The Divided City and the Grassroots: The (Un)making of Ethnic Divisions in Mostar 9811077770, 9789811077777

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THE DIVIDED CITY AND THE GRASSROOTS The (un)making of ethnic divisions in Mostar GIULIA CARABELLI

The Contemporary City Series Editors Ray Forrest Lingnan University Hong Kong Richard Ronald University of Amsterdam Amsterdam, Noord-Holland The Netherlands

In recent decades cities have been variously impacted by neoliberalism, economic crises, climate change, industrialization and post-industrialization and widening inequalities. So what is it like to live in these contemporary cities? What are the key drivers shaping cities and neighborhoods? To what extent are people being bound together or driven apart? How do these factors vary cross-culturally and cross nationally? This book series aims to explore the various aspects of the contemporary urban experience from a firmly interdisciplinary and international perspective. With editors based in Amsterdam and Hong Kong, the series is drawn on an axis between old and new cities in the West and East. More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14446

Giulia Carabelli

The Divided City and the Grassroots The (Un)making of Ethnic Divisions in Mostar

Giulia Carabelli Max Planck Institute for the Study of Ethnic and Religious Diversity Göttingen, Germany

The Contemporary City ISBN 978-981-10-7777-7 ISBN 978-981-10-7778-4  (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-7778-4 Library of Congress Control Number: 2017964129 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018 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, express 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. Cover credit: Dan Daley Printed on acid-free paper This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature The registered company is Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. The registered company address is: 152 Beach Road, #21-01/04 Gateway East, Singapore 189721, Singapore

Preface

In 2015, Radio Slobodna Evropa (Radio Free Europe) introduced several teenagers from Mostar as part of a documentary programme (Perspektiva) discussing how young people understand the ‘division’. When a young man stated candidly not only that he has never crossed to the eastern side or visited the Old Bridge, but also that it was possible to determine the ethnicity of people in Mostar because of their skin colour, the commentary section on the Radio’s webpage registered different levels of surprise and stupor from throughout the region. Some thought that the young people speaking were not representative of Mostar; some blamed their parents for imprinting fear and hatred into their brains; others refrained from commenting, arguing that (not being from Mostar) one cannot fully understand the situation. Where is the truth about Mostar? Which representation is more plausible? This is a monograph about the city of Mostar, in Bosnia and Herzegovina, a city that, in the eyes of many, became the epitome of ethnic divisions, religious violence and nationalist intolerance. It accounts for how processes of violent partitioning, and counter-processes that attempt to undo existing divisions, make, remake, and un-make urban divides. This book reflects upon how approaching the study of deeply divided societies means engaging with deeply divided narratives that are never settled. Accordingly, the main aim of this project is to provide a multifaceted and in-depth understanding of the social, political, and mundane dynamics that keep this city polarised whilst considering the v

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potential that moments of inter-ethnic collaboration hold in reimagining Mostar as other than divided. Nostalgically remembered as one of the most ‘mixed’ cities of Yugoslavia, Mostar became an ethnically ‘divided city’ in the 1990s when, following the violent dismantling of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, it was formally partitioned between antagonistic communities—Croat and Bosniak—in order to bring hostilities to an end. In 2004, the city’s administration was forcefully re-united by external actors and, since then, scholars, peace-makers, and urban practitioners have amply researched the misfiring of the (imposed) reunification, focusing on the resulting Kafkaesque bureaucracy, the segregated educational system, and the contested administration as a means to expose the national and international failure to re-create a tolerant, safe, and inclusive environment. However, less attention has been paid to actors, initiatives, and events that actually disrupt the encompassing logics of this ‘divided city’, which would create the very possibility for narrating (and imagining) Mostar as more than divided. Based on participatory research in Mostar, this book aims to challenge and destabilise the representation of the city as merely a site of ethnic divisions. Interview extracts, maps, photographs, vignettes, anecdotes, and personal memories will immerse the reader into the everyday of Mostar, as a means of exploring the inconsistencies, complexities, and problems arising from living in a city that validates its citizens solely through ethnicity. Against the backdrop of normalised practices of ethnic partitioning, the book draws attention to both ‘planned’ and ‘unplanned’ moments of disruption; it looks at how supra-ethnic spaces come into existence regardless of identity politics, as well as delving into the plans, practice, and expectations of organised grassroots groups that attempt to create more inclusive spaces in which the future of the city could be reimagined. In doing so, the book reconstructs the uneven history of re-building Mostar physically, socially, and politically. Conceptually, the book elaborates on crucial questions about the relationships between space, culture and social change. Inspired by the work of Henri Lefebvre, and in dialogue with critical urban theories, the book explores the becoming and un-becoming of Mostar as an ethnically divided city. It discusses how space is imagined, designed, and built at the level of political administration, and the various practices through which the city is re-appropriated, experienced, and lived through patterns of everyday life, thus emphasising the conjuncture and disjuncture between the actual, the planned, and the possible. By investigating not

