, Power and Ideology” group from Lancaster University, where I had been a visiting academic researcher in 2006, I started a reading group under the same name, with several coworkers from my university department. The group included students, professors, teaching assistants, and journalists, who

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initially gathered every Monday evening to read theory and connect it with the current political and economic practices in post-Dayton BiH, RS, and the city of Banja Luka, and it was active from the fall of 2009 until the summer of 2012. BASOC was founded after the group’s demise by a handful of activists and intellectuals who were emerging as the first in line to respond to social injustice, historical revisionism, and patriarchy that became especially prominent topics following the 2014 protests and plenums in BiH. While there were numerous social movements in the SFRY, such as the student movements of the 1960s and 1970s in Serbia and Croatia, they never really caught on in BiH. After the 1992–1995 civil war and war of aggression, including ethnic cleansing and genocide, there were no specific claims for social justice, as BiH was socially butchered into two entities with ethnically homogenous populations. After a sixty-year hiatus, during the February 2014 protests, social issues came to the fore again and there was a sense of actually felt and lived solidarity despite the previous twenty years of state-supported nationalism. The Dayton system installed after the war severely limited political agency to party membership or affiliation, keeping the exercise of political will divided along ethno-­territorial lines of difference. Two events and a movement-movement influence, which in Bosnian case can be interpreted as a protest-protest influence indicating a trajectory (Meyer, 2003), acted as the precursors for February 2014.2 The first protest, dating back to the spring and summer of 2012, was directed against the razing of a public park in Banja Luka to build an office building in its place. The 2013 JMBG protests in Sarajevo, popularly called  These forms of organizing drew significantly on previous similar activities in the region, most notably during the 2009 blockade of the Faculty of Philosophy in Zagreb and the 2012 and 2013 Maribor protests, all which had become involved in minoritarian forms of political decision making. Although the spaces of former Yugoslavia in the past decade have seemed to pass rather peacefully through the periods of the EU accession, there is a noted alternative history of struggles, which stubbornly problematizes conditions under which the so-called young democracies function. In recent years the region has abounded with examples of direct democratic action against erosion of public institutions, privatization of public property, and the decision-making being fully in the hands of the comprador elites that execute the EU-imposed reform process. Despite being short-­lived, the protests from Slovenia to Macedonia have been reoccurring at a decreasing time span, with clearly articulated demands around which allegiances have been formed—all of them invoking a different socialism and concern for the poorest classes. 2

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the Baby-revolution (Bebolucija), saw citizen demonstrations from around the country (Milan, 2019), crossing all the administrative and political boundaries of the Dayton order. They demanded that the state start issuing Unique Master Citizen Numbers to children born after February 2013, which was halted for a while due to a dispute on canton borders among the politicians representing the ethnic groups that constitute BiH (Dedović, 2013). As a result, a three-month-old baby died, since without her citizen number, she could not be issued a passport to travel to Serbia for medical treatment. Both these protests, however small in size, were the precursors of the February 2014 protests in that they helped set up cooperation and solidarity among activists (Majstorović et al., 2016, p. 663). They came together across entity lines to protest the state that they perceived as corrupt, inadequate, serving the interests of the ethno-political elites and not those of the people. In all three, to quote Tarrow (1994, p. 17), people with grievances did join social movements and have, through collective action, created new political opportunities. The February 2014 workers’ protests, demanding the revision of postwar privatizations, were the first protests to take on class rather than ethnic tones, and were the harbingers of a more active and more political citizenship in BiH. As late as February 17, 2014, the EC was still demanding that the Sejdić-Finci decision be implemented, as Štefan Füle, the EU Commissioner for Neighborhood and Enlargement, refused to discuss the protests with BiH political leaders.3 However, a day later, in a press release, he seemed to change his mind removing the Sejdić-Finci decision from the table and focusing on reforms. The political opportunity seized in the protests ran counter to the previously known Dayton political structure, sidelining Dayton’s ethnic prerogative in favor of a social one (Majstorović et al., 2016) after almost twenty years and showing that “precariousness knew no boundaries” (Eminagić in Arsenijević, 2014, p.  81). Plenums as an organizational form that emerged after the protests of 2014 had a double role in promoting direct democracy both for the region and BiH. First, they represented an awakening after almost twenty years of the slumber called BiH’s  http://www.sarajevotimes.com/fule-arrived-sarajevo-will-discuss-protests-bh-political-leaders/

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parliamentary democracy, and second, in Arsenijević’s terms, they showed that “the stakes for any future protests in Bosnia and Herzegovina could never be the same” (Ibid.). The February 2014 protesters focused on articulating claims for more social justice, including the review and revision of the privatization of state companies, and the abolition of exorbitant severance packages for state employees (the so-called white bread payments). Social research around the postwar BiH, which had focused more on issues such as ethnicity, religion, and reconciliation, had overlooked significance of these issues, as BiH had already become a “showcase for specific issues over time” with a “few simple theoretical handles becoming metonyms and surrogates for the civilization or society as a whole” (Appadurai, 1996, p. 357). In other words nobody would come to BiH to study the privatization of industrial complexes but, rather, interethnic hatreds, as privatization was too often seen as a necessary, natural, and neutral part of the historically inevitable transition to liberal democracy and free market, with workers having little or no say in the matter (Jansen, 2009). Skilled and unskilled, former and current industrial workers were among the social groups most affected by the economic, social, and cultural transformations of the past two decades, and yet they were often seen as passive agents who did not understand their role within capitalism. The position of peripheral workers in BiH is reflected in two key attitudes: the one of unquestioningly accepting the inevitability of privatization as part of the new system and the other of knowing the value of the product’s quality and the determination to keep it, something I often encountered in talking to the RS railroad workers, and workers from DITA, Trentex, and Fortuna who came to BASOC. February 2014 protests, however, represented as a challenge to the prevailing ethnocentric Dayton logic in BiH as a cry for social justice beyond ethnicity on a broader scale, displacing the usual ethno-national discourse of grievances with an all-out political discussion focusing on a wide range of socioeconomic issues. There were some attempts to harness the energy of the plenums and start a political party but the idea was abandoned due to issues of financing, relation to the NGO sector, and fears that the core group behind the plenums had not yet coalesced sufficiently. Plenums, as a tool for direct democratic participation of active citizens that emerged

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out of the protests, served as public spaces for deliberatively formulating collective demands toward the intermediate levels of government. They constituted an alternative public sphere in which radically criticizing the charade of the ethnic elites and re­politicizing life in BiH became finally possible (Husanović in Arsenijević, 2014). The plenums and protests were the main arteries of the direct democracy, while demands for social justice became the common denominator of these nascent social movements. They were seen as performances of solidarity, and slogans such as “He who sows hunger reaps rage” and “Enough with the national terror! Where are the wages?” were thought to embody and convey the protesters’ aim to subvert the Dayton logic.4 Despite the initial praise, the protests were mostly criticized for asking for too much and achieving nothing other than passivizing resistance by pulling people out of the streets. However unsuccessful, this attempt to up the ante and critically oversee the political process in BiH did crack open an important rift between what politicians could do with impunity and the fermenting democratic backlash of the masses from below. The north-eastern blue-collar city of Tuzla was an important battleground in February 2014. As I mentioned earlier, workers of the Tuzla detergent factory DITA self-organized and took over their company after protracted litigation and countless protests, proving, as one of the workers put it, that “banks can burn even better than government buildings.” The battle that led to this victory, certainly among the most momentous in the modern history of BiH, was fought uphill. The company was bankrupt and burdened with a twenty-million euro debt DITA’s former owner had accrued by slowly selling off the factory assets to sister companies and purposefully concluding unfavorable deals for the company, which led to its bankruptcy. The factory workers not only restarted the production in the summer of 2015, but they also hid the machinery and raw materials in the disused parts of the industrial complex, barring the owner from entering the factory in order to stop him selling off DITA into pieces (Gilbert & Husarić, 2019; Pepić, 2015; Kurtović, 2020).  The “Dayton logic” refers to the complex mechanisms of power-sharing that is ultimately based on the “constitutive peoples” described in Dayton Peace Accords, the Bosniaks, Croats, and Serbs. The political representatives of the “troika” have been blocking reforms and maintaining their positions through the veto option on all of the issues that concern the “vital national interest.” 4

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In addition to local networks within BiH, BASOC developed strong ties between Belgrade, Ljubljana, and Zagreb, as well as international left organizations and individuals interested in the topics of social justice, memory politics, and feminism. Joint work of some of these organizations was particularly prominent between 2014 and 2019 as it constitutes the most significant bottom-up challenge to the ethnically constituted (dis)order to date, bypassing ethnic division in favor of a proto-civic sense of common citizenship and class solidarity unthinkable within the Dayton mental framework. Although seldom acknowledged, post-2008 civic unrest in the former Yugoslav region had its predecessors. Despite numerous grassroots (and) workers’ initiatives throughout the 2000s to fight unfettered privatization, among the most emblematic was the one launched at the Zrenjanin-based pharmaceutical plant Jugoremedija in Serbia (Musić, 2013), but politically innovative approaches to the detrimental effects of the so-called transition started as early as 2009 during the student occupation of the Faculty of Philosophy in Zagreb.5 The students there rose up against the introduction of tuition fees as part of the EU standardization and harmonization practices. They coordinately “overtook” more than twenty Croatian universities for five full weeks in a coordinated manner. This action pointed out to the blind application of the EU legislation, a part of the “teleology of the so-called post-­communist transition that has been determining the whole political life in Eastern Europe since 1989/90” (Buden, preface to The Occupation Cookbook 2009). The Zagreb Faculty of Philosophy’s students engaged in an exercise of horizontal decision-making exercise “open to everyone,” where “all decisions are made by the majority of all present participants” (Cookbook, 2009, p. 19). This was also a key aspect of the plenums, which opened up  The gap between the occupation of universities in Croatia and Bosnian plenums five years later was traversed by Occupy Slovenia. It started in late 2011 as a Slovenian offshoot of the global Occupy Everywhere Movement at Nova Ljubljanska Banka (NLB). Even through it had no formal ties with the Croatian students’ movement, both are a part of the emerging democratic practice attempting to open up the public space for broader discussions and a multiplicity of dissenting voices without immediately implying hierarchies. Main difference between the two examples is the role of the general assembly/plenum. During the universities’ occupation, plenum was imagined as the final authority that can meddle with the actions of the working groups while Occupy Slovenia had “no overarching sovereign authority that would define the direction of this movement. … And, hence, there is no authority that can determine that a minority’s position doesn’t represent Occupy Slovenia as a whole” (Razsa and Kurnik, 2012, p. 244). 5

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the public spaces to other marginalized groups, including minorities and disenfranchised workers. They revitalized the plenum as an organizational form that tackles crucial questions through a one-person-one-vote mechanism and a system of delegation that prevented individuals from becoming recognizable faces of the occupation. The plenums immediately became an implicit critique of representational politics, promoting a direct democratic approach as a “corrective of electoral democracy and partitocracy and, possibly, a true alternative to it” (Štiks and Horvat in Arsenijević, 2014, p.  86). Despite failing to win the battle against the neoliberal Croatian state, the students’ valiant attempt reverberated throughout the region, especially after they published a practical guide to occupation titled the Occupation Cookbook. The guide proved essential in the organization of plenums throughout BiH in February 2014. There are at least three points of difference between the February 2014 protests and the previous two examples. First, they never spilled over into the entity of the Republika of Srpska despite the fact that there were many social problems to protest about. McAdam et al.’s (1996, p. 26) list of dimensions of political opportunities helps explain this by pointing at the relative openness or closure of an institutionalized political system. In this respect, the political system in the RS is much more homogenized and centralized than in the Federation of BiH, as the FBiH is divided into eleven cantons and has a more nuanced political spectrum. Also, the elite alignments at the time were much more stable in the RS because of the vital national interest policy that both the position and opposition adhered to, whereas the Federation of BiH had much more loosely defined and diversified political camps. To illustrate this, the Tuzla mayor, Jasmin Imamović of Social Democratic Party (SDP), went as far as to invite some activists from February 2014 and some public intellectuals to act as his advisors.6 Lastly, the police repression in the RS at the time appeared to be tighter than in the Federation, just as the media spin was that there were people in the Federation of BiH who wanted “to destroy RS.”7  http://tuzlainfo.ba/novosti/item/3973-ko-cini-savjet-gradonacelnika-tuzle-tridesetsugradana-pomaze-imamovicu-u-­­donosenju-odluka 7  http://www.nezavisne.com/novosti/bih/Dodik-Protesti-u-FBiH-politicki-motivisani/232356 6

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Although short-lived, the BiH protests and plenums opened space in the postsocialist, ethnocapitalist, post-apocalypse for bare life, abject bodies, the non-constitutive people, or the undeclared to articulate and embody the postsocialist affect felt by many. At the time of the protests, I had a newborn and was finishing my postdoctoral work at the University of Alberta, but thanks to the social media, I saw many of my friends and colleagues from all over BiH participate both in plenums and in protests on the streets. I felt a deep change was underway and a small attempt to document these changes was materialized in the form of an interdisciplinary research platform and the website “Direct Democracy and Activist Citizenship” (http://www.artsrn.ualberta.ca/direct-­democracy/). In an attempt to stay up to date and reconnect with old friends who took part in them between February and September 2014, I collected a dozen of anonymized in-depth interviews and letters with former activists, journalists, and non-party affiliated scholars from all over BiH in the period between November and December 2014, many of which showed affect of conflict, pain, and disappointment despite the initial enthusiasm. As one Tuzla activist remembers: Enes:

I saw “Fukare”, Tuzla football supporters stopping theft, extinguishing fire with the firefighters, workers protecting police from stoning with their bodies. These moments prove that the masses and crowds, no matter how angry, do not always have to act destructively.

Most of the plenary activities gradually declined during the months following February 2014, which was ascribed to a lack of experience; coordination and resources; external disturbances such as infiltration, repression, and media propaganda (Begić, 2014); and the almost complete neglect of the plenums by state authorities. The floods hitting large parts of BiH in May 2014 then brought an end to most of the plenums, as activists largely devoted their remaining energy to offering aid to the emergency relief operation, which the state was neither prepared nor willing to provide for. The relationship between the international community and NGOs on the one side, and plenary activists on the other was initially guided by mistrust—at first by the activists themselves, who in large parts refused to cooperate with the NGO sector as such but later,

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this changed according to one of my interlocutors, a member of Sarajevo plenums and also a junior academic at the time: Tanja: In Sarajevo the NGO sector overtook the plenums very soon including the demand for “a technical government” whereas in Tuzla some academics already had their NGOs which they nicely adapted for the post-plenum business. One of the things they stress is the construction of difference/similarity between the protesters and their relation to political parties. The Tuzla activist also said that there was “no political movement that could adequately articulate the dissatisfaction with the impunity of political parties and their manipulations” but he also saw social movements such as this one to be inevitable. Enes: The simplest response would be: despair, hunger and misery poured out onto the streets. A more complex and exact answer would be: workers’ demonstrations escalated after other citizens joined them, football supporters and some other formal and informal interest groups, as well as political parties (these I cannot be sure of but I would say SBB, BPS and BOSS-Mirnes Ajanović, at the local level). Selma, a junior university professor and an activist said that the only way to act is through political parties. “We don’t need new ones because we know how risky it is and how much time it takes. Perhaps the solution is to democratize SDP, which has become a private property of several thugs, political parties, primarily SDP,” which would be because “SDP has become a party of several insatiable individuals.” She was also of the opinion that SDP had betrayed BiH workers, which made it possible for Fahrudin Radončić, the owner of a major FBiH daily, Dnevni Avaz, founder and president of the Bosniak center-right party SBB (Savez za bolju budućnost—Alliance for a Better Future), and a former government minister, to “continue managing the protests” and that “it was not difficult for him to win the workers over”: Selma: Let us remind ourselves that he renamed a column in Dnevni Avaz (his own newspaper) called the Avaz Forum into the Avaz Plenum.

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In Selma’s opinion, the relationship between the plenums and political parties on the ground was strenuous as no one holding political office were allowed to participate openly. She found it difficult to reconcile parliamentary with direct democracy in terms of validity of claims and representation but there seemed to be a problem with the word “plenum” too. Selma: The protests/plenums were a major lost chance. … When the plenums started we knew what a plenum was, how it worked, etc. but nobody ever told how to make those in power adopt plenum decisions. And really, what’s a decision voted on by a couple of hundred people? In the end they became a laughing stock. A couple of hundreds of people gathered to make decisions on behalf of the citizens while consenting that political party representatives were in fact our choice. If I am not mistaken, the turnout at the elections was 50% and here we had a handful of citizens, and that was OK, they were supposed to represent all citizens? According to Enes, the problem lied in the public perception of “a handful of prominent BiH intellectuals as a group able to detect the problem, provide an excellent theoretical analysis of the stream of action” and this was “where it stopped, nobody seemed to offer solutions and take ownership.” Still, he was hopeful for the future: Enes:

I see the future of social movements. I just don’t think that those with the word “plenum” will be accepted by wider masses.

During February 2014, people joined the protests for a number of different, often incompatible reasons, and one point of contention was the use of violence. As one of the prominent Sarajevo protester noted “it was a pity there was no unrest in the RS” expressing his stance toward what “needed to burn”: Jasmin: Lamenting over the State Archive in Sarajevo (which had been neglected and dilapidated) and other burnt buildings is hypocritical in the light of the fact that people have been burnt and burning since 1991. No harm would’ve been done if one of the

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villas in Poljine ((the area of Sarajevo where most politicians live) had been set on fire. Among the thing that most interviewees stressed was a need for political education, better organization on the ground and a stronger, country-­ wide social movement, but there were sharp differences between those who were closer to the “liberal left” and “radical left.” A snippet of the Sarajevo Movement for Social Justice (MSJ) campaign urging people not to vote in the October 2014 elections was characterized as “absurd” by a young MA student of comparative literature who also took part in the protests: Jasmina: There are many factors which make [the future of social movements] in this country impossible and one is the inability of all the disenfranchised to unite under one body that would be politically educated and that would operate on the ground. We see the inception of movements such as the Movement for Social Justice whose agenda we have not seen except for the absurd pre-electoral campaign that discouraged people from voting in the election. Others, like Selma, also saw a lack of political education and serious preparation in the protests/plenums, not just in the way the movement as a whole communicated, but also among the protesters themselves: Selma: Repetition of empty phrases will not solve anything. The period of self-management is long gone. I would like the ladies and gentlemen who declared themselves the harbingers of social justice idea to explain to me the part on review of privatization, and what they mean when they say they would give destroyed and privatized factories back to the workers. Serious changes demand serious preparations. The issue of mistrust, especially toward the international community and the NGO scene in BiH, is a notable one and not without a reason. Valentin Inzko, High Representative of the International Community, warned in early February 2014 that “a possible escalation of tension in Bosnia might result in intervention of EU forces” stating that “Austria

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will increase its troops there, but if it comes to escalation we would have to consider the intervention of EU forces” to the Austrian newspaper Kurier. This level of international interventionism was greeted by irony as Sanja, also university professor at the time stated how Inzko “should not worry as the banks are OK.” Milan (2019), pointing at the widening chasm between the civil sector and the wider population, argues that while NGOs had been accused of having hijacked the 2013 protests, they were explicitly ruled out from both 2014 social mobilization and the assemblies’ activities. But this is contested by my interlocutors who were saying that NGOs were only “formally banned whereas in fact they were the ones running the show.” Many activists reiterated this by saying how plenums and protests were “taken by certain individuals who like to call themselves activists and NGO people.” NGO people in BiH were often perceived as vultures, “waiting for opportunities like this to use them for their projects, go to conferences and have their pictures taken.” Also there was a high level of mistrust toward representatives of political parties who used these events “to infiltrate the workers’ ranks and run things,” as well toward those who used plenums for their personal benefit. Enes: Certain people used the plenums for self-promotion, which runs contrary to the horizontal principles of plenum work and has eventually brought ended them. The plenums gradually disappeared in the Federation BiH due to the tensions among the social actors, the mistrust and differences between aims but also the heavy floods that hit BiH in May 2014 around the time when I returned from Canada. Still, in the fall of that year, the remnants of plenums joined to form the so-called 5f7 Network8 that emerged at the level of the FBiH only9 adding to the existing network of several local initiatives from Zenica, Gračanica, Bosanska Krupa, and Srebrenik. Around that time, affect spurred some of the members of the Language,  The name designated February 5 and February 7, 2014, because we could not at first decide on the date. On February 5, the protests started and on February 7, the Tuzla cantonal building was set on fire. 9  https://bim.lbg.ac.at/sites/files/bim/attachments/supporting_informal_citizens_groups_in_bih_ interim_report_feb_2016.pdf 8

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Ideology and Power group into action, and we started meeting again, in Banja Luka also with Prijedor, Bihać, Tuzla, and Sarajevo activists, eventually to become part of the 5f7 group, which was at the time trying to decide whether or not to politically organize at the BiH level. Risking omission of some organizations and names, I here list several initiatives, which played a role in sustaining the Banja Luka Social Center. The Open Society Initiative-funded HESP ReSET Seminar 2007–2010: Cultures of Memory and Emancipatory Politics: Past and Communality in the Post-Yugoslav Spaces organized by the Center for Research, Art and Civic Engagement Tuzla (Centar GRAD) active between 2008 and 2011 was in many ways the first comprehensive attempt to get critical scholars working on (post)Yugoslavia together. To get some of that surge going in Banja Luka, the Language, Ideology and Power group organized regular weekly meetings for some critical thinkers who came to Banja Luka without any funding as colleagues and guests to meet with my students between 2009 and 2012. The group was also active in preparing manifestos for participating in the Park Is Ours (Picin Park) protests but also dismantled shortly afterward. We are in a time when the ruling oligarchy confirms that we, the ordinary people, are the biggest losers of the war and the transition. The oligarchy puts profit above people under the banner of nationalist interest, personal interest above justice, and terror in place of equality. … We, citizens, declare that we are not irrelevant that the authorities are afraid of “the street!” We are in solidarity on the basis of differences by which they mean to divide us. (Picin Park manifesto in Mujanović, 2018)

After 2014, Tuzla had three important hubs of activists arising from any of these three NGOs: Front Slobode10 (Freedom Front) promoting antifascist values, emancipatory politics, and the public good including the Radnički Univerzitet (Workers’ University) initiative through which we also established ties with the aforementioned DITA factory. The other two were Sindikat solidarnosti11 (Solidarity Union) assembling the  https://radnickiuniverzitet.org/o-frontu-slobode  https://www.facebook.com/sindikatsolidarnostituzla/?pageid=278540115846725&ftentidentifi er=996108054089924&padding=0

10

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workers from privatized and destroyed companies, including DITA, and the political organization Partija Lijevi12 (Party of the Left) founded in 2013, aiming to substantially change social, political, and economic system based on the principles of equality, solidarity, and social justice. The Sarajevo plenum and Movement for Social Justice (MSJ) merged, and a faction later transformed into the platform Jedan grad, jedna borba13 (One city, one struggle), which continuously worked with BASOC. In addition, BASOC cooperated with the Mostar activists around the Youth cultural center Abrašević,14 the Bihać group Bosansko proljeće (Bosnian spring),15 including the NGO Center KVART from Prijedor16 focusing on memory politics and LGBTQ rights, a few of activists from Sanski Most17 and the Association of Prijedor Women Izvor,18 and so on. Although the plenums and protests of February 2014 never spilled over into Banja Luka and Prijedor, or anywhere else in Republika Srpska, activists showed solidarity by organizing smaller gatherings. The 5f7 Network was a direct exercise in horizontal minoritarian decision-­making and should not be regarded solely in light of its failure to popularize demands for social justice and equality. It faced obstacles any group organizing a social movement on the European periphery could and did face going beyond theoretical abstractions. The existence of the 5f7 Network showed that our cities and towns did not have spaces where a general public would congregate around issues important for the community as these had been hijacked by political parties and their affiliates. The network, conditionally speaking, lasted from November 2014 until May 2015 after which the issue of the lack of trust and “NGOization,” following financial assistance from the Austrian Initiative, led to the

 https://www.facebook.com/Lijevi-211190905652288/  https://www.artsrn.ualberta.ca/direct-democracy/?p=111#more-111, https://bhprotestfiles. wordpress.com/2014/02/12/from-the-initiative-for-a-sarajevo-plenum-the-citizens-know-very-­­ well-what-they-want/ and http://1grad1borba.org 14  http://okcabrasevic.org 15  https://bhprotestfiles.wordpress.com/2014/02/10/bihac-citizens-demands-bihac-1/ 16  https://centarzamladekvartprijedor.blogspot.com/p/about-us.html 17  http://efm.ba/tag/arijana-foric-kurtovic/ 18  http://www.memorylab-europe.eu/associate/edin-ramulic 12 13