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only how the city is administered, planned, and represented (in political and academic discourses) but also the ways in which the city is lived and used by its citizens, the book reveals the emancipatory possibilities that are embedded within (yet simultaneously suppressed by) quotidian practices of inter-ethnic cooperation. Drawing on the emblematic case of Mostar, the book promises to make significant contributions to three broad fields of study: ethnonationally divided cities, urban conflict studies, and the politics of grassroots movements in the context of socio-cultural segregation. It explores the discursive emergence of Mostar as an intolerant and hopeless place of division and the impact this narrative has on the everyday life of the city, the understandings of what the city can and cannot become, and the very possibility of subverting such ethnic divisions. It then contrasts the globalised production of Mostar as a place of ethnic hatred with the practice of local initiatives that make visible moments of cooperation, solidarity, and consensus building among supposedly antagonistic actors, which thus challenges the very representation of Mostar as perennially divided. This book discusses critically the limits of mainstream representations of Mostar as simply a site of ethnic hatred, and in turn excavate the struggles and expectations of activists and citizens who feel misrepresented by the labels of ethnic rivalries, and who attest for the existence of counter-movements that rarely become visible through academic or policy circles. What lessons can be learnt from these grassroots attempts to change the status quo? How can we write about ‘divided cities’ in a more complex fashion that situates the struggle for social change in a more visible light? How do we explore the everyday life of a divided city in such a way as to lay bare the materialisation of its potentials and to become a motor of social change? These are the ambitious questions that the book aims to answer. In offering novel explorations on divided cities, which critically engages with urban spaces of resistance in order to account for the activities of those who are already producing change, this book will be of interest to scholars, students, and urban practitioners studying ethnically divided cities worldwide. It will appeal to urban researchers interested in Lefebvrian studies, and peacekeepers working in deeply segregated environments. This book is largely based on the research conducted for my doctoral project within the framework of the Conflict in Cities and the Contested

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State project funded by the Economic and Social Research Council of the UK (RES-060-25-00150). I am also grateful to Queen’s University Belfast who awarded me a DEL scholarship to complete this project in the School of Sociology, Social Policy and Social Work. Some of the material presented in the book was produced and gathered through my collaboration with Abart, a platform for urban research and art production, which I also thank for allowing the publication of maps that were designed as part of the (Re)collecting Mostar project. I cannot but thank all those who contributed—in various ways— to the development of my research and book project. I am very grateful to my supervisor, Liam O’Down and various colleagues at Queen’s University Belfast—especially Martina McKnight, Milena Komarova, and Katy Hayward for their feedback on early versions of my doctoral work. For the many thought-provoking conversations around Queen’s library, I am grateful to Conor Browne, Delyth Edwards, Monika Halkort, Maylis Konnecke, and Merita Zeković. I am indebted to my research partners in Mostar and Sarajevo, many of whom became dear friends: Belma Arnautović, Đenan Bemen, Kristina Ćorić, Vlado Ćorić, Marina Đapić, Senada Demirović Habibija, Srđan Gavrilović, Katie Hampton, Goran Karanović, Đenita Kuštrić, Narcis Mehmedbašić, Muky, Claudia and Stefania Muresu, and Giulia Pischianz. For the generous and continuous support, I thank Anja Bogojević, Amila Puzić, and Mela Žuljević, the brilliant women who founded Abart in Mostar. For many inspiring conversations and for encouraging the writing of this book, I thank Aline Cateux, Gruia Badescu, Camila Cociña, Paola Dalla Vecchia, Aleksandra Djurasovic, Neil Galway, Liza Griffin, Zsofia Lorand, Dawn Lyon, Catalina Ortiz, Diana Pedone, Giada Pieri, Renata Summa, and Margherita Vezzosi. Special gratitude goes to my family, Marilena Goracci, Alberto and Francesco Carabelli and Alba Foglia for supporting and encouraging my academic aspirations and to my colleagues at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Ethnic and Religious Diversity, Jeremy Walton, Annika Kirbis, Miloš Jovanović, Piro Rexhepi, and Marina Cziesielsky. For the continuous support, advice, and for all the happy memories related to the research and writing of this book, I am forever grateful to Maria Andreana Deiana and Rowan Lubbock. Göttingen, Germany