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dismantling of the Network in the formal sense.19 On the ground, parts of the Network continued both without and with sporadic financial assistance from different donors, or none at all. But most importantly, the process resulted in valuable lessons in interpersonal relations and political work, and the echoes of the network warrant closer examination. The way different collectives, including BASOC, organized in postsocialist BiH was in many ways prefigurative politics and by no means prepolitical. While those claiming BiH was in a sort of prepolitical phase in which democratic institutions were to be built from scratch, the rhizome emerging in the thirty years of postsocialism was something else, a rupture in which the nascent left political community insisted on strong relationships with workers and women, as the so-called losers of transition rose in response to the postsocialist betrayal by the ethnonationalists’ ascendancy. Prefigurative politics has been experimented with since the 1960s, out of frustration with both the violent synchronicity of instrumental mainstream politics and instrumentalist understandings of revolutionary action related back to particular strands of anarchist thought (see Day, 2005, pp. 91–128; see also Graeber, 2013, pp. 89, 186–195) “that sought to carve out social and political spaces within the existing society that would envision future modes of cooperation without waiting for a revolution to happen” (Langenohl in Bachmanm-Medick et  al., 2020, p. 67). Social movements and workers’ struggles, as attempts at deperipheralization and challenging exploitation, have been the pivot of resistance against social misery, deindustrialization, mass unemployment, and life under oppressive governments in BiH. In the meantime, deep coalitions and strong ties have been developed between BASOC and other collectives, trade unions, and through them the workers of DITA, the women of Kruščica trying to defend their river, as well as with other workers’ groups and unions, including the Republika Srpska Railroads (Željeznice  There were several conferences organized both in Austria and Bosnia about the impasses of the political system emerging after the protests. The Austrian Foreign Ministry acted through Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Human Rights in order to reach out to individual informal groups and the remaining plenums. At the time of realization, most members did not regard the network as a crucial actor. http://www.turkishweekly.net/2014/09/27/news/conference-held-in-vienna-oncivil-society-in-bosnia-and-herzegovina/ 19

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Srpske), New Mines Prijedor (Novi rudnici Prijedor Mittal), and various other independent syndicates such as the United Healthcare Union (Udruženi sindikati u zdravstvu) and the Confederation of Unions (Konfederacija sindikata). In numerous meetings and get-togethers, we discussed the issues of trust, solidarity, collective bargaining, social dialogue, and collective negotiations. What we learned in the process was the workers’ distrust in the new state, especially when it came to the privatization process and preventing resources being frittered away, with full awareness that privatization was unavoidable, and they demanded at the very least a “responsible owner,” despite some less promising examples in other factories in the neighboring Serbia and Croatia (see Kojanić, 2018). Their ambiguity toward privatization thus remained a blind spot, blurring the relation between themselves, the new state and the private owner in which their peripheral selves were torn “between nostalgia for the socialist past” (Kojanić, 2015) and a belief in the “necessity of capitalist privatisation and entrepreneurship” (Fudurić, 2007). This fighting for survival between the presumed inevitability of privatization and the damage done by a series of private owners is a place of decolonial resistance in the absence of a restorable past. The postwar restructuring of BiH public enterprises switching from a socially owned to a state-owned structure in the 1990s opened a window of opportunity for the ruling oligarchies and political parties to abuse the process. Former industrial giants as well as smaller enterprises that had contributed to the development of Yugoslav economy after WWII were devastated in shady privatization schemes throughout the 1990s and the process is still ongoing. In Tuzla, for example, DITA factory workers occupied their workplace in 2013, dubbing it a “protest for production” (Arsenijević et al., 2017), resisting the “frittering away of the factory” and “bad privatizations.” At the same time, the workers would insist on a “strong state,” an “honest new owner,” and the “rule of law.” The demand for the “rule of law” would later be echoed by the Justice for David movement, but there is as yet no organized political front to fight corruption. Through union organizing and factory occupation, these workers persistently exposed numerous neuralgic spots of the postsocialist, postwar condition of labor in BiH, including deindustrialization, pauperization,

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primitive accumulation, and normalized violence against a population that once occupied a central societal role. The insights gained at DITA in many ways echo the situation in other parts of the country, but the difference here was that workers put up a fight, whereas in most cases they acquiesced more or less quietly to the new circumstances. Conditions in postsocialist Bosnia and Herzegovina introduced new dilemmas for industrial workers in the wake of mass privatization. One of them was how to pursue a demand-based politics when the usual tactics focused on the shop floor—labor strikes, work-to-rule actions, factory occupation—are unavailable. This is particularly true if the demands are to disburse unpaid salaries and social insurance contributions or to restart production when a factory has been idled by the debts, neglect, or rapacity of owners who have no interest in running a viable company. Given the number of firms across the country in economic free fall, the stakes can feel like much more than just the jobs in question. For industrial workers it can feel like the viability of the model of human flourishing and social reproduction made possible by industrial production is on the line. (Gilbert & Husarić, 2019, paragraph 1)

The workers of former Bosnian giants such as DITA realized that political clientelism went beyond ethnic lines and social disparities spreading throughout the country with more top-down restructuring of an already-­ weak economy, harsher labor laws, and growing unemployment of the population formerly employed in the “self-managing” industrial sector. In Larisa Kurtović’s words: Dayton–designed administrative organization, characterized by ethnicization of territory and complex forms of power-sharing, has not only fortified but has also remade dominant political parties into major agents of socio-economic redistribution. In economically depressed areas of Bosnia, this political restructuring has made party membership—either official or informal—both an important vehicle of social mobility and a tactic for making communities more governable under the logic of Dayton Accords. (Kurtović in Jansen et al., 2016, p. 143)

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In socialist Yugoslavia (SFRY), factories in heavy industry used to employ masses of people and formed a micro-cosmos within socialist society. “Workers in heavy industry received higher wages and were more sought after whereas factories were not only a place where people worked, but they played a significant role for the organization of social life. Many social benefits, such as housing, places in vacation homes, educational opportunities, cultural and other leisurely activities, were distributed and organized through the employer and not the state directly” (Brunnbauer et al., 2013). In the postwar years, it became clear that the “new state” with liberal tendencies and ethnic nationalism masking the new elite’s private and partocratic interests was not going to protect the working class, a term which over the years acquired pejorative connotations. The worker’s responsibility to actually “adjust better” reveals the local version of the story of corrigible capitalism (see Seldon, 1980) in which it is either the worker, the investor, or the state that is unfit, and never the system itself, presupposing the existence of seemingly clean, or orderly privatizations. This was perhaps the most conspicuous controversy among postsocialist workers in a European periphery—a failure to see “that what they are denouncing as perverted pseudo-capitalism simply is capitalism,” as Žižek put it in 2009. In their wish for the rule of law, which had been promised as part of the package along with free market and democracy, they particularly critiqued the lack of the ethnocapitalist government’s support and understanding, and they saw legitimate bankruptcy and honest privatization as a potential solution. Working together with factory workers and unions in this process meant not just learning about their defiance but also reflecting on their perceived inevitability of privatization—many workers took it for granted as they were interested in continuing to be able to live off of their work. DITA workers, perhaps more than any other workers encountered at the academic/activist/NGO intersection, demonstrated a defiance and strength not seen with others (Photo 5.1). Doing the actual fieldwork with DITA workers, Gilbert and Husarić (2019) understood they were all too aware that creating and circulating images in a humanitarian register was risky and could distract the public from the dispossession

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Photo 5.1  DITA workers and Solidarity Union representatives from Tuzla visiting BASOC house in August 2016 with Gordana Katana, Dražen Crnomat, Jasmina Husanović, Pavlina Vujović, Ljupko Mišeljić, Dragana Garić, and others

at the root of their condition and, thus, from their overall aim to restart production. Indeed, images of suffering might instead lead people to see industrial workers as just another category of “needy subjects” seeking money from the government, alongside invalids from the 1990s war, families of killed soldiers, single mothers, and other more typical “welfare cases.”

Insofar as these insights are partially telling of the proverbial “essence” of the Bosnian peripheral subjectivity, including the nostalgia for the socialist past, the workers’ belief in the necessity of capitalist privatization reveal another postsocialist and peripheral predicament, one of exhaustion and surrender despite keeping the appearance of strength.

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5.3 Configuring a Space, Finding a Voice As for BASOC, in the summer of 2015, a house was finally found and the Center opened its doors as a space for dissenting thought and action in Banja Luka. This city of unfulfilled prospects during socialism was now a center of nationalist Serb ideology after the ethnic cleansing of its non-Serb citizens,20 developing a complete amnesia and erasing the past, beset by an excess of private and a lack of public interests, and tumultuous social relations defined to an extreme degree in class, ethnicity, and gender terms. With odds stacked against it, BASOC could not function unincorporated, and after days of deliberation and consultations with the advisory board consisting of activists and scholars from Serbia, Croatia, and Slovenia, the decision was made to run it under the umbrella of the Center for Social and Cultural Repair,21 an NGO I established in 2004 to produce documentary films about and for the marginalized, reluctantly succumbing to “NGOization,” as a cooperative would have been legally more difficult to establish. Locating the politics of taking space and the body politics growing from it was paramount. In his Ten Thesis on Politics, Jacques Rancière (Rancière et al., 2001) states that the principal function of politics is the configuration of a proper space, which ultimately gives rise to the “appearance of the subject” in “refiguring the space, of what there is to do there, what is to be seen or named therein.” It was through a kind of refiguring of the context that we decided to create a space that would not be ethnically divided adding ours and other activists’ bodies to the assemblage (Fox & Alldred, 2014, p. 400). We were headquartered in an old Muslim house formerly belonging to a well-off Ćejvan family in one of Banja Luka’s older neighborhoods. Houses like ours were disused as the owners, mostly Banja Luka Muslims, who had permanently settled elsewhere, were reluctant to sell, and many of them were slowly growing decrepit. They were worth little on the real-estate market as the city’s urban plans  According to several sources that include the census, Banja Luka’s Islamic Community’s records, local parish office and the Minister of the Interior, around 200 non-Serbs were killed, 150 went missing and a mass of some 70,000 people fled the city during the 1992–1995 BiH war. 21  As a salaried university professor, I stepped out and gave the NGO to others to use it for the practical stuff, while I became more involved with the program part. 20

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envisioned a gentrification and supplanting “ethnically marked” architecture with modern buildings that combined office and living space. In an attempt to secure a space for BASOC, we found the house by approach returnees to Banja Luka and the diaspora that vacations in the city in order to see whether some of them would be interested in supporting a space free of ethnic division by revitalizing their real estate for public benefit. The plan was to offer our labor in return and refurbish and politicize the space. Though the community welcomed the idea, it was not easy for them to accept visibility of this sort, let alone partake in a minoritarian, bottom-up project aiming to raise the questions of class and gender struggle as well as broach the tabooed subjects of genocide and ethnic cleansing. Ready to give up the search, we stumbled upon Ahmet Ćejvan’s historic house with over 400 square meters of front yard with a two-meter wall around the perimeter hiding the house from the view. The house itself was a former Muslim charity-run soup kitchen and the late owner had had plans to convert it to a chess and social club. After some negotiations, the current owners, the late Mr. Ćejvan’s two daughter both living abroad, and his sister, Bedrija Jović, gave us their permission to partly refurbish the house and make it fit for the use. Ms. Jović, now in her late eighties, became a friend of the Center and visited often. Banja Luka, like much of BiH, is experiencing a three-tiered civil crisis, the tiers being memory politics, workers’ rights and social justice and gender/LGBTQ politics. The ideology of nationalism in the RS and BiH married to political clientelism has drowned out most dissenting voices questioning the issue of the 1990s ethnic cleansing of non-Serb populations in Banja Luka.22 The role of BASOC was to introduce a social perspective missing from the popular understanding of the political complexities resulting from the most recent war, their underlying ideologies and respective histories, economic transition, and social (in)justice,  The scale of peripheralization is growing rapidly, including numerous neuralgic spots from a Banja Luka postwar diaspora of around 70,000 people to even more unemployed people who lost their jobs in the privatization process. In addition to the loss of state backed employment, postwar privatization abolished workers’ identities and political legitimacy turning workers into “ethnic subjects” determined by the social hierarchies of the country’s ethnic accord. The civil society has been officially and economically divided at every level and the social fabric providing some hope for the postwar reconciliation and compensation going beyond tolerance discourse and manipulation of figures has been non-existent. 22

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repatriarchalization and retraditionalization. By insisting on repairing the torn social tissue, BASOC sought to address one of the greatest weaknesses of the local NGO scene visible in the total neglect of social spaces and orientation toward temporary, internationally funded projects run by the professionals who only paid lip service to civil society. Rampant capitalism coupled with nationalism and patriarchy remained the main axes of power, and, in striving for politics of equality, solidarity, and antifascism, the Center stood up to these axes through a combination of theory, grassroots activism, and memory politics embedded in all of its activities. As a hybrid organization, BASOC positioned itself as a pillar of independent knowledge and art production in BiH and beyond, thanks to its members’ active role in organizing social, economic, political, cultural, and art events and promoting an active and engaged social life. In addition to social justice issues such as those addressed by the February 2014 protests, gender/feminist politics was our educational and activist platform aiming to bring the class back into the gender picture, discussing motherhood and childrearing in neoliberalism,23 contextualizing Yugoslav and post-Yugoslav feminism, countering fascism against LGBTQ populations, promoting women antiwar activism in the region, organizing archive exhibitions on the legacy of the Women’s Antifascist Front (WAF), and otherwise maintaining contacts with feminists, female WWII veterans, and LGBTQ activists in the region. Nationalism remains an unexamined issue that the post-Yugoslav Left in most ex-Yugoslav countries including Serbia, Croatia, and BiH. Because of state-supported nationalism, post-Dayton BiH resembles a social laboratory where postwar disorder is constantly managed from the top-down, fueling the crisis and parasitizing on the discourse of nationalist grievances. For a long time, this has been profitable for the elites, domestic oligarchs, and the international organizations alike, without much success in bringing the local population to genuinely come to terms with the past. Ever since the war, Banja Luka has maintained its position as a nationalist stronghold with little or no space for public interventions. In  Feminists Ana Vilenica and Tanja Marković, who wrote Postajanje majkom na periferiji (Becoming mother in the periphery) in 2014 (https://arhiv.rosalux.rs/userfiles/files/postajanje_majkom-1.pdf ) often visited BASOC as friends and guests. 23

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the past years, activists and political adversaries to the ruling SNSD party have been publicly defamed through various formal and informal channels. These attempts included numerous TV programs shown on the entity’s public broadcaster, most notably, the RTRS former talk-show Pressing, with its continuous defamation of the few and far between initiatives in the field of culture of remembrance (e.g., “White Armband Day”), and promotion of historical revisionism, for instance, in the form of Stefan Karganović’s Srebrenica Historical Project, which resulted in his 2011 book Deconstruction of a Virtual Genocide: an intelligent person's guide to Srebrenica.24 On a more informal level, Banja Luka has been home for various rightist groups including sports fans and hooligans. By directly intervening into different commemoration practices, including May 31 as the White Armband Day (see Ahmetašević, 2015)25, commemorating the suffering of non-Serbs in Prijedor who had to wear white armbands during the war, or the celebration of July 4 on Mt. Kozara, where BASOC members and friends sang antifascist WWII songs to disrupt the official WWII commemoration program that exclusively celebrated the Serbs in the National Liberation Movement. This was an attempt to reclaim the public space for counter-discourse and new narratives opposing historical revisionism. Where there was liberal ­reconciliation and tolerance, BASOC insisted in placing trust and rebuilding of social relations through a collective struggle despite the many contradictions inherent in the process. When Felix Fritsch came to BASOC, his research aim was “to collectively reflect on and produce shared meaning of BASOC as a group, its objectives and strategies, and structural constraints affecting it, and to abstract theoretical insights from experiences that may be useful to fellow comrades” assigning “emancipatory participatory action research (PAR) the role of the overall framework, into which elements of CGT are implanted following compatibility and feasibility” (Fritsch, 2016,  On March 2, 2020, the Basic Court in Banja Luka concluded that the list of “destroyers of the Republic of Srpska,” made by Stefan Karganović without any evidence had an aim to defame the nongovernmental organizations, media, and individuals. https://ti-bih.org/ sud-odlucio-odbjegli-stefan-karganovic-oklevetao-udruzenja-koja-je-stavio-na-listu-rusilaca-­ republike-­srpske/?lang=en 25  https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/bosnias-unending-war 24

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pp. 38–39). He too was aware that “the collective appropriation of the produced knowledge,” “long-term engagement” (especially among NGO activists and activists who did not belong specifically to any organization, workers, pensioners, students, local and international scholars) and “not a delimited research endeavor” were needed “to fully overcome the problems arising from the complicated context of BiH” (Ibid.) if one wanted to transform it. Fritsch’s work on BASOC’s embeddedness within the larger BiH civil society at the time and the relationships and issues framing BASOC vividly illustrates its rhizomatic potential in terms of its aims, means, self-understanding, and overall organization in being part of a larger social movement in BiH. To conclude the collective’s objective was to foster the emergence of a scene with a left agenda in northwest BiH and to theoretically and practically work on producing a space addressing and challenging patriarchy, nationalism, and neoliberalism/capitalism in the postwar and post socialist reconstruction of BiH. In this respect, BASOC had strong engagement with various unions in the RS, including workers from the health sector, railroad, and mining, and some of the conclusions were based on multiple meetings that we undertook with their representatives. Interviews with the RS syndicates were done by some BASOC activists, including the journalist Gordana Katana, independent researchers, and activists Zoran Vučkovac, Dražen Crnomat, and myself. The Center built and maintained a strong local and regional structure and a platform for broad but interconnected and interdependent areas of activity. Through visual, cultural, and political research, BASOC emerged as a recognizable space for the circulation of people and ideas that built and cultivated a politically strong and socially aware public scene together. Different interdisciplinary methodologies were developed while conducting activities and building infrastructure with a focus on social justice and workers’ issues, feminism, and work with BiH diaspora and minorities. They included artivism, contemporary historiography, urban policy analyses, and a number of other critical discourses and political economic analyses nurturing an erudite relationship toward BiH history in order to critically understand and assess the past and present as a place of social dialogue, polemic, and even conflict. The ideas circulating within were about the experience of revolution, the People’s Liberation Struggle, mass

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literacy and education, healthcare, labor and women’s emancipation in the SFRY, as well as a sustained practical and political engagement in rethinking life and future on the periphery.

5.4 F eminist Epistemologies: Becoming Part of Assemblage, Engaging with the Struggles The “turn to matter” in the new and critical materialism supplies a critical, radical standpoint from which to launch a critique of postsocialism, as well as recognize both socialist and decolonial goals when it comes to people defending the “new commons” from new private owners and new relationships of dependency. The 1992–1995 war resulting in the movement of displaced people across the ethnically “cleansed” territories and the subsequent deterioration of the formerly strong social tissue made the thinking about a new socialist project in the formerly socialist countries virtually impossible. The change of ideologies from the now-devalued “brotherhood and unity” to the potent “national homogenization,” and the transformation of ownership through privatization, still produced social struggles to salvage what was left to be salvaged after socialism. Drawing on Fox and Alldred’s “research assemblage” (2014, p. 403), I would like to devote a few words to how I became part of this assemblage and what conjunctions had to be developed before I could grasp the relevance of the factory, the river, the railroads, and the mine and critically engage with them. Leila Šeper, a feminist activist from Sarajevo, decided to permanently move to Banja Luka in the fall of 2016—she had already been friends with Gordana Katana and the three of us together as the feminist core of BASOC came up with the idea to start BLASFEM (Banja Luka Feminist Festival),26 and the festival saw three annual editions in 2017, 2018, and 2019. While there had been some sporadic feminist initiatives in the local arts and theory circles, it was crucial for us to create a feminist festival format that already existed in other major post-­Yugoslav 26  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DhsXQIc0RKQ&fbclid=IwAR3q1uZlGUMw33ncBcmn MZtApWlt7GYiwlRWXqz8Aqa2K4Wu1P2bI6BKnHI

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cities and start a tradition where there had been none. BLASFEM featured a panel titled Radnice govore (Women Workers Speak), where prominent female workers/labor activists/environmentalists were given a platform to present their work (Photos 5.2 and 5.3). Visitors of BLASFEM came and told their stories to the wider Banja Luka and regional public. Now-retired Minka Busuladžić, as DITA’s one of the most vocal union leaders, told her story on how she secretively copied documentation on multiple shady privatizations, as she had been demoted to the archive office as the new management thought she could not operate a computer. Activist Amela Zukan spoke about “the brave women of Kruščica” defending their river against the construction machinery of the new small hydropower plant, which irretrievably ruin rivers. Their narratives and embodied experience all carried important lines of fight in the postsocialist reality of BiH: one about a long battle to save a factory not only as an artifact of socialist modernity but a place that still offered jobs, manufactured marketable products, and provided a

Photo 5.2  The official opening of BLASFEM II on June 17, 2018, and the opening of the “Women workers speak” panel

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Photo 5.3  Amela Zukan from Kruščica and Najila Mujaković from Fortuna Gračanica speaking at BLASFEM II in June 2017

means of subsistence for workers’ families, the other about a valiant effort of village women to save a river on which depended the livelihoods of their entire community. While DITA workers strived for more production insisting on their “right to produce,” in Kruščica village, for example, the protests and vigils were directed against “industrialization.” Incorrectly assuming that the police and private security would not be violent toward women, a group of Kruščica villagers held vigils for eighteen months on end unphased by the police presence. Their battle was eventually won in court late in 2018 when their objections to the Kruščica hydropower projects were upheld (Photo 5.4). Workers of Fortuna or DITA, but also women Kruščica, tried to protect what they understood as the commons by actively resisting transitional peripheralization. In the face of their management’s decisions to run the factory to the ground and privatize it, DITA workers reasserted their interests by organizing strikes, holding vigils, and using their bodies to protect the factory. The women of Kruščica did the same for 500 days

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Photo 5.4  Emina Minka Busuladžić from DITA Tuzla speaking on BLASFEM I in June 2017 with the LGBTQ and memory politics activist Goran Zorić, the senior associate of the Gender Center of the RS government Jelena Milinović, the director of the RS Museum of Contemporary Arts Sarita Vujković, and the University of Tuzla’s cultural studies professor and activist Jasmina Husanović

on their village bridge, while Najila Mujaković organized protests on behalf of the shoe factory Fortuna, which resulted in sacking its long-­ term SDA-party-affiliated director, Safet Pjanić, who had siphoned off five million marks from the company.27 In the rhizomatic assemblage depicted in Map 5.1, we see how BASOC and Tuzla’s Solidarity Union, Workers’ University,28 Fortuna Gračanica, and DITA Tuzla are connected, and how joint activities carried on even without the 5F7 Network as a formal framework. BASOC continued to support Fortuna workers’ campaign, and in 2018, a group of women from the factory took part in the March 8 protests in Banja Luka, the  https://www.oslobodjenje.ba/vijesti/bih/kako-je-safet-pjanic-opljackao-5-milionakm-iz-gracanicke-fortune 28  Its members Azra Jašarević and Sanja Horić made the movie Privatization: 1st Person Singular Femininum on DITA factory, which was screened at the opening of BLASFEM II on June 17, 2018. https://www.facebook.com/bassoc/photos/a.1848656388770397/1848661342103235/? type=3&theater 27

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Photo 5.5  Women workers of Fortuna shoe factory in Gračanica, Northern Bosnia, during the March 8 protests in Banja Luka in 2018, which BASOC co-­ organized with the local NGOs Oštra Nula and Helsinki Citizens’ Assembly meet with Srđan Puhalo, a prominent political analyst and myself. To the left is my partner and our son drumming at the march

rhizomatic assemblage converging the social, familial, activist, and academic relationships (Photo 5.5). Numerous analyses provide insights into the systematic changes of the BiH working class and also the Yugoslav working class in postsocialism, including the strategies and concrete tactics that industrial workers and their communities undertook in order to cope with the so-called transitional challenges. These struggles reveal different paths laboring bodies took in order to reverse and resist further peripheralization on the margins of Europe (see Pepić, 2021; Vučkovac, 2022; Gilbert & Husarić, 2019). Studies of everyday life in postsocialist industrial plants and working-­class milieus, especially in a moment of crisis, show how deep these ambiguities run when confronted with a “real-life” threat, usually privatization and workers’ decisions to end the squandering away of still available resources by placing the spotlight on the often subtle and innovative ways in which they claimed their rights and resisted peripheralization. When I look back at these struggles through Haraway’s “situated

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knowledge” and the “partial translation of knowledge among very different—and power-differentiated—communities” (Haraway, 1988, p. 583), with whom one may still be united in struggle and political imagination, despite feelings of loss, failure, and inadequacy to open and sustain an organized and lasting political front of resistance and change (Photos 5.6 and 5.7). Different deterritorizalizations of these social actors, as their Deleuzian lines of f(l)ight, pointed at the struggles worth fighting for in postsocialist BiH, despite them being sporadic and decentralized. They occasionally did manage to unite more people but, within the assemblages, there was always the danger of failing the protestors ethically, of not showing enough solidarity, of there not being enough space for both polemic and politics. The issue of future relationships emerged every time I thought of the line between documenting as opposed to extracting the knowledge acquired by participating in the left scene and individual privileges of education or greater mobility. Despite occasionally feeling complicit

Photo 5.6  Naila Mujaković of Fortuna shoe factory in Gračanica relaxing at BLASFEM II in June 2018

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Photo 5.7  Amela Zukan of “Women of Kruščica” relaxing at BLASFEM II in June 2018

along with other academics or NGO workers in eventually failing the workers and the activists, I willingly joined these assemblages accepting full responsibility. I was affectively attuned to the strong potential of fusing or otherwise commonizing our peripherality as the collective experience of bodies that have been oppressed, banished, pronounced mad, made ill, or killed. This rang true whenever the left in BiH occupied the streets, classrooms, and squares and demanded something from the state, but these efforts would always fizzle out, especially when there was no NGO money to grease the cogs, no vision, and no goals, with people leaving for economic or political reasons or because they felt they were wasting their lives in the post-Dayton meantime (Jansen, 2015). There were perpetual fears that there was nothing left to be frittered away, as had indeed been the case with many BiH factories that were picked clean after 1992. The melancholia of the left was a typical topos in any social struggle, but in the periphery, it was felt more strongly. I was disillusioned myself as were some of my coworkers and friends. Being

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part of these assemblages left me with a similar dilemma—to critique and reflect on the past struggles to better engage in new ones, or to leave, temporarily or permanently, and join the streams of people leaving BiH for good. Being part of BASOC meant questioning these stances while being self-reflective and critical of our own work on class mobilization by collectivizing the war trauma and the experience of postsocialist, neoliberal privatization. Methodologically, the goal was not to deliver or arbitrate knowledge, but rather to reach common ground and understanding through an open communication and an egalitarian approach to politics and collective work without favoring the theoretical and academic over manual work. During the 2020 pandemic, the BASOC was sold by the owners, and the center moved to a house just across the street for a small monthly rent (50 euros) and lost Soros funding after five years. Though its future is uncertain, for my colleagues, friends, and me, BASOC continues to be a place of learning and emancipation in the periphery even in the hardest of times. In the words of one of the BASOC founders, Dražen Crnomat: This is a joint struggle in which militant feminism, equality politics and problematizing of the Bosnian trauma of war and genocide go hand in hand. The BASOC flag has a white star on a black surface and a black star on a white surface marking our integral mourning towards the class-based relationship towards war trauma and genocide. We think it is time to strike back.

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6 Justice for David, Justice for All of Us: A Story of Two Bodies

In March 2018, twenty-one-year-old David Dragičević was killed by what his father called “the state.” Young men from the region, David’s age and older, were already en route to Germany and Austria in their thousands, never to return. In the middle of this “emptying” of bodies from socialism to capitalism (see Dzenovska, 2019, 2020), citizens took to the streets to protest against the police cover-up of David’s murder and their reluctance to launch a proper investigation. Coming to the square where the protesters gathered every day made me think of Anne Boyer’s experience in Kansas City: Some days I would swear to you that nothing but this place exists. When I leave the occupied space of the city into the ordinary space of the city, the ordinary space has ceased to feel real. The ordinary world is a theme park now, faux-hygienic, grating, insincere. My feeling for the occupation is almost exactly like love, vulnerable and half-mad, but I am handing my heart not to another human but to an unfixed, circulating crowd. The stakes feel high, and I question my desire, my attachment, tell myself it is just a cold park, some strangers, the same sad world. But I’m pretty sure I’ve been waiting my whole life for this, pretty sure that we have made a rip

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 D. Majstorović, Discourse and Affect in Postsocialist Bosnia and Herzegovina, Postdisciplinary Studies in Discourse, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-80245-5_6

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in everything. And from the cut-that cold place-we shout. (Boyer, 2018, p. 31)

Standing with my son in the center of Banja Luka following the days of David’s disappearance and murder, in the Krajina square, now colloquially renamed “David’s Square,” I felt that it no longer felt real the way ordinary places do—it was filled with a concoction of love and fear. I was absorbed in the Justice for David cause (JFD) almost against my own volition, and soon it felt as if I had crossed the point of no return. Within four months, in July 2018, I was ill as my own body stopped producing thrombocytes, and I slowly began to recover only after December 2018 protests in Banja Luka when we returned from Germany for the Christmas holidays. At the square itself, especially in the early days, there were no NGOs, no international funding to grease the cogs, just people from all walks of life who empathized with the tragedy and demanded state accountability in the case. How is a movement for social justice triggered by the death of twenty-one-year-old electrical engineering student a backdrop and an event and through what assemblage? How can it be situated it and analyzed in a wider sociopolitical and economic context, without losing touch with the affect and intensities they produce within the researcher? One way of approaching it is to look for cues and relations, since affect is always about activity, patterns, and power (Wetherell, 2013, pp. 16–17), a so-called bonus track in addition to the discourse track and not just something entirely different (see Massumi, 1996; Thrift, 2008). There is neither a clear-cut pathway to empirically studying something escaping representation and cognition, something what-is-not-yet, such as affect, nor is it easy to study the discursive or semiotic aspects of social research. “Affective practice is interrelated but it can be held inter-­ subjectively across a few or many participants. It can thread across a scene, a site or an institution and is spatialized, too, in complex ways. … An affective practice can be ‘held’ in a particular place. Further solidification comes into view when we consider the affective practices of entire social categories and historical periods” (Wetherell, 2013, pp.  13–14) (Photo 6.1).

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Photo 6.1  Author with the members of JFD group in Banja Luka in July 2020

My engagement with the Justice for David movement could never be a purely objective study because all of us who gathered regularly developed some sort of affective sociality (see Majstorović in Dwyer et al., forthcoming)—an amalgam of trust and relationality like never before— possibly empathizing with the parents’ relentless struggle to discover the murderers but also feeling a change was coming. Analyzing discourses around and living the reality of BiH’s turbulent past, political stalemate, unsanctioned crime and corruption as historical practices (see Bakko & Merz, 2015) for more than a decade proved in this instance to be a good primer but the discursive part told just one side of the story. Rather, the intensity of the crowds at the square demanding justice, the entire miseen-scene, David’s friends and ordinary citizens who stopped by created an assemblage and affect going beyond the discursive in describing the potential of a collective yet to be made. Studying resistance to acts of

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violence is always a welcome challenge, opening up a political space for seeing affect as a force of social indeterminacy, offering the opportunity to look at what is, imagine what could be instead, and grasp that this “instead” is always already in motion, always in the process of becoming a destabilizing register of stability and instability (Connolly, 2011, p. 20). Making use of the availability and depth of data from the ground while learning and writing about the context in which social movements in BiH were generated was only possible through an affective involvement, an “affective conviviality” (Illich, 1973) that allowed for a politics and poetics of relation to be established and written about. In my attempt to account for what is/was going on, and based on the data I was able to access during my three years of interaction with the actors of this social movement, I decided to write about it as a constellation of multiple relationships and personal intensities, traumas, and solidarity birthing new forms of political agency in the periphery. When citizens started to gather in small groups following David’s disappearance, nobody could have imagined that his case would make it possible for so many people to affect and be affected and with such intensity. Twenty-three years after the 1992–1995 civil war in BiH, even fewer people could have predicted that the protests would grow into something larger and fuel the existing popular discontent in the BiH entity of the Republika Srpska (RS). David Dragičević was last seen on Sunday, March 18, around 3:30 AM when he left a night club. Four days later, his parents offered a 100,000 KM (50,000 euros) reward for information on his whereabouts, while citizens of Banja Luka combed the city streets and alleys searching for him. The parents appealed to the police to consider a text message David sent them that night, holding a young man named Filip Ćulum responsible if something happened to him. On March 24, the young man’s body was found in the shallow waters at the mouth of the Crkvena River, near the Fortress of Kastel close to the city center. On March 26, the RS police held an outrageous press conference in which their representatives claimed David had brawled with three young man in front of a café, after which they went their separate ways. Darko Ilić, head of the Interior Ministry’s Unit for Organized and Serious Crime, said that police had also found stolen items from a burglary in David’s backpack, including a laptop, 200 KM (100 euros), a USB

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memory stick, a Swiss Army knife, and keys to the house that had been robbed that night around 3:00 AM. Furthermore, the investigators said that David’s toxicology report indicated that he had been positive for alcohol, THC, as well as LSD. The next day, Milorad Dodik, the then president of the RS, visited David’s father, Davor, to extend his condolences. More high-ranking police officers gradually became involved in the case and made statements to the effect that David Dragičević’s death was accidental, only to accept that it was an attempted murder after months and weeks of protests in May 2018 (Photo 6.2). Even his father Davor demanded the truth no matter how cruel in one of his speeches at the square: I am a first class, disabled war veteran. I am neither a terrorist, nor an Islamist, nor an intelligence type. My struggle is one for justice and truth. I, Davor Dragičević, do publicly declare that my son was tortured and brutally killed, on someone’s explicit order. I want truth and justice no matter how brutal. You killed my child. You ended my line. I demand that the deputies declare whether this was a suicide or murder.1

With the Justice for David movement in the BiH entity of the Republika Srpska, issues of police brutality, weak legal system, public security, and trust in the public institutions came to the fore as additional bases of popular distrust of the system, especially before and after the October 2018 state elections. The ethnopolitical elites in BiH have managed to secure power and wealth through privatizations but also through what Alena Ledeneva (2006), writing about post-Soviet political and business practice, describes as kompromat, a single powerful actor weaponizing damning evidence to blackmail a target, reflecting the weakness of formal legal institutions in Russia as well as other postsocialist states. Ledeneva argues that wealth and power are distributed through networks of  The RS National Assembly voted to form an Inquiry Commission to analyze the circumstances surrounding the case. In June 2018 the Inquiry Commission concluded that “there [were] reasonable grounds for suspecting that David Dragičević [had been] killed” and that they expected “the Prosecutor’s office to issue a decision to prosecute as soon as possible.” The report was rejected by the RS National Assembly. As of January 2021 the Prosecutor’s Office has not reacted and the death remains classified as an accident. https://www.dw.com/bs/slučaj-dragičević-okvalifikovankao-ubistvo/a-44525994

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Photo 6.2  Davor Dragičević at JFD protests in the summer of 2018. (The courtesy of Danijel Čuček)

political figures and business people who follow unspoken rules, in an informal hierarchy that she calls sistema, or the system. Sistema, which is a system of ambiguity, has a few clear rules—do not defy Putin being the most obvious one—and a toolkit for controlling potentially insubordinate members.2 During the Justice for David protests, on the square itself as well as on social media, Davor and others often referred to the “system” or “state” as  https://www.newyorker.com/news/swamp-chronicles/a-theory-of-trump-kompromat

2

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Photo 6.3  Davor holding the poster in front of the RS Ministry of the Interior in Banja Luka with portraits of RS figureheads and the messages, “Who protects the murderers of our children?!” and “Gentlemen, set up new ministries so you can operate legally!”

the main obstacle to finding out the truth processing the culprits. Photo 6.3, taken in front of the RS Ministry of Interior, shows the Minister of the Interior Lukač, the then RS president Dodik, the then RS prime minister Cvijanović, the chief of police Ćulum, the RS National Assembly Vice-President Stevandić, and the head of Organized Crime Department

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Ilić identified by Davor and JFD group as the main actors either complicit, instrumental, or deeply involved in the subsequent cover-up. In the absence of a legitimate institutional effort to find out who killed David and why, two rumors circulated: one saying Prime Minister Cvijanović’s son, Filip, had been involved, and the other to the effect that David, who was a hacker and a computer whizz, had found out something he shouldn’t have found out about “the system” possibly related to the drug dealing and narco-cartel among members of the RS police.3 The scene on the square was the one of private mourning turned a cathartic democratic public plenum. The active role of plenums and protests of peaceful citizens as “bodies that mattered” in a “performative power of assembly” (Butler, 2015) may have ushered in a new culture of protest, especially after the banning of public assembly and the increase in police brutality since the arrest of Davor Dragičević on December 25, 2018 (Photo 6.4). The direct hit on bodies that was David’s death was a watershed moment where “the system” crossed the line and acted against the body. There was a strong sense among the protesters that what had happened to David could have happened to anyone’s child, which is what being “in this together,” and being “locked in this relation” meant, the relation referring to “what is relayed but also the relative and the related” (Glissant, 1997, p. 27). To describe this case adequately, it does not suffice to reconstruct the timeline of events; to understand the workings of power entails producing textured, lively analyses of multiple modes of engagement inviting participation in rollercoasters of identification, investment, disgust, elation, and cynicism in circumstances that mediated a terrifying embodied immersion.  The most “famous” bot person was a Boki on the Bijeljina Television chat who claimed having seen the footage of a police inspector Dubravko Kremenović beating up David and said that Filip Ćulum, who David had accused in the text message sent to Davor the night he disappeared, had indeed been a drug dealer for Dragan Lukač and Darko Ilić. On March 15, 2021, David’s mother, Suzana Radanović, posted on her Facebook page that Slaviša Krunić, the former director of the largest RS surveillance company, Sector Security, who was killed on April 23, 2019 under mysterious circumstances in Banja Luka, may have in fact been Boki who stopped posting stuff around April 2019. She kept the screenshots of Boki’s messages here https://www.facebook.com/photo?fbi d=4099133403472916&set=pcb.4099133766806213 but her original statement had apparently violated the Facebook community standards and was removed. 3

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Photo 6.4  Raised fists during JFD protests

I first reached out to the group in May 2018 when I offered pro bono translation services for David’s autopsy reports as a professional translator. As I dealt with the documents I was astonished at the level of visualizable detail in them and I found myself not just translating, but also performing textual forensics. I became affected by the texture and materiality of the young man’s death, and the visceral bodily sensation I experienced as I watched the photos accompanying the reports with their detached tone, Latin words, and the passive voice. There was something solemn and cathartic in the ritualistic and repetitive dramaturgy of the protest, the speeches, the singing of a song David wrote as a teen, “Kid from the ghetto.”4 Truths absent from public discourse were loudly spoken, both live at the protests and in the Justice for David Facebook

 The chorus of this rap song is: It looks like I won’t make it far because I’m just a pawn in this story. I’m not going anywhere, I did damage, I’m just another kid from the ghetto (Izgleda da neću daleko stići jer sam ja samo pijun u ovoj priči. Ne idem nigdje, načinio sam štetu, ja sam samo još jedan klinac u getu). 4

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group,5 and the Bijeljina Television (BNTV) web page,6 including the one about the Banja Luka military police “red van” that was used by the during the 1992–1995 to collect Banja Luka Muslims.7 There was talk of a police-run drugs cartel in Banja Luka, “where only the dealer had the power” as David sang in his rap song, and kids dying of overdose without anyone being held accountable. At the time of my involvement in JFD protests, I experienced workplace harassment while trying to balance activism, work, and personal life as a temporarily single parent. I developed an unknown autoimmune disease, later diagnosed as stress-triggered cold-agglutinin anemia that lowered my thrombocyte count. Coincidentally, my condition started improving six months later when I rejoined the protests, just before all gatherings and demonstrations were banned in Banja Luka on December 30, 2018 (Photo 6.5). Perhaps the parents’ fear and apprehension, translatable into an almost material and sensual collective experience was possible because it was posthumous, because death and horror had already happened. Davor’s

Photo 6.5  The RS police facing JFD protesters in Banja Luka  https://www.facebook.com/groups/PravdaZaDavida/  http://www.rtvbn.com/3951445/pravda-i-istina-o-smrti-davida 7  https://www.sense-agency.com/tribunal_(mksj)/teror-banjaluckog-quotcrvenog-kombijaquot.25. html?cat_id=1&news_id=457 5 6

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fatherhood continued posthumously, as he swore on David’s grave both to him and his younger child, Teodora, that he would see justice served or settle the score himself. So the ritualistic, repetitive acts of protests and protesters, including the ad hoc script that never failed to affect others, became units of my analysis as a nascent, open-ended, intertwined affective-­discursive pattern operating much like other social practices (e.g., cooking, sport, personal care, and mothering). Embodiment, entanglement, the middle ranges of agency, patterns that organize but cannot necessarily be articulated, and the importance of taking action complexes (Wetherell, 2013) brought affect and social practice together. Suddenly, we were all part of an assemblage made up of histories as longer series of events containing the embodied, visual, and discursive content in which different affective episodes and attunements occurred and translated into public empathy and action despite the fear—it was as if embodied states of defiance became attuned to affect as politics. After I temporarily left Banja Luka in the late summer of 2018 for my sabbatical, I walked to David Square on Tuesday, December 18, 2018, only to see a handful of people standing there. The movement seemed to fizzle out in the run-up to Christmas and New Year—the city was decorated with lights and several big concerts were scheduled for the holiday season in the city center. For the first time, I approached Davor, shook his hand, and introduced myself, saying I had translated the autopsy reports in May. I also asked to interview him as I was collecting data for my research even though I had no idea what that research was going to conclude in the end. Together with Daniela Ratešić, we had tea in a café near the square, talking about Daniela’s plans to temporarily leave BiH to try to find a job in Germany, since she had been fired in October that year on the account of her political activism. She was a prominent and outspoken member of JFD group, a humanitarian activist, and the mother of one of David’s friends, who I had occasionally spoken with and who had even participated in the BLASFEM feminist festival in June 2018 on a panel about militarization and migrations. Davor gave me his phone number and we made an appointment for Monday, December 24, 2018 at 11 AM.

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I drove to his house with my husband, who was also my partner in this research project, and Davor greeted us and let us in. A moment ago we had seen a black Peugeot parking nearby, and as soon as we got into the house, there was a knock at the door. Davor said it was the police, but he refused to accept any papers from them. “I don’t recognize this police force any more, I’m not giving them anything,” he said. Present during the interview were Davor, his ex-wife, and David’s mother Suzana with her toddler from her second marriage. David’s sister Teodora briefly came in to say hi and then went off with a friend. The in-depth style interview started around 11.00 AM, it was recorded and went on for almost three hours. Davor offered us breakfast and coffee calling us “kids.” “Would you like some breakfast, kids?” he asked. We also introduced ourselves and told them about our own activism at BASOC and work on issues of social justice, workers’ rights, memory politics, and feminism. We offered further help with translations and grant writing to obtain funding for educational activities among kids from Bosnia and Austria, something Suzana was interested in at the time. Davor spoke about his childhood in Sarajevo where he had lived until the age of seven, then Libya, where he had moved with his mother, who worked there as a nurse after his parents divorced in 1976. He moved to Banja Luka in 1980 and lived there until 1991 when he moved to Italy, lived there briefly, then returned to Banja Luka in 1992, married Suzana, and had a son. After his first wife, who was a Muslim, left with their child for the United States, he joined the Republika Srpska Army (Vojska Republike Srpske) and went to war. Talking about the war, he said Yugoslavia was his only homeland, and both he and Suzana said they refused to state their ethnicity while filling out consent forms. He was critical of Banja Luka where people had “lived lavishly and drunk expensive beer during the war” comparing it with the life in the trenches. He thought the war would only last for a couple of months but was severely wounded on November 30, 1992, and almost lost his leg. When his father sent him some money from Switzerland, he was able to go to Belgrade to continue receiving treatment, and doctors did save his leg, although it was left shorter and he has had a limp ever since. Davor met Suzana in 1995, they married in a year, and had David in January 1997. He worked as a waiter and she worked for the forestry

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company Srpske šume—they struggled to make ends meet and ten years later managed to buy a house. They spoke fondly of David, who was a modest kid, interested in music and computers, “I would give him pocket money and he would return half of it, saying it was too much.” David made a point of dressing modestly, he didn’t care for brand name clothes. Several years ago, he moved briefly to his mother’s place in Wiener Neustadt, near Vienna, but didn’t like it there very much. “I asked him,” Davor said, “do you want to be a gentleman or a waiter?” “You are not to be a “klošar [eng. Loser, bum, tramp], the only thing I expect from you is to better yourself.” My son was reluctant to take a pill when he was sick, he was no junkie, though I know he occasionally smoked pot.” She (Suzana) knows me, she knows I am quick-tempered and a hotspur, well David was the same, he thought he was gonna get rid of them and he said to my brother “just don’t tell dad, he will kill them8 all”. I taught my boy to be fearless, who was he supposed to be afraid of? He wouldn’t be able to stand being called a coward. Every day, we would exchange a hundred text messages and calls. The night he didn’t come home I said to my coworkers, “Guys, something’s wrong, something’s up.” He wanted to study that night, he wasn’t planning on going out, he was led on. At the beginning when David disappeared, some 500 people were involved, and later almost 1000 friends and family were searching the town. I went to people’s houses and barns and we would receive messages that he was seen at such and such place waiting for the bus (he never took buses), it was all done to make us crazy. On March 18 his Facebook account was shut down and it could only have been done by a family member or the police. We went searching for CCTV cameras ourselves and were told that the footage had been deleted. They were organized in groups and A.B., David’s uncle, who is a hacker, told us not to go check the School of Metal Work (Metalska Škola) as they had allegedly already searched there. Later this same guy took David’s computer deleting some files from it.

When asked about the core of the movement he said it was him, Suzana, and their daughter, Teodora. They said that fear made people in  Possibly referring to the people who harmed David.

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Banja Luka walk around like zombies and that 90% of the population were sick. Suzana remarked that people would approach her after the rallies talking about their own personal problems, sick or deceased family members, and that she was finding it hard to listen and take it all in. Then the doorbell rang again and this time it was the mailman delivering documents from the court related to the formal registration of the Justice for David movement. Davor said the movement had been formalized for one reason only: to protect the people involved. Even the New York Times reported that a one-man protest movement had grown into the largest demonstrations in Bosnia in decades as “a father’s grief (was) swelling into an antigovernment movement”9 (Photo 6.6).

Photo 6.6  Davor Dragičević at the Krajina square  https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/08/world/europe/bosnia-davor-dragicevic-miloraddodik.html

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As for the other people in the movement, he said they all had their own interests, and for as long as the interests matched. When asked about the movement’s structure, Davor said there were a few points he had in common with the movement: I am not going to get the justice through the movement, he said, but at least it won’t be possible for what happened to David to happen to any other kid so easily. The movement is there to protect the people and so that others (foreigners) can see what a force we are. If I was to die tonight (from a heart attack or anything), Banja Luka would go back to where it was. As for now, at least they won’t hit anyone. Justice is a ship that sailed, even if you had the best, the most honest judge or five top prosecutors, the evidence has been tampered with, it’s been compromised. I have to have evidence, but who destroyed it? And the Minister of the Interior said he wasn’t in the country on that date. Where’s the line of responsibility? I have the right to say whatever I want, let them say it is not true, let them refute me. It’s all about taking responsibility, people would like others to do it for them.

In an interview for a local TV station that aired on December 19, Davor said he did not have political ambitions, but acknowledged that his movement “had become the strongest civil society organization in the country. With that came “high expectations from supporters—and pressure on the authorities to gag him.” I am not a messiah. I am not a savior, I’m well aware who I’m up against: the whole state apparatus. No state would admit it’s committed a murder. Ever.

The next morning, on December 25, news broke that Davor and Suzana had been arrested. Suzana wrote on Facebook: “They are just trying to arrest Davor,” she said. “We are in the car, they are driving behind us.” A little later she added: “They’ve arrested Davor.” Soon, the citizens started gathering in the Krajina square, where a police cordon soon arrived. While the police officers put the crime scene tape on Davor’s car with a tape, Suzana talked to them, holding a picture of David, “Am I breaking the law by standing here, is this free territory?” she asked. She told them that they could arrest her as well or they should go to arrest

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“the murderers of her son.” “Do you have a mother, do you have a child?” she asked the members of the RS police, and one officer approached and told her to stand back. Two police officers soon took her away while she was still holding a picture of her son. After a few hours, she was released and she said that she was going to return to the square. Davor was brought to the District Prosecutor’s Office in Banja Luka around 8 AM on December 26, 2018, just before the expiration of his 24 hours of detention. Two police officers took him to the Prosecutor’s office, and he shouted “Justice for David!” when he stepped inside. After almost three hours of interrogation, Dragičević was released, and on that occasion, he stated that he was “the proudest father” and that he “would not give up the fight.” The days between Catholic Christmas and New Year were sad and hectic but also full of hope, despite the police officially banning the protests on December 25. People cried when “David’s Heart,” a floral installation forming part of his shrine, was being removed from the public square, but thousands persevered and continued to march through the city demanding to know who killed David.10 On the night of December 30, Davor went missing and it was feared that he might have been arrested or even murdered. He had last been seen by local journalists as he was being pursued by plainclothes police officers. The RS police had issued an arrest warrant for Dragičević, charging him with incitement and threatening public safety. On Monday, January 7, Davor Dragičević posted a video message on Facebook saying he could not disclose his present location and people continued to meet in the courtyard of the Temple of Christ the Savior yard as the only place where they felt they could not be arrested. On January 15, 2019, police officers of the Banja Luka Police Administration submitted a report to the Republika Srpska Public Prosecutor’s Office against Draško Stanivuković, a young opposition politician and entity-level MP who went on to become Banja Luka’s youngest ever mayor in November 2020, Davor Dragičević, and JFD member, Željko Dabić, on suspicion of “calling for and inciting others to violent change of the Constitutional Order of the Republika  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O6YzbkfKCVY

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Srpska,”11 a felony carrying a penalty of three months to five years in jail. Davor’s lawyer, Ifet Feraget, stated that “in a democracy, freedom of expression is a basic human right that all of us have to get used to and invoking ‘verbal delict’ is completely anachronistic. It seems like the main goal here is to keep Davor Dragičević far from Banja Luka and the Republika Srpska.” A chill came over me when I received a message from Suzana on my German WhatsApp sometime in late January 2019, when I was already in Germany doing research. She asked if I could help her with writing projects for the movement in Austria given I had experience in education and NGO sector. Dear Danijela, please write to me. I am stuck!!! I have written to Dragana and there has been no answer. Regards. (Draga Danijela, molim te da mi se javiš. Zapela sam!!! Pisala sam Dragani, odgovora nema. Pozdrav.

She reached out, I wrote back and we had spent many evenings in conversation online, and I witnessed her political savviness, mental toughness, and her sharp mind. I was able to help her with diplomatic contacts in Sarajevo as well as in Vienna as well as with drafting projects on workshops with young people in BiH and Austria, since she and a few of her friends were planning to establish a Justice for David foundation in Vienna, where Davor applied for political asylum in January 2019 and which he was denied in early October 2021 (Photo 6.7). On March 15, 2020, my family and hers stood around the David’s new grave in Wiener Neustadt after his bodily remains had been exhumed and transported to Austria a few days prior. People from Banja Luka could not travel to the second anniversary of his death because of the pandemic, so we expressed our condolences and had to be on our way to Germany because the borders were closing. The photograph of Suzana  According to Article 307 (1) whoever, with a view to endanger constitutional order or security of Republika Srpska, calls for or incites to violent change of the constitutional order of Republika Srpska or to depose its highest officials, shall be punished by imprisonment for a term between three months and five years. 11

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Photo 6.7  Suzana Radanović, David’s mother, with her daughter, Teodora, at the protests in the summer of 2018

Photo 6.8  Suzana Radanović standing in front of the RS police on December 25, 2018

holding David’s photo while standing in front of the police cordon on December 25 remains one of the most harrowing images from the protests, a picture of a woman standing bold and defiant (Photo 6.8).

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After the events of December 2018, I traveled to Banja Luka again in April and May 2019 to interview a young mathematician, Ozren Perduv, currently the president of the political party Movement for Justice, which emerged out of the Justice for David group and one of the most promising young politicians in BiH. I had approached him during the gatherings in front of the Temple of Christ the Savior in April 2019 after the protests had been banned following the events of December 30. We had a cup of coffee at the hotel Bosna in April, then met again in May 2020 with a couple of other activists as well as the wife of the journalist Slobodan Vasković. When we started talking, Ozren was a little surprised that my husband and I had also taken part in the protests, and I took some time explain my position and involvement with JFD: Ozren got involved in June 2018, even though his family knew Davor and David, he only read about the case from the press. The boy went missing, the search started, in the cold, there was still snow. I saw in the newspapers that they were searching for him and that was before the group was formed. … I remember working on my computer [the day he was found] and then all of a sudden notifications about a body that was found start popping up. I knew right then who it was. I told my mom, there was shock in the house. That was on March 24. It happened and you knew nothing. Why was he missing? What is the truth? Was he hurt? It’s all very strange. And then the press conference was announced. I only read a short report. Mom was at home and she watched it [and] said … something wasn’t right. And then I saw a Facebook post, this guy Blagić posted that David had gotten into a fight and he tagged the guy who was police director Ćulum’s relative. It was that [realization that that there had been a cover-up] that drew the people on the street. The first gathering on March 26, nobody could believe it. Davor was crying. At first, he addressed everyone with ‘sir’, he wasn’t using people’s names out of caution. Neither he nor the rest of us could believe that we lived in such chaos. Madness. And then journalist Slobodan Vasković started writing about the case. And you somehow got the whole picture.12

 In the meantime, several documentaries have been made about this case, such as the film Dijete (Child) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ohSZWDXF65g and Tamara Denić’s film 284 Days https://www.tamaradenic.com 12

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Ozren always maintained that we had to keep a cool head and not idolize anyone, including Davor, especially in front of the Facebook 200,000 members. “Some people “projected their own lives onto the group, for them the group was their life, while others were put off by it,” he said. “There were women who literally fell in love with Davor,” Ozren added, and he saw this potential for a personality cult as something that could derail the movement, “Move it away from its essence.” The libidinal was present from the very beginning, Eros and Thanatos merging into the assemblage that of the Facebook group as well as people in the square. But Ozren and Daca, as one of the most dedicated activists, for a long time stood aside as well as the parents of the so-called Magnificent Twelve, a dozen high school friends of David’s who had supported the protests from the beginning, and one of them was Daca’s daughter Katarina. Ozren became fully involved in early June when the group asked him to read something in public during the protests. In discussing his engagement, Ozren stressed the importance of building trust among the members and determination to stay the course. “We had a joint Viber group and screenshots were leaked, which often raised doubts as to who was really with the group,” he said, “especially in the most intense period between September and the October 5 elections.” During that period when the first march toward the Ministry of the Interior was held, Davor actually slept at the Krajina square constantly surrounded by people. “The culmination was October 5,” said Ozren, “if the change had happened then, it would have been substantial. There was so much energy there, present. People wanted some … everyone was feeling somehow powerful. The elections were coming, it was time for change. The energy was crazy, unbelievable. My task was to read a text … but all eyes were on Davor. The crowd expected something, that Davor would show something or say something that would change things.” Ozren had been arrested several times. The first time, the police came to his home at 1.30 AM in the morning of December 31 accusing him of “breach of peace” and later arrested other group members. He said they “caught Daba (Željko Dabić) that night, and Daba was not at the square at all, maybe for 5-10 minutes. He was with his wife Tanja who got sick. Daca was arrested while sitting in a café and she also did not participate in the march. You could see they had a list.” Also, Ozren had his doubts

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about some of the politicians involved with the movement as well as within the movement itself, which proved to be more heterogeneous and divergent, as he then recollected: Daca suspected someone had lured her to Banja Luka which is how she ended up arrested. At the time she had no need to come to Banja Luka. Somebody from the group called her to come to try to “curb” Davor. We met with Draško (Stanivuković) on December 27 to talk through some details about the rally scheduled for December 30. He offered to provide the stage and PA system as well as to register the gathering with the police. Honestly—and I said it back then—I had my suspicions about him. During every walk he was stuck to Davor, like a leech. I still have my doubts. … You ask a lot of things, but the walks were like a river of people, you’d get goosebumps. The most beautiful time in Banja Luka ever. … It’s impossible that all those people changed their opinion overnight. What happened? Did they get scared? Did they, when Davor left, said what the hell are we still doing here? … A river of people, and a day or two later there was nobody.

Following Davor’s exile, he maintained close touch with Suzana. Every day he went to a small park in downtown Banja Luka to stand with the few who were still demanding justice for David, and was even arrested and held in the custody in July 2020. As JFD politically transformed into an NGO Put pravde (Path to Justice) and a political party Pokret pravde (Movement for Justice), as the only nominally left party in the RS, he was elected their leader and ran for the city assembly in the November 2020 elections without a single poster or paid advertisement. He campaigned by canvassing, talking to people on the street, distributing fliers, and playing music in front of his party stand in the Krajina square, the December 2018 ban on public gatherings having been finally lifted. He fell a handful of votes short of winning the seat (Photo 6.9). In the summer of 2019 I also met with Aleksandra Ninić Vranješ, whom I knew from high school (Banjalučka gimnazija). When we met for coffee at the end of August 2019, she openly spoke about her time in the ruling SNSD party, which she joined as early as 1998 because “it was close to her.” Although “she saw some things she didn’t not like in the higher SNSD echelons,” she openly admitted to having found her job in

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Photo 6.9  (From left to right) Arijana Memić, Muriz Memić, Ifet Feraget, Ozren Perduv and Aleksandra Vranješ in the BiH Parliament in Sarajevo in November 2019 during the public debate “Right to Justice”

2007 in the Republika Srpska Ministry of Education “via the party (preko stranke)” because her goal was to “resolve her own matters” (da nešto svoje riješim). I held the position until 2009, it was a temporary one. At that time I was pregnant with my second child and they opened a vacancy, for which I applied with some 30 other candidates to the State Administration Agency but I knew this job was opened just for me. … They were clearly breaking the law but I had one child and another on the way, I didn’t feel like pursuing some justice at the time.

Even though she had some coworkers who supported her, they would be silent when speaking in a bigger circle while she herself was torn “between the mind and the heart” on one side thinking about her

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children and on the other the protest. She joined the group following the notorious press conference on March 26 at which it was announced that David’s body had been found. She approached Davor in the square, felt his pain “as a mother,” and joined the crowd in order to be “one more body standing where every normal person should be. … And for the first time I was happy in Banja Luka, it was again the city of my childhood, a warm, welcoming Banja Luka with wide-open arms.” She was later approached by a young woman, one of the Magnificent Twelve, who asked her if she could help other mothers (including Daniela Ratešić) with advice and organizational issues. She knew the young woman for her work in the cultural sector. She also made a remark about the Inquiry Commission, which for Aleksandra was a way to move things forward and classify the case as a murder, but unfortunately that did not happen. “Dodik said it loud and clear the day before it was supposed to be voted on that the ruling party wouldn’t vote to adopt the Inquiry Commission’s report,” which stressed the issue often repeated by the Dragičević family lawyer Ifet Feraget that “there ha[d] got to be an investigation about the investigation before the case proper could be prosecuted.” In terms of her personal involvement with the case, Aleksandra reflected on her own life of a divorced mother of two, with a BA degree in political science, who because of her involvement with JFD suffered pressure at work and was even demoted and transferred to another town. In this way her employer the RS Ministry of Culture tried to pressure her into quitting. She soon built rapport with the people in the square. There were many low-income women in the movement, some of whom were divorced and/or jobless or destitute. She spoke of others who struggled to pay the interest on their bank loans on their low incomes, felt they simply had nothing to lose, and wanted to topple the government. “Rabble did rise”, she explained, “but we never wanted to bring down the state, Davor begged and implored the institutions to do their job, we saw that nothing was ever going to be resolved at the polling station, you either hold elections or start a revolution. Ninety-nine percent of people came out because of David, but there was that 1% who came because they saw people in the street and though perhaps this time things would really change. But we told them we were not there to bring down anything but to get the state do its job. This was ‘democracy in action,’” Aleksandra

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explained. “Not a single shop window was broken, nobody threw a single rock, let alone stormed the institutions.” Gender and class were two strong markers in the Justice for David movement: among the people voicing their discontent with their present position of precarity, instability, and disadvantage, there were masses of women, cancer survivors, divorcees, and the so-called grannies (bakice) who came regularly, rain or shine. All of them identified with Davor as he “had nothing left to lose.” When Davor was released on December 26, 2018, protest walks started, and there was strong riot police presence in the square. On the first walk Davor led the masses to the Crkvena River, where David’s body was found and then lay in the same position in which his son had been found. The protests and marches between 26–30 December were the biggest and most powerful and eventually lead to the stricter police ban as well as to Davor’s exile on December 30. During those five days of marching I was not just a bystander but a witness too, I saw people helping each other with the battery lamps, with spreading information, with encouraging each other amid the loud cries all of us were uttering such as “justice for David and Dženan,” “stop unpunished murders,” or “resignation for Lukač.” There was some libidinal release and joy even during the night city walks as affect and discourse opened up more than symbolic ways of understanding why the prevailing nationalist discourse was no longer winning (Photo 6.10). After ten months of protests from March until December 2018, the group still had not achieved its goals. This period was also the run-up to the 2018 elections, and everyone profited politically from the status quo. The position collected political points by showing magnanimity and “letting the protests go on,” while the opposition capitalized on performative acts of support and solidarity. Aleksandra was hopeful that the opposition would win but when she realized how ineffective they were, she felt she had wasted her vote. She personally spoke with some opposition leaders urging them to take over the protests and lead the movement. She thought that Davor and Suzana “had too much on their plate as two working class people to begin with,” and toppling the government was beyond their capacity, but she also felt that “some politicians saw Davor’s charisma and fortitude as a threat.”

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Photo 6.10  Davor Dragičević laying on the spot David was found in Banja Luka

Tensions that arose with another political candidate, Draško Stanivuković, who saw himself as the new mayor and, allegedly, Davor as his second in command, as he was of the opinion that the local opposition leaders could not imagine Davor as mayor or a leader. On December 25, when Davor and Suzana were arrested, Aleksandra and two other activists stood on the square and, since the group had not yet been formally registered, they told people to disperse and not engage in any kind of confrontation with the police—they judged they were in a precarious position and wanted to avoid arrest. All of a sudden, Draško showed up and said he “brought scissors” and wanted to make a performance of cutting the police tape around David’s Heart, a heart-shaped shrine which the police were set on removing that morning. Aleksandra explained the situation and advised against that, but Stanivuković checked if the journalists’ cameras were on and did it anyway. In November 2020, he went on to become Banja Luka’s youngest mayor, ending the twenty-two years of SNSD rule in the city.

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Two years later, Aleksandra and Ozren both ran for office as members of the newly formed Movement for Justice in the November 2020 elections that defined itself as a left of center party. Although the party received only a couple of thousand votes, it did help Banja Luka citizens punish the former mayor Radojičić for never showing up at the main square but also brought a discursive change in terms of dealing with the past and bringing working-class optic even nominally: The story begins and ends with a child who had been murdered, both Mujo (a Muslim name) and Ivo (a Croatian name), not to mention women, will start uniting about the child murder case … I support the mothers of Srebrenica, the pain of any mother is the same, be it a Muslim mother or Suzana, one loses a cell phone and walks around like crazy until one finds it, let alone a child who they could not find and hug … we managed to unite people around a humane cause at the level of BiH, there was a spark, there was a seed, the people who came were a motley crew, very versatile (šarolik), and we were dangerous to those who built their careers on pigeonholing people according to their ethnicity. … We were all working class, hard workers, it hurt me, the rumors, I was never the one insistent on setting things straight and justifying myself (nisam se htjela pravdati) because if you do, you often have something to hide, but I was hurt … and I knew truth was like water, always knew which way to find.

Affect in this case shows up new political registers and intensities allowing us to work on them to brew new collectives in ways, which at least offered some potential for the emergent political moment like the “spark” or “seed” Aleksandra was referring to. The ontological consistency of being in this together, of bodies that feared for their children and future and were ready to fight, opened, albeit for a moment, a real, non-­ discursive kernel of enjoyment (Žižek, 1993, p. 202) showing how discourses could be constructed and deconstructed if enough hearts and guts were won. The absence of this enjoyment is why the project of constructing a coherent European identity has foundered: “Europe has not been capable of winning the ‘hearts’ and the ‘guts’ of the peoples of Europe” (Stavrakakis, 2007, p. 226) as opposed to American patriotism, which, by contrast, is thriving, because it is linked to the joys of consumerism: watching baseball matches, eating hot dogs, driving SUVs, and so

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Photo 6.11  Aleksandra Vranješ and Daniela Ratešić during the protests in Banja Luka in 2018

on (Kingsbury, 2008). Exploring the affective underpinnings of geopolitical discourse—whether it is aggression, consumerism, libido, fear, and so on—could therefore tell us a lot about the social effectiveness of discourse, whereas much of that would be missing from an analysis based on exclusively symbolic and discursive approach (Photo 6.11). When I met her in 2018, Daniela “Daca” Ratešić Došen was a forty-­ two-­year-old divorced, single mom, a certified medical nurse with a BA degree in medical management and a long career at the Republika Srpska Clinical Center. Before the 2018 protests, she had worked for a Serbian

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company selling hearing aids in downtown Banja Luka, but was fired by her boss in early in October due to her political activism. She was a registered humanitarian worker, and her daughter Katarina was a friend of David’s. When I started going to the protests, it was through Daca that I approached the movement and she introduced me to Davor. Our last meeting was in Zurich in early September of 2019, when she was already an asylum seeker, and it was then that she gave me a powerful and painful account of what happened on December 30, her last night in Banja Luka. I felt a strong connection with her from the very beginning, she was emotional, trustworthy, and had a powerful presence. She told me she was going to write her own memoirs of what was going on during the protests from an activist perspective. She said she had always felt close to Davor and empathized with him deeply. She began her account with what she thought was the bane of the movement: Daca:

In the square I knew how to recognize the vultures, the vultures who really only wanted to take advantage of him (Davor), and the vultures who wanted to infiltrate the movement. I was scanning people. Sometimes my daughter Kaća would say, “You are standing like a soldier, like this (demonstrates) and you are standing there, watching people.” I did it unconsciously. It was simply a maternal instinct when you’re protecting your child and looking out for threats. I gained a lot of enemies. Danijela: In the movement and outside of it? Daca: Everywhere. I literally put up fences limiting how closely people could approach the movement. I said a million times to the politicians in the square that they had a place where they could do what they needed to do for their people and not to come to the square to score points. … I said that openly to Draško Stanivuković and Branislav Borenović and those from the SDS. Davor lost his child and he was not a sandwich-man for political parties, I am like that, spiteful. Daca’s sense of agency was keenly felt in her rhetoric and her actions, and the way she acted as one of the faces of the movement. She had lost her job in October 2018, and by the end of the year she was in Germany

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as a careworker for a private company an acquaintance recommended her to. Angered by the opposition politicians meddling with JFD trying to influence the group in her absence, she came to Banja Luka from Germany for a reckoning, and to attend the rally which there was no way of canceling. A film by Tamara Denic, titled 284 Days,13 follows Daca from the day she arrived in Banja Luka as the police were removing David’s shrine, through her arrest, to her final departure from BiH to seek asylum in Switzerland. Daca is a strong storyteller: her interview lasted for two and a half hours, which was recorded in its entirety, and featured two important vignettes stood out: one about her arrival from Munich to tell Davor about Draško and one about her arrest. Daca:

so I am phoning all of our people who have a positive influence over Davor to come, it is 4 or 5 in the morning. I am waking people up, we have to prevent it (potential abuse of the rally by the opposition). He will gain nothing from it. He will only go to jail and he will get convicted. He will never find out the truth about his child. So we go there, I wake Davor up. Suzana is there with her husband Zoran. And we enter, I cannot wait any longer. No niceties, no “how are you”, no “what’s up”. I immediately go, “Are you out of your mind? Is it true that you have some sort of agreement with Stanivuković?” “Yes, I do,” he says. And I keep saying, “Are you out of your mind? Are you out of your mind?”

During the meeting with Draško Stanivuković at Davor’s home before the rally, there was a heated exchange between him and Daca. Davor eventually got fed up and asked them to leave. Later that day, after the rally, Daca gathered a group of young activists at the square and went with them to make sure they arrive to their homes safely. Along the way she met another group of activists and joined them later at a downtown café before returning to Germany. As they were having coffee, the police burst in. 13  https://vimeo.com/407253070?fbclid=IwAR1DGUBHiYgXFqrYqJn9L6XUtXJnSWQLSBvAh PeJnIuH-­ALrWEFNP-­eHZ7U

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they would have put a search warrant and it would turn out that I was running away. … So we walk into the café and sit down, I put my phone on the table. And we’re talking and this guy Dario says, “Here come the turtles!”14 I said, “Yeah, they’re chasing the people down, maybe they’ll head towards the market place.” And then all of a sudden everyone jumps to their feet, “Daca, run, they’re here for you.” Six of them surrounded me.

Daca was arrested and taken to the station where her lawyer was only allowed to see her in the small hours. She did not have her cellphone with her as one of the activists had picked it up when the police came. When they realized the phone was missing, the police handcuffed her and asked her to do a breath alcohol test. Soon they brought in four other prominent activists, Ozren Perduv among them. They were ordered to stand in front of a wall as the police officers, a man and a woman, talked about how the easiest way to kill oneself was by hanging. Hours later, in her overheated, stuffy, smelly holding cell her laryngitis flared up, she was taken to the hospital, where she was treated at the emergency ward and returned to the police station in the morning. Daca was kept in the emergency room for a couple of hours on Synopen. Her lawyer informed her she had been arrested for participating in the riots in the square. When she thought she was finally to be released and allowed to meet the press, she was taken to a different office to give a witness statement, where the inspectors told her she could be held for six additional hours as a witness before release. “This is a different matter,” they told her. Daca: “They do it deliberately to make you crazy. You are hungry, thirsty, tired, you haven’t slept. Then you have the good cops and the bad cops, mind games. “What’s the name of your daughter? What’s the name of your stepfather?” I say, “Katarina,” and then he takes his cellphone and starts typing. “You know you should take it down a notch. It would be a shame if someone else ended up like David.” I look at him, and I start to lose it. I’m looking at him and thinking, “Katarina is landing tomor-

 Local colloquial name for riot police in their chelonian gear.

14

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row and I have no phone to stop her, tell her not to come. And he’s still typing on his phone as if he hasn’t said anything at all.” She was finally released in the afternoon, and she immediately called her daughter to tell her not to take the flight to Banja Luka. Later that day she went to Munich, and from there to Basel, Switzerland, where she applied for political asylum. I met third-wave migrant Jelena Marjanović in Vienna in March 2020. She was thirty-one at the time, a psychologist and a mother of one child. She moved to Vienna in 2018 when her husband got a job with an IT firm, and she became active in the Vienna chapter of JFD. She kept up to date on the situation in Banja Luka, and in 2019, she approached Davor and Suzana to offer help. She eventually helped organize three international conferences in Banja Luka in September 2019 and 2020 and in March 2021, as well as set up a trilingual website, which also had a downloadable membership application for new JFD members. She said she joined the movement primarily because as a woman she sympathized with Suzana Radanović, because “Suzana was the most sensitive one.” Jelena’s contribution included setting up a civic association in Austria, recruiting new members among the diaspora, and maintaining international contacts with NGOs, diplomats, politicians, and scholars. She realized that the international community would be able to react more quickly if she launched a project, provisionally titled “Stop Unresolved Murder Cases” under the auspices of which she and others would conduct in-depth clinical interviews with each parent who lost their child in an unresolved case. Jelena: Many people came to Davor asking for help for their child, and we thought it would be good collect, scan, and compile all the legal documentation related to these cases, so we sent the project proposal to some foundations and the Friedrich Ebert Stiftung refused to fund it. Jelena had a clear vision of the project for which they requested funding, the project activities ranged from media content analysis to documenting activists’ experience of being part of JFD; from fieldwork, including data collection, transcription, translation, and digitalization of

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materials, to regular yearly conferences where the results would be presented. She wanted to develop a strategic plan for after the protests detailing how different organizations involved could organize debates and round tables act in their communities to raise awareness of human rights violations, including the unresolved cases of murder of young people.” She was well aware that the NGO sector was corrupted as well as the EU is corrupted too—she had no trust either but one had to try something. When I asked her why she thought representing these cases altogether was a priority, she said she came up with the idea “when Davor was going around visiting embassies they said the international community will react if there was at least 18 dead children. At least 18. So I said ‘we will give them 18.’” The statement itself is problematic in its brutality, but it also reflects the status of bodies to be managed in the periphery. She asked if I could help with writing grants and with domestic and international contacts to get things moving. She mentioned that Suzana even had a chance to speak with Sebastian Kurz, the then Austrian Chancellor who resigned in October 2021 over a political corruption allegations, but how there was still no news on Davor’s second political asylum application after he had been rejected the first time, “It hasn’t been granted in the last twenty or thirty years to anyone… Davor was applying for asylum according to the old law and Sofija Grmuša according to the new, and her application for asylum in Switzerland was rejected.” She also stressed the importance of the newly formed party, “Sofija is now in the party, it’s very important that Movement for Justice existed as a political party, Davor is all about that party,” but was worried too: Jelena:

“I worry that he doesn’t get disappointed. There are no people, there are no people there, my friends from Banja Luka for whom I would never think … (that they would leave), there are no people, even if October 5 was to repeat, there are no people there, Danijela.”

She had scheduled a meeting between Davor and me for March 3, 2020, in her apartment—I was looking forward to seeing him after almost a year and a half. I finally got to ask him a question that had been on my mind ever since the beginning of this journey, namely I wanted to know if he felt that, as a researcher, I was taking advantage of him in any way.

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Danijela: Davor, do you feel used and being used. I have the best intentions regarding my research but I would like to ask you how you feel about it, I believe there have been many researchers and journalists asking you the same. Davor: I don’t mind being exploited in that way. I’d never allow the murder of my son to be used for a reality show, for example, but I’m fine with exploitation that aims to spread the truth, not lies. There are all kinds of people out there, many are trying to benefit from this … I will give up my life so that my child could get the truth. Jelena: There’s been exploitation from the very beginning, and a lot of fake activism. A lot of people get involved seeking social status and self-promotion, because JFD is now trendy and cool. Problems begin when we ask them to actually do something. Davor felt very strongly about the (wo)man in the street’s general apathy, but he was far from disheartened by it: Davor:

This case speaks volumes about the people, and the structure and apathy of our society. I understand fear, fear and human feelings, that’s OK, it’s OK to fear, but to fear something that’s already there anyway, Dodik or Lukač, and their junta, that’s not fear. The people are like zombies, and they used to be a freedom-loving people. There were 40, 000 people in the square at one point, but out of those 40, 000, not 500 truly believed in the movement. I would bet my life that half of them voted SNSD in the elections.” Danijela: What were they doing at the square then? Davor: One guy wrote that he’d been waiting all this time at the Square for me to release the footage, and that I’d betrayed him. So he was there for a year just to see blood. I cannot wrap my head around the fact that he was expecting that I release the footage of my child being abused.

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Davor’s political strength at the square was immense but he was also aware that “one needed to work with people” (sa narodom se moralo raditi). He felt it was essential to have a reckoning with the past that was “horrific but unchangeable,” and start looking toward the future, but with a clean slate, as it were, “when they ask me about Srebrenica … I am Davor Dragičević and I never committed a crime in my life as an individual. Why would I apologize? I will apologize for what I have done and not on behalf of others … still, it remains a political responsibility. … We need to put things behind us, but properly, not to suit individual interests. The truth is brutal, but we have to accept it. And we cannot change the past. We have got to look toward the future.” The case of David Dragičević’s disappearance and murder is a complex one that can be analyzed from various perspectives. Why is a proper investigation murder being blocked by the entity institutions, which Davor referred to as “the state”? Why was the issue of police brutality allowed to fester and ruin the image of the city vying for the title of the 2024 European capital of culture, turning it into the European capital of torture? Is it possible that there is a parallel structure within the entity institutions that is protecting someone powerful? Can Banja Luka ever go back to normal life without finding out who killed David? Why have the police been sloppy since March 2018? Can we escape the kompromat in the absence of strong institutions? And what to do as a researcher who belongs to this constellation and who is affectively involved either by identification, political impulse, or migration status? Journalist Slobodan Vasković, one of the few independent journalists regularly publishing on Justice for David, may have hinted at the answers to some of these questions: They’ve turned Banja Luka into the only ghetto-city in Europe, and the Republika Srpska into Europe’s darkest corner, and they will continue to protect their hunting grounds in which they publicly hunt people down, every last one of them.

What does living in “Europe’s darkest corner” where “they publicly hunt people down” mean? What immediately comes to mind is Sedgwick’s (2003) work suggesting that critical analysis has become analogous with, and even indistinguishable from, paranoid thinking. Drawing on Melanie

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Klein and Silvan Tomkin’s thinking on paranoia, Sedgwick develops a picture of the critical thinker who, taking a “depressive” “anxiety-­ mitigating” stance, is continuously expanding their existing discursive universe to anticipate and thus negate any element of surprise (128, 130). “The critical thinker achieves this by putting themselves in their enemy’s shoes; that is, only by performing the paranoid fear is the theorist able to anticipate surprise. And even the failure to anticipate surprise confirms that you can never be paranoid enough” (Sedgwick, 2003, p. 127). Often, while doing this research, I have experienced feelings close to fear and paranoia, and this also holds true for my parents living in Banja Luka. They were glad I no longer lived there, although I returned in the summer of 2021. The country is beset by numerous political tensions, including the scenario of possible RS seccession, and while some citizens have tried to occupy public spaces and demand justice, more and more opt out, leaving BiH in search of a better future for their children elsewhere. It seems like a chain of suffering continues in the absence of a political vision and effort powerful enough to bring about meaningful change in a European periphery. This raises another question, that of accountability. For a long time now, Western and non-Western academics, myself included, researching former Yugoslav spaces have built careers on other people’s suffering. Is there a way to put an end to this, and what have we really given to those we researched? What can we give them, if anything, and what kind of a relationship is possible here? Are we merely recording and should we engage in more concrete political actions even as diaspora? The force of social movement performances lies in the act of participation and the arousal of hope for new worlds (Hynes et al., 2007). This is not just a hope for the future, but also a hope for an experience of new possibilities in the present moment, the experience of learning to be affected in collectives and thus contributing to the differentiation and proliferation of alternative economic possibilities for action. “Pedagogies of hope … offer ways of holding fraudulent political regimes accountable for their actions” (Denzin, 2006, p.  47, 2007), as I hope that opening of spaces where such regimes could be held accountable either by taking over the institutions or through a variety of possible noninstitutional and guerilla occupations, rather than a singular prescription for action or manifesto, is the way forward for social movements in the sense of reimagining

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and remaking the future (Andreotti & Dowling, 2004, p. 605). This line of political activism, mutual trust, and bodies acting together in forming constellations of struggle and hope is crucial for bringing forward greater social justice in the center and in the periphery alike, as well as for erasing the imaginary line between the researcher and the researched. In my last interview with Davor, I asked him about his outlook for the future. I wanted to know, if he were granted asylum and became a public figure in the EU, what would be his message to the people of the EU, as a person, and as the father of a child killed by “the state”? Davor:

Bosnia and Herzegovina does not deserve a special place in the EU. Everyone thinks that things will improve by simply joining the EU. Everyone needs to clean up their own backyard first. I firmly believe that coexistence is possible and that it is the only option, so respect and rule of law for starters. There’s an exodus going on and these people, or to be more exact, their children in ten or twenty years will never want to back. And they shouldn’t. If they want prosperity in their lives, they should probably forget our language.

While Davor believed in the possibility of coexistence but connected it with the rule of law, exodus seemed a more feasible option. For many peripheral selves, exodus seemed like the only way to save themselves and their children, something that would later be reiterated by many of my interlocutors in Germany. By assuming a specific relationship or positionality within migration and in the absence of any existentially stable position regarding citizenship, security of kin and economic security as well as group identity, peripheral selves in BiH were “patching their wounds” and leaving the country en masse.

Bibliography Andreotti, V., & Dowling, E. (2004). World Social Forum, Ethics and Pedagogy. International Social Science Journal, 56(182), 605–604. Bakko, M., & Merz, S. (2015). Towards an Affective Turn in Social Science Research? Theorizing Affect, Rethinking Methods and (Re)Envisioning the Social. Graduate Journal of Social Science, 11(1), 7–14.

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Butler, J. (2015). Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly. Harvard University Press. Boyer, A. (2018). Kansas City. A Handbook of Disappointed Fate. Ugly Duckling Presse. Connolly, W. E. (2011). A World of Becoming. Duke University Press. Denzin, N. K. (2006). The Politics and Ethics of Performance Pedagogy: Toward a Pedagogy of Hope. In The SAGE Handbook of Performance Studies (pp.  325–338). SAGE Publications Inc. https://doi.org/10.4135/9781 412976145.n18 Denzin, N. K. (2007). The Secret Downing Street Memo, the One Percent Doctrine, and the Politics of Truth: A Performance Text. Symbolic Interaction, 30(4), 447–461. https://doi.org/10.1525/si.2007.30.4.447 Dzenovska, D. (2019). Timespace of Emptiness. In R. Bryant & D. M. Knight (Eds.), Collection, Orientations to the Future. American Ethnologist. Dzenovska, D. (2020). Emptiness: Capitalism without People in the Latvian Countryside. American Ethnologist, 47(1), 10–26. Glissant, É. (1997). Poetics of Relation. University of Michigan Press. Hynes, M., Sharpe, S., & Fagan, B. (2007). Laughing with the Yes Men: The Politics of Affirmation. Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies, 21(1), 107–121. Illich, I. (1973). Tools for Conviviality. Harper and Row Publishers. Kingsbury, P. (2008). Did Somebody Say Jouissance? On Slavoj Žižek, Consumption, and Nationalism. Emotion, Space and Society, 1(1), 48–55. Ledeneva, A. (2006). How Russia Really Works: The Informal Practices That Shaped Post-Soviet Politics and Business. Cornell University Press. Retrieved February 24, 2021, from http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.7591/j.ctt7zdpw Majstorović, D. (forthcoming). ‘The State Killed My Son’: Security, Justice and Affective Sociality in the European Periphery. A Special Issue of Critical Security Studies, ed. A. Dwyer, A. Langenohl, & P. Lottholz. Massumi, B. (1996). Becoming-Deleuzian. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 14(4), 395–406. Sedgwick, E. K. (2003). Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity. Duke University Press. Stavrakakis, Y. (2007). The Lacanian Left: Psychoanalysis, Theory, Politics. Edinburgh University Press. Thrift, N. (2008). Non-Representational Theory: Space Politics and Affect. Routledge. Wetherell, M. (2013). Affect and Discourse—What’s the Problem? From Affect as Excess to Affective/Discursive Practice. Subjectivity, 6(4), 349–368. Žižek, S. (1993). Tarrying with the Negative. Duke University Press.

7 Our Migrating Laboring Bodies: When Periphery Moves to Center

The late David’s mother, Suzana, left for Wiener Neustadt in 2014 with her second husband, and David too considered moving to Austria permanently when he finished high school in 2015. Daca and Davor involuntarily became political asylum seekers in early 2019, along with a handful of other prominent Banja Luka activists As I was finishing the book, a week before the 2020 municipal elections in BiH, I received a text message came from a friend, a thirty-eight-year-old LGBTQ rights and memory politics activist, a veteran of many clashes with the police, someone I have always thought was fearless. He was almost done with his degree in psychology and had his ducks in order, but he was telling me he was leaving everything to become a care worker in Berlin. “I got the visa and will be coming in 10 days (Dobio sam vizu, palim kroz nekih 10ak dana).” “Bravo,” I said back, “come to us, what’s the feeling, are you happy?” (Bravo, dolazi nam, kakav je osjećaj, jesi sretan?) His response to me was, “sheer and unadulterated happiness (čista i nepomućena sreća).” A seasoned, well-known activist, almost done with his degree in psychology, was leaving everything to become a care worker in Berlin, happy to enjoy his forties as a free gay man without the burden of Bosnia. He was

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 D. Majstorović, Discourse and Affect in Postsocialist Bosnia and Herzegovina, Postdisciplinary Studies in Discourse, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-80245-5_7

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able to sell his laboring body at the German market in exchange for a salary that would provide him with a chance of normal life. The motto “Occupy or Leave” reverberates with the famous “To be, or not to be” soliloquy from Hamlet, because the question could be extended to “Whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to suffer, The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, Or to take Arms against a Sea of troubles, And by opposing end them.” Fortune has indeed been outrageous in the periphery. Hamlet’s dilemma embodies two contemporary trends that stand out in a summary of popular dissatisfaction with the current situation in BiH: lines of people in front of foreign embassies waiting for their visas to leave the country in search of employment, and people occupying public spaces to protest. Analyzing migrations on the “new margin of Europe” especially in the wake of the 2015 West Balkan Regulation and the coronavirus crisis, this last chapter builds upon the available theoretical, methodological, empirical, and epistemological nodes between the core/periphery or worlds’ system theory (Wallerstein, 1974; Boatcă, 2006), postsocialist studies (Buden, 2012: Todorova, 2009; Chari & Verdery, 2009), and postcolonial (Baker, 2018; Said, 1978; Azeez, 2016) and decolonial critique (Mignolo, 2011; Tlostanova & Mignolo, 2012; Manolova et al., 2019). Its goal is to somewhat distance itself from the established repertoires of both traditional and critical migration studies by relying on cultural studies and postcolonial analyses attuned to the politics/practices of migrations and bordering, and social and cultural histories of migrant bodies as peripheral selves, in this case either leaving or coming to Bosnia after 2015, stressing the necessity of this connection (e.g., Casas-Cortes et al., 2015; Nyers, 2006; Kasparek & Hess, 2014; Papadopoulos et  al., 2008; Mezzadra & Neilson, 2013; Anderson et al., 2009; De Genova & Peutz, 2010; Balibar, 2009; Anderson, 2013). In Blood, Bread and Poetry (2003), Adrienne Rich coined the term politics of location. In her book, theorizing begins with the material, not transcending the personal but claiming it. Variegated forms of contemporary mobilities, border struggles, and migration regimes in the peripheral European borderland (Balibar, 2009)—BiH and the Middle East—and

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Germany as the perceived core are shaped by the material reality of the national order of things and regimes. This gives meaning to mobility “in collective and individual narratives” in which “the experiences of mobility and the associated emplacement and displacement exceed their cooptation by national(ist) common sense” (Dzenovska, 2013, p. 205). A “poetics of relation” sees mobility as a type of decentering, conjectural and with no ideological stability or as Glissant (1997, p. 14) puts it, quoting the epitaphs of imperial conquerors, “Rome is no longer in Rome, it is wherever I am,” giving precedence to movement itself. Writing from a perspective informed by the legacies of French colonialism in the Atlantic, and before that slavery, his thinking on nomadism and “explosive” relations between the center and the periphery are, although abstract and mostly literary, more than relevant for understanding the current peripheral and postcolonial aspects of Bosnia’s postsocialism. “The root is not important. Movement is. The idea of errantry, still inhibited in the face of this mad reality, this too functional nomadism whose ends it could not know, does not yet make an appearance. Center and periphery are equivalent. Conquerors are the moving, transient root of their people” (Glissant, 1997, p. 14). Yet, when there movement from the center to the periphery and vice versa, what remains is movement from periphery to periphery, relation exploding “like a network,” and the figure of the poet as someone who “has the power to experience the shock of elsewhere”: In a third stage the trajectory is abolished; the arrowlike projection becomes curved. The poet‘s word leads from periphery to periphery, and, yes, it reproduces the track of circular nomadism; that is, it makes every periphery into a center; furthermore, it abolishes the very notion of center and periphery. All of this germinated in the works of writers such as Segalen, Kateb Yacine, Cheik Anta Diop, Léon Gontran Damas, and many others it would be impossible to name. The time came, then, in which Relation was no longer a prophecy made by a series of trajectories, itineraries that followed or thwarted one another. By itself and in itself Relation exploded like a network inscribed within the sufficient totality of the world. (Glissant, 1997, p. 29)

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Having migrated myself to conduct research and for family reasons, I wanted to know what motivated third-wave BiH migrants to migrate and what happened when they did. I wanted to find out what was happening with our peripheral selves when they moved closer to the center in terms of constructing, negotiating, and legitimizing narrations and reasons, former resentments and dissatisfactions to become part of a frozen-conflict-­ generated diaspora (Koinova, 2014) but also to account for the “affect and attitude of entrenched opposition” (Gibson-Graham, 2006, p. xxv) accompanying this becoming. In this ontological reframing and excavating, as suggested by Gibson-­ Graham (2006), I wanted not just to state the obvious, that in 2017 BiH and Serbia joined India, the United States, and China in being the main origin countries for skilled labor coming from outside the EU, but to dig deeper for explanations. Without any hope of joining the EU, most low-­ skilled workers arriving from the so-called West Balkan States (Serbia, Kosovo, Montenegro, BiH, and Albania) could at least hope to escape the predicament of postsocialist transition, move elsewhere, and live selling their labor power. Guest workers are often lauded for the role they played in Germany’s spectacular social and economic rise, which “rested in large part on an ‘underclass’ of migrant workers, who had been brought to Germany for repetitive and dirty work in a prospering industry, and then later, once the long economic boom was over, were coolly sent back home” (Nachtwey, 2018, p. 30). In 2015, when the Bundestag’s West Balkan Regulation,1 seeking to reduce the numbers of people seeking asylum (Bither & Ziebarth, 2018), made it easier for BiH workers to enter the German labor market, Bosnians started to emigrate in droves. However, because Germany considers BiH a so-called safe country of origin, asylum requests have little or no chance of being approved. The Regulation, also known as section 26.2., passed by the German Bundestag in October 2015, removed language and qualification requirements for accessing the labor market.  https://www.arbeitsagentur.de/vor-ort/zav/content/1533719184471

1

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Because for many of them the move meant a step forward in life, they worked more or less the same jobs they worked at home in the German labor market but for much better pay, while most middle-class migrants experienced painful social and symbolic decline with little opportunity for upward mobility, but for all of us the new emplacement was a rich site of analytical and political possibilities. In addition, Germany introduced the Skilled Immigration Act in March 2020, which fundamentally changed the way qualified professionals from non-EU countries immigrated to Germany. Now they were allowed to come for a six-month period to search for jobs, and with a valid employment contract or a job offer and a qualification recognized in Germany, a person could bring over his or her family without any checks by the Federal Employment Agency (Bundesagentur für Arbeit or Arbeitsamt), and whether a German or EU national was available for the job in question no longer played a role—people were now coming here to stay. There was a case of a physicians’ couple from a small town in Montenegro: the wife had been a psychiatrist who ran a small rehab clinic for drug addicts and she got into trouble with a local drug dealer, while the husband had been a gynecologist in a clinic where several infants died, so two or three senior gynecologists were suspended. Her car was blown up one night, possibly by the drug dealer as a warning sign, and he suffered the stress of working in three shifts due to the lack of personnel. Both of them invested their savings to move to Oberrad, Frankfurt, and enroll in the same language school in Sachsenhausen as myself, with the goal of raising their German to C1 level and obtaining physician jobs in the neighboring Wiesbaden, well-known for spas and clinics. Their goal was to use the West Balkan Regulation and leave Montenegro with their children for good so that they could have “some life, nothing more” (da imamo nekakav život, ništa više). Soon after arriving in Offenbach, I met forty-seven-year-old Edina Čović, who soon became one of my best friends, and Edina was someone who could speak about the three Yugoslav and Bosnian migration waves from personal experience. She used to work as a research associate and consultant for the Institute for Vocational Training, Labor Market and Social Policy (Institut für berufliche Bildung, Arbeitsmarkt und Sozialpolitik, or INBAS), which occasionally cooperated with the Federal

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Employment Agency (Bundesagentur für Arbeit, or BA) in the federal state of Hessen. Through one such federal program, “Integration through qualification,” INBAS was authorized to organize and coordinate counseling for all citizens with foreign diplomas using the Agency’s premises, and to mediate between institutions in charge of diploma recognition, diploma holders, the Agency, and sometimes employers. In addition, she also coordinated a skilled labor force immigration program for Hessen and was a literary translator from German into Serbo-Croatian and also a writer. Embodying personal experience with her daily job and poetic and literary aspirations, she also mentored me through this process. She never got over the dissolution of Yugoslavia and had “an aversion” to everything that came after its fall thinking of it as a “personal insult.” Edina lent us her car and invited us over to her place, she translated the paperwork that came in the mail that I couldn’t even read, and she gave her son’s toys to my son. Naturally, when working on this chapter, I wanted to run my findings by her to check for accuracy. She even happened to know most of my interlocutors, especially those from Frankfurt and Offenbach, having helped many of them with their diploma recognition. My interview with her was the last, and I wanted not only to document her life story, but also to have her views as a specialist in the field on the genesis of German immigration laws and how they had affected the lives of new and old immigrants. Edina was a child of Yugoslav gastarbeiters, economic migrants from the first wave who came to work temporarily for Siemens in Hanau in the early 1970s, first her father and then her mother. The flow of Yugoslav gastarbeiters was stopped in 1973, as the German market was saturated by foreign work force, through the law aiming to ban immigration for economic reasons (Anwerbestopp), which was occasionally modified by procedures that allowed for exceptions (Anwerbestopp Ausnahmeverfahren) whenever the market required it. As for Yugoslavia, there weren’t many jobs available in her father’s native region in the northwest of BiH, and her father, and he found himself in Germany, trying to make some money and help the rest of the family get an education and “get up on their own feet.” As the youngest of three children, she tried to join her parents in Germany on several occasions in the 1970s and 1980s, but this proved “nearly impossible,” as her parents worked in shifts, and every time she

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would end up returning to her aunt in Bihać. But the economic situation in Yugoslavia deteriorated and her parents wanted “to stay just a little bit longer, make some money, build a house, buy a car and come back with their savings and start a business at home.” As her father was wont to say, “I came here to live, not merely survive.” Edina spent summer and winter holidays in Germany, and she vividly remembered the performances, concerts, folklore shows, and recitals at the Yugoslav Workers’ Club in Hanau, on Tito’s birthday, May 25, where the Yugoslavs were well organized and had a strong sense of community despite the ghettoization: Yugoslavia was their homeland,, all the best there was, and in Germany everything was bad, other than the opportunities to make money. They lived for their summer holidays, brought presents for people and consumer products unavailable at home at the time. Back then there was no interest in German society to integrate these new migrants and have them stay. My father does not have a single German friend and he never really learned German, the integration courses that you know today, they didn’t exist. If someone wanted to learn German, they needed to pay through the nose, which gastarbeiters probably could ill afford, and since they were mostly construction workers, of lower intellectual aspirations, they didn’t want to invest time and money in that thinking they would return home anyway in a year or two. They lived in a Yugoslav ghetto, both at work and at home.

She finished elementary school in Bihać and then the economics. After graduating from high school in Bihać (and here I learned that my father was one of her favorite teachers) in the early 1990s, she went on to study hotel management in Opatija, Croatia, but when the war started, she had no papers to stay there, so her family decided she should come to Germany. She arrived on a student visa and became part of the second immigration wave from the former Yugoslavia. She started an intensive language course in 1992 and six months later enrolled in the economics BA program at the Goethe University in Frankfurt, after which she obtained an MA in Slavic studies and sociology. The 1990s in Germany saw a rise in the number of asylum seekers from all over the world, including refugees from BiH, and increasing

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violence against asylum seekers and nonwhite population. It was the period following the German reunification, and anti-Semitism and Islamophobia were on the rise. By drawing analogies between contemporary Islamophobia and pre-WWII anti-Semitism, David Theo Goldberg warned in his 2006 essay of the potential for anti-Muslim racism to escalate in Europe at some point in the future. Pointing out that “the Muslim represent[ed] the threat of cultural demise and, as the bearer of violent destruction, the ‘monster of our time,’” and was viewed as “inevitably hostile, aggressive and engaged in a jihad against Europe,” he wondered “how much longer is it to go from cultural animalization to the burning down of mosques than it was to go from the bestialization of Jews to Kristallnacht?” (Goldberg, 2006, pp. 346–348). And the Germany policy back then, according to my interlocutor, was in some ways reflected by the notorious slogan “Ausländer Raus,” whereas BiH refugees, once the war stopped, were to be sent back to BiH via deportation (Abschiebung). Between 1995 and 1998 people whose homes had been burned or destroyed in the war were able to get monthly or three-monthly visa extensions called “toleration” (Duldung), which postponed the deportation: German authorities viewed the war in BiH as something temporary, and proclaimed it a civil war so that the refugees from the former Yugoslavia could not apply for asylum, but were here temporarily, for as long as the war was on, and then they were to return home. For them there was a special limited residence permit (befristete Aufenthaltsbefugnis), and the intention was for them to return. The exception were the so-called contingent refugees who came via UNHCR, such as those from the town of Bosanski Novi, for instance, where the whole of Novi was moved to the former American military base in Hanau. Only those who came for humanitarian reasons and spent eight years here, their stay was considered legal, they had the chance to stay permanently and most of them did, and those who came via personal arrangements, families, or were here illegally, they had no long-term prospects unless they married a German citizen. On top of that, knowledge of German was a prerequisite and there was still a law that said foreigners could only be employed when there was no suitable qualified workforce from Germany or the EU. This law was in effect till March 2020.

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Most second-wave refugees lived in uncertainty and precarity, and then they would get a short-term Duldung, which was not considered a legal stay, but was considered a delayed deportation. As for Edina herself, it was the student visa and her parents’ financial support (she was not allowed to work) that enabled her to stay legally for eight years and set her on a path to citizenship, but her position was still precarious enough that she considered emigrating to Canada. When the German immigration law changed to shorten the minimum required period of residence for German citizenship, she was able to apply, and was naturalized it in 2000. When Edina got the citizenship, her husband also got it through her, and after eight years, they were finally able to get on with their lives as German citizens. “Only those who had support from their family and friends, or won scholarships, or had amazing jobs were able to stay. And it was always a struggle.” As for the third migration wave enabled by the West Balkan Regulation, as early as 2011 and 2012, Germany had a deficit of medical staff, and that was seen as grounds to amend the law yet again and introduce another set of exceptions (Anwerbestoppausnahme). “The market dictated who we were to let in. It was egotistical, protectionist, and capitalistic in its outlook.” Many changes were introduced at the time, including an obligatory integration course, all of which indicated that the new policy was geared toward keeping the migrants in the country for good. This meant that many newcomers had to get their degrees and credentials recognized, for which they needed to know enough of German to take and pass additional exams. Care, gastronomy, and construction sectors were exempt as they needed workers urgently. As for professionals, those who could support themselves for up to six months while looking for jobs in Germany could hope to be able to stay if they were successful in their job search. In other words, a person had to have a recognized diploma relevant for a regulated profession and an employment contract in order to come and work in Germany. Still, Edina noted that many were pouring in to work unregistered, including construction workers, waitresses, and cleaners with “bundles of keys to different German households,” who enjoyed the trust of the families they worked for but would not have been able to stay legally even after many years spent in the country.

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The portion of my education in the Anglo-American world and was mostly writing in English, but at the time I had no desire to be in the post-Brexit UK or in Trump’s America. Even though the move to Germany gave me a sense of stability and a certain amount of distance from activism and the academia, I lived a life suspended in mid-air, torn between nostalgia and an uncertain future of precarious employment and having to start from scratch at an age when most people would prefer to avoid fresh beginnings. The byproducts of my migrant life were watching my then four-year-­ old son go to a German kindergarten and school, making friends and mastering German with absolute ease, and us making friends with the first-, second-, and third-wave diaspora communities in Offenbach, a traditionally migrant, predominantly nonwhite city close to Frankfurt. This was not just me doing an ethnography or in-depth qualitative interviews with others, but an experience of actually living a migrant life in a poorer area of Schäferstrasse around Offenbach Hauptbahnhof along with other migrants from all over the world, surrounded by Moroccan mothers in hijab silently walking behind their husbands, Nigerian kids playing football, and Croatian Trockenbau specialists. There were the Serbian bus drivers, Greek hairdressers dreaming of returning to homeland and Polish shift workers getting drunk and holding speeches in our building’s staircase every Saturday night, all of us speaking bad German with a thick accent and buying discounted groceries in a local Penny, and our kids playing together oblivious to ethnic, racial, and gender differences. We were all part of the same global context as were similar the processes of making the Moroccan and Nigerian migrants to Germany postcolonial subjects, after the direct decolonization of the Western European empires, or ex-Yugoslavs becoming postsocialist subjects. We were all swept up by the same global migration processes, and what we shared as migrants admitted to the EU was our peripheral fate as laboring bodies. The center had peripheries too, in fact many of them. By analyzing interviews collected between March 25, 2019, and November 12, 2020, in Frankfurt, Offenbach, Mühlheim, Linden Holzhausen (Limburg), Lübeck, and Munich, intersections of class, race, and gender often played out as a result of labor opportunities in the daily lives of BiH migrant women and men. I used the method of in-depth interviews, ethnography,

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and critical discourse analysis, but what made this writing possible was not writing about, but writing “nearby,” in the footsteps of Trinh T. Minha, being there and having experiences and affects similar to my research participants and being allowed to document and tell their stories in an academic text. “And if the assumption of responsibility for one’s discourse leads to the conclusion that all conclusions are genuinely provisional and therefore inconclusive, that all origins are similarly unoriginal, that responsibility itself must cohabit with frivolity, this need not be cause for gloom” (Spivak, 1976, p. xiii). The main topics I discussed with my interviewees were those of emplacement “here” and displacement from “there” (Massey, 1994, 2005), both indicative of “partaking in tangible social and material relations and trajectories that make up particular places, subjects, and lives” (Dzenovska, 2013, p. 205). Many of my interlocutors became my friends, sending me job leads or putting me in touch with the people who knew people. What I learned was that migrant’s affect as a structure of feeling (Williams, 1977) is never just about oneself but a particular, translatable consciousness about other bodies, killed, hurt, or denied justice through wars, policing, isolation, and violence, with a politicizing potential to be a basis of solidarity across the globe (Majstorović, 2020). Yet, despite the political aspects of their decision to migrate, my interviewees did not seem to be interested in acting on any political potential after they settled in, other than voting, finding a job, or learning about the German labor market. They never spoke about party connections, all-important back home. Instead, they wanted to be integrated as soon as possible, thinking of themselves as “good workers.” Often in discussing their counterparts in the first and second waves, what counted was the integration and financial security embodied in consumer credit, and in this becoming German or “white,” a good portion of them displaying open racism (see Fox et  al., 2012), when talking about Offenbach’s interracial structure embodied in us versus them, crime and “Turks’ and Arabs’ different way of life” a “self-hatred of the marginalized” (Blagojević, 2002, p. 480). According to the most recent comprehensive study on BiH migrations and diaspora (Domazet et al., 2020), BiH’s large diaspora of around 50% of the country’s total population is attributable to unsustainable development. People find it difficult to meet their needs and aspirations, which

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is why they decide to leave and “seek their future in departure,” (Ibid., p. 7). Characterizing the current intensity of migrations as “destructive” these authors claim that “migrations in BiH today reflect youth attitudes that this country has done nothing for their benefit and that they simply have to look for a better life for themselves and their families somewhere where people are treated in a more humane way as economic and social beings” and “that one palliative measure, such as raising pay, cannot change such deep dissatisfaction” (Ibid., p. 7). The third migration wave made BiH one of the world’s leading exporters of bodies ranking eleventh on the global league table. “If microstates were to be excluded or the states with less than 0.2 million inhabitants, such as Dominican Republic, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, Grenada, Samoa, Tonga and Antigua and Barbuda), BiH would score third, right after Palestine and Puerto Rico” (Domazet et al., 2020, p. 18). As a direct or indirect consequence of the most recent war, the 2017 data show that “the size of the BiH diaspora is 1.7 million citizens” (Ibid.) and given BiH’s total population of 3.35 million, the BiH diaspora is in relative terms one of the largest in Europe today (Čičić et al., 2019, p. 67), with more than 15% having left since 2014 for reasons such as individual challenges and perceptions of the socioeconomic surroundings to the socalled postconflict influences. A little over a half of the BiH diaspora (52.4%) live in the so-called Yugosphere (Slovenia, Croatia, Serbia, Montenegro, and North Macedonia), and a significant portion live in Germany, as its economy provided most job opportunities especially unqualified jobs. Since 2013, BiH citizens have been quietly taking either under-the-­ table jobs, or making more permanent employment arrangements, mostly in Germany and Austria, but also in other EU countries. The German embassy in Sarajevo approved 13,300 visa applications in the first nine months of 2017 alone, and the number is estimated to have quadrupled since. In addition, Germany provides twenty-four-hour care for some 1.86 million of its elderly citizens, employing some 300,000 mostly female Eastern Europeans already (Lutz, 2015), but young men were recruited as well because of the high demand. In 2020, it was estimated that there 480,000 Bosnians and Herzegovinians in Germany only, out of the total population of approximately 3.5 million. According to the

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2020 Eurostat data, 71,375 people permanently left BiH in 2019 only, out of which, for instance, 18,307 left for Croatia and 31,765 for Germany.2 Migration was a strategy embraced by most people as they did not appear to view struggle and resistance as feasible. Subjected to the volatility of visa regimes, hard work, and uncertain market conditions in Western European countries, they accepted marginalization, but under their own terms, hoping to create better lives for their children if not for themselves. While the guest workers of the 1960s and 1970s, mostly men who usually came for temporary work, as well as refugees settling in Western Europe and the United States as a consequence of the 1990s wars, the third-wave migrations seem to be rather different. This time there was no open conflict to fuel emigration, although many would agree that the war in BiH had never actually ended and that what we had was a so-called negative peace (Galtung, 1996). People were leaving out of security reasons, this time with their entire families, in search of a more stable life. Traditionally, migration research (e.g., Castles et al., 2014, p. 25 ff.) divides migration according to type, into voluntary migration (work, au pair arrangements, migration, marriage, professional training) to forced migration (for political, religious, or ecological reasons; persecution based on sexual orientation etc.; displacement; human trafficking); “betterment” migration (to improve living standards), expert or career migration (also known as elite migration), interior, international or transnational migration that can be permanent, temporary, and circular (Amelina & Lutz, 2019). These categories overlapped for most of my interlocutors. For instance, some of the doctors I interviewed, who emigrated in 2014, fared well on the job market because they had been refugees in Germany in the 1990s and stayed until the Abschiebung, that is, the order that all BiH citizens were to return to BiH in 1998.3 When they came back in 2014, their German was already very sophisticated and they climbed the social ladder more easily.  https://www.rtvbn.com/3990931/alarmantni-podaci-eu-odliv-ljudi-zabrinjavajuci https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=y1BeNoF4CUE&feature=share&fbclid=IwAR1ovvIdJ0GDaylueGONp7 3Ud4kqI-­Uq1dzyYkpBOF0Pbmhxj65XaG_ob98 3  https://de.usembassy.gov/de/die-frage-der-rueckkehr-bosnischer-fluechtlinge/ 2

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Martina Löw (2016) proposes the concept of duality of space to stress that spaces are not only always structured, but they also have a structuring effect; that they are produced by processes of action, and that they cannot ignore the rules and orders governing them. In researching migration and labor, we are inevitably drawn to investigating what underlies various systems, logistics, and rationalities that can be found in the infrastructures of integration into the labor markets. When asked about my initial question marking the second decade of the twenty-first century in BiH, whether they would “occupy or leave,” some of my interlocutors said that they saw leaving as a way of putting up resistance while others connected it empathetically with the tragic death of David Dragičević. They felt fear that something similar could happen to their children and that someone could have just as easily covered it up and not been held accountable for it. Gender plays an important role in migrations not only because of affective labor, mostly associated with care work as one of the most sought-after positions in the current German economy, but also because of the unpaid reproductive work needed to sustain the migrant families. Female care workers and women with higher education and better German did especially well in terms of integration. In addition to class, it affects migrants’ motility, or “the capacity to be mobile” (Flamm & Kaufman, 2006, p.  167), playing a crucial role in whether individuals will succeed or fail in their attempts to move. Motility is defined “as how an individual or group takes possession of the realm of possibilities for mobility and builds on it to develop personal projects” (Flamm & Kaufmann, p. 168) but not every mobility is necessarily translated into a movement. Motility is constituted by three aspects: (a) access, or specific opportunities to access mobility (understood as ready availability of opportunities to travel); (b) skills, or acquired professional or amateur knowledge and the capacities necessary to plan such a journey; and (c) a cognitive approach, which involves a cognitive analysis of all available movement, something that was present in many of my interlocutors’ discourse. Motility for Bosnian and Herzegovinian women was greatly improved through online virtual communities, as well the establishment of low-­ cost airlines in Tuzla (Wizz Air) and Banja Luka (Ryanair), with the bus

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as a cheaper but less convenient alternative. For men, especially those who came without families, carpooling is another option. Space is socially produced by the interplay of social practices and material artifacts, and is also generated, in part, by interpretation patterns that are attributed to a variety of spatial categories, such as global/local and national/transnational, whereas “narratives of the spatial, such as distance and proximity or us versus them, are incorporated into the concrete social practices of families, networks, organizations, and institutions” (see Amelina & Lutz, 2019, p. 46). In the same vein, migration and mobility must be understood as being about assuming specific relationships and positionalities in order to avoid existentially unstable positions in the home country. Mobility is then justified through spatialization that incorporates specific readings, interpretations, small talk about lines at border crossings, telephone and Skype calls, and remittances to the family back home all embedded in specific interpretations that imagine spaces between a here and a there as being the result of emotionalizations and dramatizations, whereby “here” is extended onto “now” and “there” onto “then” (Amelina, 2017; Bajić-Hajduković, 2020). BiH migrants’ labor power was produced as a commodity despite filtration, control, and blocking by the border regime as the West Balkan Regulation by and large affected the politico-economic constitution of the German market post 2015. I wanted to see what sort of intersections were revealed between the labor market requirements and the experience of bodies as possessors of labor power, as a property of peripheral selves selling labor in the new German market, broadly using Mezzadra and Nielson’s (2013) border as method. This method made me interested in what kind of political subjectivities were emerging such as the figure of the citizen-worker (Mezzadra & Neilson, 2013, p. 251). I was interested not so much in migration as a social process or practice but in what kind of subjects people who were allowed to cross the border or prohibited from so doing were produced. I wanted to know what happened to them on their way from the periphery to the center, seen through their own lenses, labor “supplying the crucial theoretical key” (De Genova, 2010, p. 50; Mezzadra & Neilson, 2013, p. 24) between the bare life of an asylum seeker and sovereign state power to decide on the migrant’s status as a laboring body More broadly, I wanted to see how these new migrants

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coming from the peripheries as possessors of labor power embodied the hierarchies of gender, race, and ethnicity, which created the opportunity for them to sell this power while being molded and entangled by the complex constellations of a violent and traumatic past and the Dayton “meantime” (Jansen, 2015) they were trying to escape from. My selection procedure may have been affected by these reasons as well as an understanding that research was in many ways pioneering—a possible tip of the iceberg in future analyses of the third-wave, postsocialist migrations from former Yugoslav republics. Realizing how open-ended this might be, my goal was to single out continuities and changes, suggesting potential generalizations as well as each story’s singularity and specificity, including differences in age, education, level of German and citizenship, to show how versatility and skill were important for the migrants in establishing themselves on the German labor market. The age range of BiH emigrants to Germany at the time of the interviews was between twenty-four and fifty-two, the level of education was mostly high school and most were seeking jobs in care, construction, or cleaning. For the purposes of this chapter, I selected fragments from fifteen out of twenty-five interviews, eight women and seven men, due to the repetition of some patterns but also because of the depth of their stories. Halida (thirty-five), Andrea (thirty-six), and Petra (thirty-two) had college/university diplomas, while Boba (thirty-two), Jelena (twenty-­ seven), Sara (forty-three), Svjetlana (fifty-two), and Matea (thirty-eight) had high school diplomas. Halida had a degree in dentistry, Petra a law degree plus an MA in English, and Andrea had an MA in biochemistry. As for men, one, Novak (thirty-five) had a degree in construction engineering technology, whereas Husko (thirty-six), Željko (thirty-nine), and Izudin (forty-one) all had high school degrees. Aleksandar (thirty) was several exams away from completing his BA in political science, but he dropped out when he came to work as a careworker in Lindeholzhausen via his aunt in 2017. Svjetlana was interviewed together with her son Ilija, and husband, Zoki (thirty-two), while Aleksandar was interviewed together with his wife, Jelena. Of the eight women all were citizens of BiH, while five had dual citizenship and also held Croatian passports, which ultimately made it easier for them to enter the EU job market. Ilija and Zoki also have Croatian passports. Working in construction, they

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did not really require a high level of German, but Svjetlana, Ilija’s wife and Zoki’s mother, “wanted to invest in herself,” and she started paying for an A2 level course at the local adult education center in Offenbach as soon as she could afford it through her cleaning job. Since the West Balkan Regulation has been in force, relatively stable jobs contracts made it possible for people to plan bringing entire families: my hairdresser Sneža came with her husband who was working as an electrician at the Frankfurt Airport for close to 2000 euros net, she did cleaning and hairstyling on the side getting paid under the table, and she was working at a hair salon in Offenbach twice a week for a 450 euro, tax-free mini-job and receiving 204 euros of “Kindergeld” for each of her two sons. With a net income of between 3000 and 3500 euros in Offenbach, even while paying 900 euros for their apartment, they could live much better than they would have in BiH. Sneža knew this was temporary and was looking for a more stable job once her younger son got a place in a nearby kindergarten; with her getting a full job, even a low paid one, their net income would rise to close to 4000 euros but this was also the ceiling. Halida had learned German as a child refugee in Germany in the 1990s, Matea had learned it in elementary school and high school, while the rest had levels of German ranging from A2 (Svjetlana) to B1 (Sara, Jelena, Boba, Andrea, Petra) and were still actively learning. Aleksandar’s level of German “rose significantly” from his Prijedor-acquired B1 when he started to work. Novak wanted to obtain a blue card as a construction engineer and his pathway to Germany was Austria, where he first enrolled as an MA student in 2005 after completing his studies in Banja Luka. Jelena (twenty-five) is my husband’s cousin, who came to Germany in 2019 on a family reunion visa, since her current husband had arrived in 2017. She is a certified nurse with a B1 level of German and is willing to enter the labor market as soon as her child is old enough for kindergarten. Her husband Aleksandar got his job via his aunt, who has lived and worked as a teacher in Germany for thirty years (second-wave diaspora) and used her personal connections to find him a job. For Jelena and her husband, leaving BiH to work in Germany has been difficult, but they “did not want their child to live in BiH,” and were unable to attain a satisfactory standard of living. Through Jelena, I met Boba (thirty-three),

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who also got a job through the same aunt in Germany, just like her husband, with whom she has one son. Boba sees herself primarily as a care worker: she is driven and wants to excel, but she is also aware that her personal life suffers because she is “fully dedicated to her work.” Sara (forty-three) is an old friend of mine from Banja Luka, a former shop assistant with three children and a Croatian passport. She said she decided it was time to leave the country “when they killed David Dragičević,” and when she witnessed firsthand the corruption in healthcare while working toward her nursing certificate. In her early forties, she took her Croatian passport (she was born in Croatia) and completed a training course in nursing, a year-long voluntary practicum at a geriatric center and a clinical center in Banja Luka, and started learning German, all while working at the department store and looking after her family. For Petra (thirty-two), from Tuzla, coming to Germany for a promised, well-paid job in the university sector was a way to see what “her potential in a Western European country could be,” while for Halida (thirty-five), a dentist from Bugojno, the swift procedure through which she was employed as an assistant dentist at a prestigious Frankfurt clinic stood in sharp contrast to the corruption and favoritism she encountered in the local emergency clinic in her hometown where she had never been able to get a permanent contract. As for Andrea (thirty-six), a biochemistry engineer from Sarajevo, who I met through friends in Offenbach, “there was no chance of ever getting a job in my field in Sarajevo,” so she used her family ties in Germany along with her Croatian passport to start working night shifts at the Frankfurt Airport’s dishwashing facility. The unsociable hours turned her “into a zombie sleeping during the day and working during the night.” Matea (thirty-eight) is from Livno and she came to Offenbach in 2017 to help her single-dad brother raise his son. Her brother was a heating mechanic/plumber and he often had to be on call (Notdienst). Matea mostly lived on her brother’s income, but twice or thrice a week she would clean apartments for which she was paid under the table. “Whatever will be, will be, and I was poorer there anyway,” she said. And, lastly, Svjetlana (fifty-two), a refugee from Croatia who settled first in Bosnia and later in Serbia, who came to Germany in 2019 on a Croatian

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passport to work as a cleaner so she could retire in Germany at the age of sixty-five. What do all of these people have in common and why are their narratives significant? Their stories traced the trajectories of their migrant lives in the massive post-2015 surge of people from the Western Balkans to Western Europe, including more than 100,000 Bosnians and Herzegovinians. Living with them for three years while being a temporary migrant myself provided me with a firsthand experience of how we defined our peripheral selves spatiotemporally, through political and private reflections, from labor conditions, including networks, to gendered, familial ties. Notions of “here” and “there” and the volatility of migrant lives in Germany played a pivotal role in negotiating new roles at work, but also in leisure activities and social life. In the words of my friend Sanja (fifty-six), who has been living in Germany since 1988, “whenever I say I’m going home, this always means Zenica, never Offenbach.” With all of us, I found the stories to be about a wound as well, a somatized bodily affect that was both individual and transgenerational. I even became known as the “wave lady” as we often discussed migration in terms of the three entangled waves. Whether “permanent” or “temporary,” in pursuit of betterment or simply “doing what’s right for the family,” “forced,” or “expert,” I wanted to learn more about loss and gain, here and there, and otherwise complex texturing of center and periphery in relation to migration, not just through “traditional” interviewing but also through participant observation as an ethnographic practice of multiple coffee drinking sessions, Skype chats, and taking kids to football lessons together. We were in this together, here and there, then and now. Before coming to Germany, Jelena tried to find work in BiH after studying pharmacy for two years along with doing some youth outreach work in the NGO sector. She also did “nails and manicure” on the side. It was once she had received her tenth rejection letter for the nurse jobs she was applying for that she started thinking about leaving Bosnia for good. She started learning German in 2015 and by 2016 had a B1 certificate in hand. As a trained nurse, she knew she could get a job easily, but she wanted her boyfriend to test the waters. Her boyfriend, now husband, took German classes in Prijedor for months before arriving in Germany, but crucial for his success was a job obtained through his aunt.

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His aunt was able to find him a job as a care worker in a local care facility for the elderly through her personal connections, just as she had done for another couple from the Prijedor region who were distant family, Danijel and Boba. In the summer of 2018, Jelena learned she was pregnant and in March 2019 gave birth to a baby girl in Germany. This meant several things: she was entitled to the so-called Elterngeld (parent allowance) and Kindergeld (child allowance) from the province of Hessen and her husband immediately moved to a different tax bracket, all of which meant a substantial increase of their household income. You can advance here, especially if you learn the language well. In Bosnia, the pinnacle of human ambition is to get a government job and work from 8–4 but very few can get this. Here, if you have integrated, learned the language, and hold a job, they don’t have a problem with you. We are not a burden on the German state I went to school in Bosnia, somebody paid for it, and Germany took the product of that education. It would be best for Bosnia to sell its workforce. If Norway had paid for every person who came, Bosnia would now be a rich country.

For someone in their late twenties, this attitude reflects pragmatism as well as acceptance of one’s lot; she knows that a government job in Bosnia is a pie in the sky, unattainable for most due to political clientelism. Also her pragmatism does not leave much could-haves as she immediately shifts to a bright prospects future and personal advancement once a person is integrated enough culturally and linguistically. The integration may be hard but it will eventually yield results, “we are no burden to Germany” but are instead good and skilled workers, whereas Bosnian prospects are bleak, despite their acknowledgment that “someone in Bosnia was paying for her education.” She saw her role as diaspora as a powerful one, in which she and her husband can help their families, even treat them to something luxurious, and help them make ends meet. Most of my respondents shared a strong affective engagement with Bosnia, describing it simultaneously as the most beautiful place in the world and a place that should nevertheless “be set on fire” and which “everybody should move out of.” Izudin said whenever he came to

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Bugojno, he only wanted to enjoy himself either by pursuing his motorcycling hobby or organizing cookouts for friends and family in nature. Educated people like Novak and Petra, for instance, often brought up the issue of BiH’s weak or missing institutions and the lack of rule of law, especially as they thought of themselves as proactive, ambitious people who would not settle for low salaries, often paid under the table. Novak used to work for a road construction company, where he was always considered “the rebel.” He left because he was “enraged” with the corruption and exploitation but also because he felt he could achieve more in Vienna or Frankfurt if he obtained a Blue Card (die Blaue Karte), the coveted residence title and work permit for non-EU citizens. Novak’s attitude toward nationalism was ambiguous, he said he was “a bigger nationalist when he was younger” but soon realized that “institutions were everything” and that a lot of people in the Republika Srpska, which he called “the black hole of Europe” should go to prison and lose the elections. None of that happened, so the older Novak had to “bury his illusions,” feeling less and less that he “belonged where he was from.” “Nothing can happen there any more, we are no longer young,” he said to me over a cup of coffee in Offenbach’s Trocadero café. “I knew the police were corrupt, but to kill a young man?” His decision to leave was firm, as soon as his brother got a job in Wiesbaden Novak joined him, at first working small under-the-table jobs for a few months, but he eventually found a construction engineering job and had his “baptism of fire.” His role was to set up mobile telecommunications equipment and implement the so-called Ausführungsplan (execution plan) and Bestandsplan (file plan) while controlling the drawings, working directly with the “Bauleiters” (construction managers). He mostly used German words when talking about his job. I had known Petra (thirty-three) an activist with a BA in law and an MA in English, for years before our paths crossed again in Germany. She used to work as a teaching assistant at the University of Tuzla and as a consultant for some private firms in BiH. Her last job was for a prominent Mostar software company where she had a “ministerial” salary, paid apartment, and a number of perks, “the Bosnian dream,” as she put it, but in 2018, she decided to move to Munich and accept a job in tertiary education offered to her through one of her former business contacts.

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Interviewing her was relatively easy, as we knew each other well, and I knew she would not only talk about herself and her life, but also offer an analysis of the third-wave migrations. While discussing her own reasons for leaving, and as well as emigration from BiH in general, she reflected on life in the cities in BiH as opposed to the rural areas. Having lived in both Mostar and Tuzla, the third- and fourth-largest cities in BiH, respectively, she said that while Mostar was a divided city ridden with ethnonationalism, the economy there was “doing fine,” while Tuzla, a traditionally “red city” with the highest rate of interethnic marriages, had a staggering youth unemployment rate of 70%, which left her feeling that Tuzla was in fact “being punished for its multiculturalism.” For Petra, who moved a lot during her life, migrating to Germany to take a consultant’s position requiring a high level of German was a challenge, but not something that lay beyond her ability. The knowledge that he had something to return to in case she failed to build a life in Germany. As a former activist of the Tuzla’s Workers’ University engaged with the aforementioned DITA detergent family, where she “learned her most important lessons,” she said her passion was to deal with employment, but she always wanted to work for the private sector and not try out to get involved with local politics. Within a year, she found an even better job at the Ludwig Maximillian University in Munich. Tuzla is specific because of its multiethnicity but people are hopeless not just because they are jobless but because they are socially inactive and I wouldn’t want my children to grow up there … Tuzla canton is the most populated canton but there are … huge class discrepancies, only if you go 25km into the countryside do you see poor people. The center of politico-­ economic power is Sarajevo and you feel the socioeconomic shackles, corruption has been somatized and you have to work with these people, it’s hard … the civil society has been artificially created and it’s neither the educational institutions nor the business sector that dictates the climate, more and more people have left.

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When she talks about the protests and plenums of 2014 and the time when she worked with DITA4 workers, she points out that mistakes were made, but that “it was not in the interest of the Tuzla cantonal politics to snatch DITA away from the privatization. … Perhaps they should have insisted more on self-management along with better fundraising to collect money for operational costs, but there were people there who had not been paid for 30 months, some even died because they had no access to healthcare, the situation was dire which is why a strategic partner was necessary.” You come here from a system where there are no workers’ rights to speak of, and everything is flexible, the Germans tell you “you are too German for us”, employees work in the office 10 days a month and the rest is done remotely, they are pampered and protected like polar bears. Of course it’s not always like that, especially when we talk about non-white people in Germany.

Petra said “she was not “a typical representative of the new migrant class” both in terms of her privilege but also in terms of what she saw as wrong in her home country. For her, Germany was “a challenge to pursue and advance her prospects.” If she won the lottery, she would “open an institute for workers’ rights in Tuzla and an agency to deal with investigative journalism” in order to “bury them all.” She said “there was no left party or left agenda in BiH, perhaps only in trace amounts” and that “the left had allowed the right to dictate the rules of the game.” As for those without university education, most of them expressed interest in apprenticeship (Ausbildung), a one- or two-year practical technical training course. For the physicians and dentists I spoke with, diploma recognition (Annerkennung) meant a large raise and a social mobility boost, for both of groups getting your diploma recognized and getting a vocational training in Germany meant higher income and more opportunities for advancement. And these opportunities never run out,

4  https://distribute.utoronto.ca/um_groups/how-do-we-work-together-distributionpolitical-labor-and-worker-struggles-in-bosnia-and-­h erzegovina-·-como-trabajamos-juntosdistribucion-trabajo-politico-y-luchas-obreras-en-bosnia-­he/

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as age does not hold one down in Germany—in the words of Anela (thirty-one) who came to work as a waitress, “Here, you’re never old.” Jelena reiterated this perception of the unfixed nature of time, especially when it extends to the EU space, rendering a specific type of spatio-temporality: there in Bosnia, if you pick the wrong high school, you blew everything. Here you have the opportunity to reinvent yourself (kod nas, ako fulaš srednju školu, fulao si sve, ovdje imaš priliku da se ponovo izmisliš).

Jelena saw differences in privilege and negotiating power between German and migrant workers. In her view, migrants were “unable to fully use the benefits of the system because [they were] not as protected as German workers, they did not have permanent ‘Aufenthaltstitel’, which is why [they] settled for less and agreed to work overtime as [they] knew they could lose their job, whereas a German would go to a workers’ court.” Both Jelena and Petra spoke of their disappointment with the life over there while rationalizing the decision to come over here. They did not see themselves as “growing old” in BiH, and while both of them visited BiH often since their families still lived there, they saw the future of their children in Germany, not Bosnia. Care work is a field where one inevitably goes from the affective to social reproduction and back. This is especially true of women, but applies to men as well more recently. Neither capitalism nor socialism has done away with the asymmetric characterizations of reproduction as female and of production as male. The same is true of the distinction between “paid” and “unpaid” labor, with women still doing most of the unpaid reproductive work (Amelina & Lutz, 2019, p. 60). While the care work of mostly migrant women has been traditionally transnational, what is new after 2015, however, is that most BiH women come for arranged jobs in the care work sector. As Jelena put it, Germany is an ageing nation in need of care workers. It is people’s outlook that’s different. In BiH it’s a taboo, if you had an ill family member, you would be judged by the community if you did not care for them personally. In every Bosnian family there is at least one unemployed person who can

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act as a care giver, while in Germany that’s unthinkable because everyone is employed. It is pointless to pay a good monthly salary in nursing home fees if there’s a family member who sits at home unemployed. Germans have many other opportunities and they’re not interested in assuming responsibility for someone’s life when they can be movie directors and such, which opens up space for foreigners. A careworker is paid like a cashier, but he or she has a much bigger responsibility.

Boba (thirty-two), Jelena’s neighbor, left because of the economic situation. She was unemployed but tried to become actively engaged in politics during her studies when she approached the ruling SNSD. “When the party was formed it seemed that people of liberal leanings joined it, but it turned out to be a party of the right. My friends became members, and as they advanced politically their character changed. Money came first, ideas second, getting rich became more important than the community.” She said she did not benefit in any way from her party membership, and when her first child was born and her husband lost his village shop, they decided to search for work in Germany. “This bombardment with ethnic divisions became unbearable, obsessing over who’s a Serb, Muslim or a Croat, I didn’t want to raise my child in such atmosphere, I wanted my child to see others as human beings, not members of their nations. Situation here is not ideal, but at least in kindergarten they tell him we’re all the same.” While a gainful employment is the loss for the country of origin, it means a lot for an individual’s social mobility. Halida, a dentist from Bugojno in central Bosnia, first migrated when she was eight, and she and her family escaped from the Bosnian war to Germany, where she went to school and learned German. She and her family stayed in Ingolstadt until 1998 when most Bosnian refugees were deported by Abschiebung as the peace agreement had been signed. Her father was a physician and she thought of studying medicine but then opted for dentistry. After graduating from the University of Sarajevo in 2010, she spent five years trying to get a permanent job at the Bugojno hospital, but refused to join a political party. She volunteered for a couple of years, passed the licensing exams and saw her three colleagues get jobs but not

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her. When her volunteering, the manager told her that two other colleagues were hired and that there was no vacancy for her—she had to wait until a school dentistry clinic was opened. In 2014, on a beach in Croatia, Halida met Stela, a Bosnian woman whose friend worked for a Frankfurt-­ based maxillofacial surgeon. The surgeon owned a clinic in Frankfurt and was looking to hire someone from the former Yugoslavia because a lot of his clientele was from there. Stela recommended Halida, who applied for the job and was hired. She has since managed to get her diploma recognized, and does not plan on returning to BiH. Jasko (thirty-five) started his interview by observing that “what is happening is an exodus… because in the past, people went and returned … they won’t be coming back anymore.” He came to Offenbach in 2013 to test the waters. He stayed with a friend for a month and returned in 2014 spending a year in Offenbach illegally and working in bars. Eventually he got a job at Deutsche Bahn. “What troubled me the most there (in BiH) was injustice … everyone wanted a government job. I applied for the border police or the armed forces and every time I promptly received a rejection letter.” He gave me a poetic account of his experience with temp agency, the so-called Zeitarbeitsfirma or Leihfirma, which he called “modern hookers.” After seven months of working in bars, he got married and decided to apply to a temp agency as an electrician, and he spent the next eleven months at a construction site (Baustelle) while waiting for his high school diploma to be recognized. His qualifications were in mechanical and electrical work, and since electrical work was paid better, the firm offered to “rent” him out to a construction site: They make a deal and take a cut. For example, you work 40 hours a week, but you get paid for 35 hours. And then you have a tab with those unpaid hours of which you need to collect 100. When you collect the 100 hours in your tab, then they start paying you regularly. You need to work some 5 months or 20 weeks to get those 100 hours. So they take 5 hours every week from you, this is modern day slavery. So for example, there is less construction work in the winter, and the boss calls you and says “stay at home” but he pays you from the hours that you have already worked. These are German companies, just wait for Bosnian ones to figure it out.

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At the time, his wife was finishing her law studies, and he worked for thirteen hours every day except Friday. A friend from Livno told him to apply for a better job at the company she worked for at the time. He had his diploma recognized, applied for a managerial position, and spent the next four years as a facility manager. In 2018, he moved to a more prestigious job of an industry computer facilitator at SAP Deutsche Bahn, and still works there at the time of writing. Yet not everyone chooses to live permanently in Germany. Our household friend from Bosnia Marko (forty) has been working illegally in Germany since 2012, while his wife and daughter live in a village near Prijedor. Marko thought that life “down there” was “all in all good … you buy a case of beer and clear your head,” but he was very worried when “that Dragičević kid was killed by the state.” Marko was born in Vienna in 1980, and his mother was hit by a tram when he was little. His father got the compensation money in a lawsuit, and the family returned to Bosnia when the war started in 1992. When Marko went back to Austria a couple of years after the war, it was too late for him to obtain citizenship. He spoke some German and had family connections in Offenbach, Germany, where he managed to obtain under-the-table house painting jobs. One time he worked for a criminal investigator (CRIPO) without even knowing it. One night he was on his way home from work when he spotted a police vehicle slowing down. He instantly froze, thinking he would be arrested and deported, but the CRIPO man rolled down his window and said, “Hello, Marko, nice to see you.” Marko felt as though he was gifted with more time between Bosnia and Germany. I asked my friend Edina if it was possible to shake off one’s peripherality by simply moving to the center. She felt it was possible, especially in lower-paid positions, but she contended that it was indeed the migrants’ children who enjoyed the full range of available opportunities. An immigrant may stay peripheral here, but for their children, the chances are lower than if they were to live in the old country. There is another thing, that people who weren’t a periphery there, become a periphery here and to stay here only to survive. … The German dream is always about the material things, it means to succeed, to get accepted, to not be ghettoized, to be part of society. This is integration. … Language is key, there are

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opportunities, some even offered by the German Trade Union Confederation (Deutsche Gewerkschaftsbund) in Kassel, they provide counseling on employment contracts and working conditions. If a person can define her or his problem in German, there is a chance to get help.

Edina reiterated that “BiH was losing a lot in the process,” risking to become even more of a periphery with people leaving and settling in Germany and elsewhere. With these insights into the migrants’ lives and the range of opportunities available to them, another dimension was added to my understanding of the center-periphery dynamic—the one of time. The only way of ever knowing more about far-reaching consequence of this reshuffling was surely time. Despite the richness of the data and my own temporary migrant experience in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic, it was a difficult time to be strategic or act conclusively. One could but take stock and document, and accept that the questions we raise in time over time will be different and that the questions we ask ourselves now are timely and not belated.

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Bither, J., & Ziebarth, A. (2018). Creating Legal Pathways to Reduce Irregular Immigration? What We Can Learn from Germany’s ‘Western Balkan Regulation.’ Bertelsmann Stiftung, The German Marshall Fund of the United States and Robert Bosch Stiftung. Retrieved January 10, 2020, from https://www. bosch-­stiftung.de/en/publication/2018-­creating-­legal-­pathways-­reduce-­ irregular-­migration-­what-­we-­can-­learn-­germanys Blagojević, M. (2002). Žene i muškarci u Srbiji 1990–2000: Urodnjavanje cene haosa. In S. Bolčić & A. Milić (Eds.), Srbija krajem milenijuma. ISI FF. Boatcă, M. (2006). Semiperipheries in the World-System: Reflecting Eastern European and Latin American Experiences. Journal of World-Systems Research, 12(2), 321–346. Buden, B. (2012). Zona prelaska: o kraju postkomunizma. Fabrika knjiga. Casas-Cortes, M., Cobarrubias, S., De Genova, N., Garelli, G., Grappi, G., Heller, C., Hess, S., Kasparek, B., Mezzadra, S., Neilson, B., Peano, I., Pezzani, L., Pickles, J., Rahola, F., Riedner, L., Scheel, S., & Tazzioli, M. (2015). New Keywords: Migrations and Borders. Cultural Studies, 29(1), 55–87. https://doi.org/10.1080/09502386.2014.891630 Castles, S., de Haas, H., & Miller, M. (2014). The Age of Migration: International Population Movements in the Modern World. Palgrave. Chari, S., & Verdery, K. (2009). Thinking between the Posts: Postcolonialism, Postsocialism, and Ethnography after the Cold War. Comparative Studies in Society and History, 51(1), 6–34. Čičić, M., Trifković, M., Husić-Mehmedović, M., Efendić, A., & Emirhafizović, M. (2019). Studija o emigracijama: Bosna i Hercegovina. Akademija nauka i umjetnosti Bosne i Hercegovine. Retrieved December 1, 2020, from http:// cis.unsa.ba/wp-­content/uploads/2020/02/Zbornik-­Migracije-­s-­cipom-­za-­ stampu3.pdf De Genova, N. (2010). The Deportation Regime. In N. de Genova & N. Peutz (Eds.), The Deportation Regime: Sovereignty, Space and the Freedom of Movement (pp. 33–65). Duke University Press. De Genova, N., & Peutz, N. (2010). The Deportation Regime: Sovereignty, Space and the Freedom of. Duke University Press. Domazet, A., Domljan, V., Peštek, A., & Hadžić, M. F. (2020). Održivost emigracija iz Bosne i Hercegovine. Sarajevo: Friedrich Ebert Stiftung. http:// library.fes.de/pdf-­files/bueros/sarajevo/16523.pdf?fbclid=IwAR1FM4IPrfS SJdDyWZO5izmPYpfMbj9fE3wQyyas4RTrFk5uwBvRaolHAFk Dzenovska, D. (2013). The Great Departure: Rethinking National(ist) Common Sense. Migration Studies, 39(2), 201–218.

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Flamm, M., & Kaufmann, V. (2006). Operationalising the Concept of Motility: A Qualitative Study. Mobilities, 1(2), 167–189. https://doi. org/10.1080/17450100600726563 Fox, J. E., Moroşanu, L., & Szilassy, E. (2012). The Racialization of the New European Migration to the UK. Sociology, 46(4), 680–695. Galtung, J. (1996). Peace by Peaceful Means: Peace and Conflict, Development and Civilisation. PRIO. Gibson-Graham, J.  K. (2006). A Postcapitalist Politics. University of Minnesota Press. Glissant, É. (1997). Poetics of Relation. University of Michigan Press. Goldberg, D.  T. (2006). Racial Europeanization. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 29(2), 331–364. https://doi.org/10.1080/01419870500465611 Jansen, S. (2015). Yearnings in the Meantime: ‘Normal Lives’ and the State in a Sarajevo Apartment Complex (Vol. 15). Berghahn Books. Kasparek, B., & Hess, S. (2014). Border Regime. Cultural Studies, 29(1), 55–87. Koinova, M. (2014). Why Do Conflict-Generated Diasporas Pursue SovereigntyBased Claims Through State-Based or Transnational Channels? Armenian, Albanian and Palestinian Diasporas in the UK Compared. European Journal of International Relations, 20(4), 1043–1071. Löw, M. 2006. The Sociology of Space: Materiality, Social Structures and Action. New York: Palgrave McMillan. Lutz, H. (2015). The New Maids: Transnational Women and the Care Economy. Zed Books. Majstorović, D. (2020). Love as Practice of Solidarity: Of Peripheral Bodies, Embodied Justice and Associated Labor. On Culture: The Open Journal for the Study of Culture, Summer (9). https://www.on-­culture.org/journal/issue-­9/ practice-­of-­solidarity/ Manolova, P., Kušić, K., & Lottholz, P. (2019). Decolonial Theory and Practices in Southeast Europe. Special Issue of Dversia, 3(19), 151–167. Retrieved November 4, 2020, from https://dversia.net/4644/dversia-decolonial-theorypractice-southeast-europe/ Massey, D. (1994). Double Articulation: A Place in the World. In A. Bammer (Ed.), Displacements: Cultural Identities in Question (pp. 110–119). Indiana University. Massey, D. (2005). For Space. Sage. Mezzadra, S., & Neilson, B. (2013). Border as Method, or, the Multiplication of Labor. Duke University Press.

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8 Being in This Together: Of Quarantined, Global Southern and Global Eastern Bodies in Bosnia and Herzegovina

For centuries the Western Balkans (WB) and the Middle East have been frontier and migration regions and, despite their many differences, both of them share traits of peripherality in relation to Europe (Dunaway & Clelland, 2017; Wallerstein, 1974). These areas have recently also been dubbed Global South and Global East. Migration is not the sole property of peripheralization but its grim consequence on the one hand, and a chance for a better life the other, as we have seen in the BiH example. As I was writing this manuscript, the Middle East and the Western Balkans were being subjected to different borderings, including a permanent (post)war condition as a state of exception (Fassin & Pandolfi, 2010), division of political ex/inclusions, absence of human rights, and strong authoritarianism and sectarianism of the political elites resulting in more migrants “made mobile with their own relative point of expulsion” (Nail, 2015). While social categories such as race,1 gender, origin, class, and migration  A paradigmatic case of racial profiling was the one of two Nigerian student table tennis players who were arrested in November 2019 and wrongly deported to a camp in BiH by Croatian police who mistook them for undocumented migrants despite having valid visas they obtained to come to Croatia to participate in a table tennis tournament. (https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/ dec/13/nigerian-student-student-table-tennis-players-deported-croatia-had-visas). 1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 D. Majstorović, Discourse and Affect in Postsocialist Bosnia and Herzegovina, Postdisciplinary Studies in Discourse, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-80245-5_8

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status (as workers or asylum seekers) marked the difference between these two migrant populations, peripherality, poverty, uncertainty, crisis, and war or a postwar situation make them comparable. The border struggles they were subject to were inextricable from their everyday lives and experiences while migration and border regimes, assembling the logics of securitization, humanitarianism, labor-related immigration, and citizenship regulation strongly conditioned them to the effect of demographic and geopolitical changes in the home, transit, and destination countries. Just as core/periphery classifications found along intersectional axes of oppression are not only spatial or structural but also temporal, historical, longue durée dimensions in which peripheral selves are socially nested (Majstorović, 2019), bordering tends to follow a similar logic (see Green, 2005). Borders are “not simply spatial … but also operate in ways that are fundamentally dedicated to the temporal processing of distinct mobilities, ultimately consigning various categories of mobile people to one or another protracted trajectory of indeterminate and contingent subjection to the governmentalities of migration” (De Genova, 2017, p. 9). In August 2018, the refugee crisis brought thousands to Bihać, a northwest Bosnian town where I was born. Bihać figures as a topos from where I am able to understand my own memory of the socialist past and my Yugoslav identity, all of which was erased in the 1990s war. I am also a witness of new structural changes taking place in the far northwestern corner of Bosnia known as Cazinska Krajina (Cazin Marchlands) whose outcome is not easily predictable. Although a refugee myself, having had to escape Bihać in 1992 and settle elsewhere, some twenty plus years later I reestablished contact with a group of people from my hometown, both local and diasporic, with whom I subsequently worked together on different projects on a number of occasions. Among other things, we jointly wrote an abstract for the 2020 Bordering Culture conference in Frankfurt under the working title “Re(b)ordering and migrations in the European periphery: A view from Bosnia and Herzegovina” with the following summary: In March 2018, Bihać, a northwestern Bosnian-Herzegovinian (BiH) city near the Croatian border, emerged as the newest hot spot on the so-called Balkan migrant route. This is mostly due to the city’s proximity to Croatia

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and the European Union (EU). While the borders and routes elsewhere in Europe are being closed, the city is currently harboring approximately 3000 people from South Asia, the Middle East and Northern Africa who are desperately and repeatedly trying to cross into Croatia and the rest of the EU. The goal of this panel is to carefully examine everyday encounters, and politics and aesthetics of this border/order regime. Using a cultural studies perspective, the panelists explore these novel yet historically-­ informed relationships between people and objects, and policies and history that are emerging in this European semi-periphery—Bosnia and Herzegovina and especially the city of Bihać. This broad approach to the “field” encompasses several theoretical, analytical and methodological lenses including: a careful analysis of politico-­ economical aspects, such as different, historically-contextualized orders and regimes of governance or “crisis management” by different state and international actors; a reflection on post-colonial, post-socialist and post-­ war convergences; an exploration of different media and cultural texts shaping public deliberations, argumentations and representations; and an ethnographic examination of the local community’s daily experiences with the shifting situation on the ground. Through the interdisciplinary lenses of anthropology, critical discourse analysis, gender and race, media and labor studies, we investigate what happens “culturally” in these encounters. Our painstaking research includes: 1) postcolonial criticism of the Western NGOs handling the situation; 2) the role of the semi-absent state in BiH; 3) public sphere deliberations, including perceptions and representations of migrants with respect to race, gender, class, labor, nature (rivers, mountains, and trees) and infrastructure (life in, with and through socialist material ruins); and 4) research on simultaneous antagonisms and solidarity networks, divergences and convergences forged in the process of cohabitation and encounter. Moreover, through our different methodologies and analytical approaches, we hope to grasp and analyze different aesthetic-performative practices of inclusion and exclusion as well as different order-reproducing border processes in their specific context of northwestern BiH.

We had to say something and we demanded a discourse of integration, not just of racism, dehumanization, and hate. Given the current situation with the pandemic as well as with the opacity of humanitarian and security issues faced by Bihać and its satellite towns, it seems that the public

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imaginary after two years of living in this suspension is not going anywhere. Some activists and scholars pushed for a critique of the racism and brutality that permeates these issues, among them the young Bihać politician and a friend of mine, Aida Sejdić, who wrote an emotional letter to the EU representatives in October 2020 titled “Migrations, Bihać and the EU”2 saying that “Bihać is collapsing and burning” but “is not and must not become a camp.” Sejdić invited “the EU, the neighboring Croatia, BiH politicians, other cities and towns in BiH and all of her friends” to help by taking on part of the burden and responsibility, suggesting that the crisis was too big to only rest on the shoulders of one small BiH town. Although it took a concentrated effort to find a critical voice to speak about the struggles going on in the so-called reception camps, partly because of my own (dis)location at the time and partly because of the coronavirus pandemic, periphery can be further theorized by examining the situation happening in the northwestern BiH. Aside from individual acts of charity, it seems that there is no discourse there but the one of exclusionism at best and fascism at worst. The voices critiquing securitization and humanitarianism regimes spilling over from the EU onto BiH police, politicians, and private security and demanding that “something be done” is too weak to gain popular traction, let alone spread the message that the two peripheries are in this together, hostages of complex histories, geopolitics, and nationalisms producing genealogies of violence. How can we “decolonize” together and live better lives is big question this book tries to raise, and while I cannot answer it, I would like to point at the cracks offering horizons of hope so that dissenting voices at least resonate more loudly in the future. How are we to further theorize peripherality in relation to violence, privatization, social protests, and migration/bordering? The research on third-wave migrations from BiH presents a stepping stone, albeit an uncertain one given the shortage labor power as a result of the pandemic. The question remains how the most powerful nation states in Europe and the EU will respond to it this shortage, and what consequences will the response have for the periphery. BiH is not just a boiling cauldron of  https://www.facebook.com/sejdicaida/posts/3157902367668646

2

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underdevelopment from where labor force is siphoned off to the EU but also a permanent transit country and as of recently a reluctant reception country. Reception centers in BiH for the Middle Eastern, North African, and Southeast Asian migrants are closed at the time of writing, new migrants cannot be admitted, and doing research on these refugees is burdened with ethical concerns. One way of overcoming the problem of extractivism and exploitation, while seeking to arrive at shared and critical social knowledge that disrupts the existing power relations, is to be inclusive and truly recognize that we are in this together and that we have been made peripheral by similar struggles and regimes. An analysis that includes Syrian and other refugees alongside Bosnian economic migrants, as well as the ways these peripheral selves are managed as bodies, could potentially break new ground and clear a path for rethinking politics and action in the peripheries. Looking at these two groups of migrants through the comparative and intersectional prism could irretrievably change the ways in which European spaces and bodies are talked about, organized, and managed in transnational migrant flows, as well as change the social, political, and security infrastructures that aim to manage them. This peripheral “coming together” or a “union of peripheralities” calls to mind Glissant’s Poetics of Relation, which “at every instant and in every circumstance, by this particularity spelling our opacities, through this singularity, becomes once again the global experience of relation. Its death as generality is what creates the life it has to share,” whereby this movement allows giving-on-and-with the dialectic among aesthetics. If the imaginary carries us from thinking about this world to thinking about the universe, we can conceive that aesthetics, by means of which we make our imaginary concrete. … Thus, we go the open circle of our relayed aesthetics, our unflagging politics. We leave the matrix abyss and the immeasurable abyss for this other one in which we wander without becoming lost. (Glissant, 1997, p. 203)

What does this mean in the middle of a pandemic, as economies collapse and people die? Although a refugee myself, I am now more privileged than many others in refugee camps, yet although we come from

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various, power-differentiated communities, our experiences are similar when freedom, choice, or mobility is restricted. As a Bosnian citizen I am allowed to access the job market even though Bosnia is not in the EU. Many of my Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African counterparts who are currently in Bosnia are not. They are stuck between the brutality of the refugee camps in BiH and the slim chances of ever being granted asylum in the EU, in many cases with no home to return to. Yet how are we to form alliances and bring about solidarities if we forever insist on identity politics that merely counts, classifies, and obsesses over differences? We would do well to start by establishing relations, networks, and translation of knowledge about global justice and solidarities so that “bodies could have chances for life” (Haraway, 1988, p. 580). In the end, there is yearning, and mine, just as my research participants’, includes an excess of love for our families, and friends with whom we form coalitions in the spaces between the center and the periphery. While there has to be a way around reintroducing the grammars of modernity and colonialism in designating spatial inequality (Stoler, 2016), there is still a difficult-to-process excess of bodies inhabiting such spaces. There are multiple structural and cultural “peripheries” and “peripheries within peripheries,” inhabited by peripheral selves, bodies conditioned by multiple oppressions, including wars and policing, privatizations, denial of justice, as well as various gatekeeping processes from within and without, inhibiting the circulation of knowledge and people. These oppressions include historical as well as more contemporary practices, from racial profiling in the United States, to the Croatian police’s pushbacks at the EU border, Bosnian authorities’ everyday racism toward migrants, and clientelism in the distribution of jobs and justice fueling migration and poverty. The Justice for David movement shook up the stagnant political scene in Banja Luka and the rest of the country despite the police repression, and even though it failed to win a seat in the city assembly in its iteration as a political party, it did help propel Draško Stanivuković into the chair of Banja Luka mayor. It was precisely violence and lack of justice that contributed to my own decision to become a postsocialist migrant— postsocialism being an awkward, possibly quite inadequate term for the

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developments in the European periphery. Just like many of the people I spoke with, I did not want my child to live there, in this European, although not-yet-EU periphery because accountability was no longer organizational principle of society, and I had developed a fear of the police. Almost three decades after the war, there is still no accountability for the multiple expulsions of various populations during the war (non-­ Serbs from Banja Luka and Prijedor, Serbs from Bihać and Sarajevo, Croats from Travnik and Zenica, etc.), for the catastrophic privatizations of the early 2000s, for various other acts of violence that mostly went unpunished and further weakening whatever was left of the state and its capacity to serve society. Nobody with any amount of power ever went to prison. The word “state” now rarely refers to the nationstate of BiH. As my country was becoming complicit in the management of life and death of both domestic and foreign population and turning into a camp, I am trying to understand how the Balkan experience could be useful to Africans, Syrians, Indigenous peoples, African Americans, and vice versa. It is a matter of time before the “surplus populations” (Rajaram, 2015) of Middle Eastern refugees will be recognized as bodies that can be taken in by capitalism as living labor or killed by its war machine, as was the case in the Balkans in the 1990s, as is the case now in Syria, as will be the case in some future wars. How are we to learn from and listen to one another, as subjects of colonialism, neoliberalism, fascism, patriarchy, and imperialism? How are we, as subjects of ethnic nationalisms and ethnic cleansing fodder, to read race, and what it means to be Black, Jewish, Muslim, or Yugoslav? More importantly, how are we to think above and beyond identity, and focus more on class, inseparable from race as it is? Suffocated by the perennial question of whether we were or were not the same, I came to realize that dead bodies are not to be counted, compared, and measured, but smelled, or touched or felt like I felt the excavated remains of those killed in Srebrenica in July 1995 lying in the Forensic Center morgue in Tuzla when I visited in 2008. There our postcolonial bodies were counted, the peripheral bones measured, racialized, and gendered when necessary (Arsenijević, 2011). But those holding the

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line must build alliances, as “our positionalities, our postcolonialities, our peripheralities are competing with other more privileged Europeans on the labor market instead of seizing the opportunity to repair and revolutionize what we have already had” (Majstorović, 2020). Just like in the Yugoslav OOURs, the basic organizations of associated labor aiming to disalienate labor through democratization of industry, once the cornerstone of Yugoslav self-management. Some other questions remain as well, the much-contested issue of ethics, extractivism, and exploitation in social research informed by Haraway’s “situated knowledge” (1988) and Derrida’s “politics of friendship” (1996), as well as the issue of peripheral grammars and idioms informing peripheral selves. The question of grammar and language remains especially as we are left with calcified idioms “the clever and mechanized combinatories of languages may soon appear to be outdated, not so the churning of an idiom. The poet strives to create rhizomatous connections between his place and the whole, and to diffuse the whole throughout his place: permanence within the given moment and conversely, elsewhere within the here, and vice versa” (Glissant, 1997, p. 3). Rhizomatic connections surrounding periphery are not idioms to be freely picked up or discarded by those inhabiting or originating from such spaces. By saying someone was/is peripheral is not to claim for them an identity on the neoliberal marketplace of identities, but to assert that one can be born peripheral or become peripheral as a result of concrete socioeconomic and historical processes and assemblages in which one participates. “A ‘North’ is developing within the former ‘Global South’ while a ‘South’ is growing in the North. This development is based on all subaltern classes and in particular dark-skinned ones, who are made ‘scapegoats’ to turn the white ‘working poor’ and the unemployed against ‘immigrants’” (Samary & Leplat, 2019, p. 347). Just as a “single worker’s product could no longer be expressed as a product of his/her individual labor but as a product of associated, so to say social labor” (Kardelj, 1979, p. 8), single particular struggles against racism and injustice needed to become more integrated within BiH, the rest of the former Yugoslavia, now termed Western Balkans, and globally. I wonder what would happen with the Syrian refugees had they come to socialist Yugoslavia, would

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have we been better then? Would it have been easier to find David’s murderers in the old country? While I do not have the answers to these questions, I do know this is the time of alliances. Despite coming from power-differentiated communities, there is a potential for fusing or otherwise commonizing these collective experiences of peripheral bodies who have been oppressed by a violent logic and practice of the center. It is my hope to see this book contributing to the realization of that potential.

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Index1

A

Affect, xiii–xv, 2, 7–9, 26, 27, 71–96, 106, 110, 118, 122, 148–150, 157, 170, 172, 188, 195, 198, 203 Affect research, 71–96 Assemblage, 3, 5, 8, 9, 43, 71–76, 80, 84, 92, 93n11, 95, 96, 107, 111–130, 135–142, 148, 149, 157, 166, 224 Asylum seekers, 4, 6, 7, 27n16, 79, 174, 185, 191, 192, 199, 218 Autoethnography, 2, 9, 103–111 B

Banja Luka, xiv, 3, 4, 4n2, 9, 17, 21–25, 35n4, 52, 58, 61, 78,

79, 107, 111, 112, 123, 124, 130–133, 130n20, 131n22, 133n24, 135, 136, 138, 139, 148–150, 153, 154n3, 156–158, 160–163, 165, 167, 169, 171–175, 177, 178, 180, 181, 185, 198, 201, 202, 222, 223 Banja Luka Social Center (BASOC), 3, 4n2, 9, 24, 25, 103–142, 158 Body, xi, xiv, 1, 3–11, 15, 20, 21, 23, 26, 36–38, 43, 50, 58, 62, 71–96, 103–142, 147–182, 185–212, 217–225 Border, 1, 3, 6, 14, 24, 27, 76, 79, 106, 113, 163, 186, 199, 210, 218, 219, 222

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 D. Majstorović, Discourse and Affect in Postsocialist Bosnia and Herzegovina, Postdisciplinary Studies in Discourse, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-80245-5

253

254 Index

Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH), xi, xii, xv, 1–3, 6–11, 13–28, 13n1, 17n7, 19n10, 25n15, 27n16, 33–45, 47–54, 49n11, 51n15, 54n19, 56–60, 77–79, 81, 83, 86, 88, 92–96, 103–107, 110–123, 125–127, 125n19, 130n20, 131, 132, 134, 136, 139–142, 149–151, 157, 158, 160, 163, 165, 168, 172, 175, 181, 182, 185–188, 190–192, 194–212, 217–225, 217n1 C

Care work, 7, 10, 23, 185, 198, 202, 204, 208 Collective, 9, 15, 22, 24, 25, 44, 76, 87, 93, 113, 115, 125, 126, 133, 134, 141, 142, 149, 156, 172, 181, 187, 225 Colonial, 8, 15, 19, 35–41, 44, 46, 57, 62, 63, 75 Connolly, W. E, 73, 79, 150 Construction work, 23, 191, 193, 210 Critical discourse analysis (CDA), 2, 90, 195, 219 Critical materialism, 9, 71–96, 103, 107, 135 Cruel optimism, 95 Crystallization, 73, 91, 96, 107 Cvijetić, Darko, 81, 81n5 D

Decolonial, xv, 1, 4–8, 19, 33–42, 44, 54–57, 59, 62, 104, 106, 126, 135, 186

Deleuze, Gilles, 3, 9, 20, 72–76, 79, 83, 84, 86, 92, 96 Derrida, J., xiv, 24, 27, 105, 224 Deterritorialization, 79, 96 Diaspora, xv, 16, 47, 54n19, 131, 131n22, 134, 177, 188, 194–196, 201, 204 Discourse, xv, 2, 3, 6, 7, 36–38, 50–52, 55, 71–96, 105, 106, 110, 114, 131n22, 132–134, 148, 149, 155, 170, 172, 173, 195, 198, 219, 220 Dragičević, David, 9, 22, 34, 58, 78, 147, 150, 151, 151n1, 180, 198, 202 Dragičević, Davor, 4, 9, 23, 25, 57, 78, 151, 152, 154, 160, 162, 163, 171, 180 E

Embeddedness, 3, 4, 9, 111–129, 134 Embodiment, 85, 87, 157 Entanglement, xi, 3, 41, 42, 75, 77, 78, 87, 90, 157 F

February 2014, 9, 21, 24n13, 52, 61, 112–115, 117, 118, 120, 121, 122n8, 124, 132 Feminism, 85, 104, 116, 132, 134, 142, 158 Feminist, xi, xiv, 4–6, 9, 44, 46, 106, 132, 132n23, 135–142, 157 Freedom time, 8, 33–40, 43

 Index  G

Germany, xi, 3, 7, 8, 10, 25, 26, 41, 78, 88, 105, 110, 147, 148, 157, 163, 174, 175, 182, 187–194, 196, 197, 200–209, 211, 212 Glissant, E., 4, 5, 75, 154, 187, 221, 224 Guattari, Felix, 3, 72–76, 79, 83, 84, 86, 92, 96 H

Haraway, D., xi, 4, 5, 91, 139, 140, 222, 224 History repeating, 83, 92–94 I

Immigrant, 88, 105, 190, 211, 224 Immigration, 190, 191, 193, 218 J

Justice, xi, 1, 4, 9, 22, 26, 27, 38–40, 43, 49, 53, 54, 57, 58, 61, 83, 104, 112, 114–116, 121, 123, 124, 131, 132, 134, 147–182, 195, 222 Justice for David (JFD), 3, 4, 9, 10, 17, 22–25, 52, 57, 58, 72, 78, 110, 126, 147–182, 222

255

Landnahme, 53 Language, xiv, 3, 26, 27, 81, 90, 104, 182, 188, 189, 191, 204, 211, 224 Line of flight, 76, 84 M

Marx, K., 20, 55, 71, 83, 84, 86, 87, 95, 111 Materialism, 3, 9, 71–96, 103, 107, 135 Memory, 35, 73, 80, 81, 83, 92, 110, 116, 124, 131, 132, 138, 151, 158, 185, 218 Memory politics, 83, 116, 124, 131, 132, 138, 158, 185 Middle Eastern, North African and Southeast Asian (MENASEA) migration, 62 Migrant, xi, xiv, 4, 10, 11, 14, 23, 25, 25n15, 27, 75, 78, 95, 106, 110, 177, 186, 188–191, 193–195, 198–200, 203, 207, 208, 211, 212, 217–219, 217n1, 221, 222 Migration, xiv, xv, 2–4, 14, 15, 19, 20, 23, 26, 27, 54n19, 60, 62, 76, 81, 82, 96, 106, 111, 157, 180, 182, 186, 189, 193–200, 203, 206, 217, 218, 220, 222 N

L

Labor, 3, 18, 19, 44, 45, 57, 71, 111, 126, 127, 131, 135, 136, 188–190, 194, 195, 198–201, 203, 208, 219–221, 223, 224

Nationalist, xii, xiii, 27, 36n5, 37, 50, 94n14, 110, 123, 130, 132, 170, 205 New materialism, 3, 9, 72, 73, 83, 85, 86, 91, 96

256 Index

1992-1995 war in Bosnia and Herzegovina, xi, xii, 2, 15, 19, 26, 47, 48, 77, 79, 92, 93, 112, 130n20, 135, 150 Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), 8, 41–43, 46

Protest, xiv, xv, 3, 4, 9, 17, 21, 22n12, 23–25, 24n13, 52, 61, 62, 76, 78, 91, 104, 111–115, 112n2, 117, 118, 120–124, 125n19, 132, 137–139, 147, 148, 150–152, 154–157, 160, 162, 164–166, 169, 170, 173, 174, 178, 186, 207, 220

P

Participatory research, 7, 83, 106 Peripheral selves, xi, 1, 3, 5–8, 10, 15, 17, 20, 26, 33, 38, 57, 61, 62, 71, 75, 82, 90, 92, 94–96, 103, 107, 111, 126, 182, 186, 188, 199, 203, 218, 221, 222, 224 Periphery, xiii–xv, 1, 2, 4–7, 10, 11, 13–21, 14n2, 21n11, 24–28, 33–63, 77, 79, 82, 83, 95, 96, 103–107, 111, 124, 128, 135, 141, 142, 150, 178, 181, 182, 185–212, 218, 220–224 Poetics of Relation, 5, 75, 81, 150, 187 Politics of affect, 2 Politics of friendship, 24, 25, 224 Politics of location, xiv, 5, 8, 39, 40, 91, 96, 103, 186 Postcolonial, xv, 1, 2, 6, 33–63, 76, 106, 186, 187, 194, 219, 223 Postcolonialism, 85 Postsocialism, xv, 5, 9, 25, 34, 45, 49, 54–56, 78, 104, 125, 135, 139, 187, 222 Postsocialist, xii–xv, 1, 2, 6, 7, 9, 19–21, 33, 40, 46–57, 59, 60, 77, 78, 82, 86, 95, 96, 103–142, 151, 186, 188, 194, 200, 219, 222

R

Refugees, xiv, 3, 10, 14, 16, 20, 24, 26, 27, 51, 105, 191–193, 197, 201, 202, 209, 218, 221–224 Research, xiii, xiv, 2–5, 7, 10, 20, 25, 25n15, 35, 36, 46, 71–96, 104–107, 114, 118, 133, 134, 148, 157, 158, 163, 181, 188, 189, 195, 197, 200, 219–222, 224 Rich, A., xiv, 5, 39, 75, 91, 186 S

Situated knowledge, 5, 139, 224 Socialism, xi, 6, 8, 10, 13, 20, 33, 35, 40–48, 54–56, 59, 79, 112n2, 130, 135, 147, 208 Socialist Yugoslavia, 9, 33, 47, 52, 128, 224 Social justice, 9, 22, 61, 112, 114–116, 121, 124, 131, 132, 134, 148, 158, 182 Social movements, 2, 3, 19, 20, 33, 52, 72, 78, 83, 112, 113, 115, 119–121, 124, 125, 134, 150, 181 Surplus populations, 87, 223

 Index  T

Territorialization, 79, 80, 96 Trope, 83, 90, 92–94 W

War, xi, xii, 1, 2, 6, 8, 10, 11, 15, 19, 26, 33, 35, 36, 39, 42, 43, 47–54, 76, 77, 79, 81, 92, 93, 94n14, 95, 110, 112, 123, 129, 130n20, 131–133, 135, 142,

257

150, 151, 158, 191, 192, 195–197, 209, 211, 217, 218, 222, 223 West Balkan, 10, 203, 217, 224 West Balkan Regulation, 186, 188, 189, 193, 199, 201 Women’s Antifascist Front (WAF), 8, 43, 44, 76, 132 World War II (WWII), 8, 13, 19, 40n8, 41, 43, 45–47, 54n19, 62, 76, 79–81, 92, 93, 93n10, 126, 132, 133