Giulia Carabelli

Contents

1 Introduction 1 2 Imagining, Planning, and Building Mostar After the War 41 3 The Everyday Life of Mostar 83 4 Grassroots Movements and the Production of (Other) Space(s) 123 5 Conclusion 171 Index 187

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Abbreviations

BiH Bosnia and Herzegovina (Bosna i Hercegovina) DPA Dayton Peace Agreements ECF European Cultural Fund EU European Union EUAM European Union Administration of Mostar EUFOR European Union Force FBiH Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina HDZ Croatian Democratic Union (Hrvatska Demokratska Zajednica) HR High Representative HVO Croatian National Defence (Hrvatsko Vijeće Obrane) ICG International Crisis Group JNA Yugoslav People’s Army (Jugoslavenska narodna armija) MDG-F Millennium Development Goals Fund NGO Non-Governmental Organisation OHR Office of the High Representative OKC Youth Cultural Centre (Omladinski Kulturni Centar) OSCE Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe RS Republika Srpska SABNOR Council of antifascists and fighters of the popular liberation war (Savez antifašista i boraca Narodnooslobodilačkog rata) SDA Party of Social Action (Stranka demokratske akcije) SDP Party of Democratic Action (Socijaldemokratska Partija) SFRY Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia UN United Nations UNESCO United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organisation

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List of Figures

Fig. 4.1 Demis Sinancević (2009) Fig. 4.2 Aluminium plaque left at the Piramida Shopping Centre Fig. 4.3 Božidar Katić, OpSjene.ver.1.0—When people should be walking upside down with their legs lifted up in the air, Spanish Square, March 2011 Fig. 4.4 Boris Orenčuk—Individualna Radna Akcija 1—Bulevar, June 2011 Fig. 4.5 Boris Orenčuk—Individualna Radna Akcija 1—Bulevar, June 2011 Fig. 4.6 Gordana Anđelić-Galić—Ovo nje moj mir (This is not my peace). Partisan Memorial/Cemetery, September 2011

135 138 147 148 149 150

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List of Maps

Map 3.1 Map 3.2 Map 3.3 Map 3.4

and

Picture

Pre-war socialisation practices Post-war socialisation practices Pre-war spaces of fear Post-war spaces of fear

87 92 96 97

Picture 3.1 Spanish Square before renewal. February 2010

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction

Since the end of the wars following the dissolution of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRY), Mostar has become known as a divided city. After the wars, the two largest ethno-national communities, the Croat-Catholic and the Bosniak-Muslim, have resettled in two separate parts (the east and west sides) divided by a four-lane street, the Bulevar. Deeply divided societies such as Mostar are described as places where ‘ethnic identity is strongly felt, behaviour based on ethnicity is normatively sanctioned, and ethnicity is often accompanied by hostility toward outgroups’ (Horowitz 1985, 7 quoted in Nagle 2016, 19–20). In such environments, ‘strong ethnic allegiances infiltrate practically all sectors of political and social life, imparting a pervasive quality to conflict between groups’ (Kaufmann 1996, 137). Much has been written about Mostar as a divided city—a place of conflict, segregation, and ­ethno-nationalisms. This book proposes to re-engage with the analysis of Mostar by considering practices and discourses that challenge these entrenched divisions. I visited Mostar for the first time in 2005 with the UN Urbanism research project team.1 Although the war had officially ended a decade prior to my visit, the conflict was far from settled. I was taken by how the process of urban reconstruction had injected the violence of the conflict into architectural projects, filling the landscape with religious symbols mobilised as signs of irreconcilable difference between the two warring sides. At the same time, illegal constructions mushrooming throughout the city spoke loudly of the absence of coordination and monitoring at © The Author(s) 2018 G. Carabelli, The Divided City and the Grassroots, The Contemporary City, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-7778-4_1

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a centralised level. If the war had been about destroying the materiality of the city, the post-war scenario was still characterised by a fierce ­struggle over space. The (largely unregulated) process of rebuilding the city inscribed the new understandings of identity and belonging into the city’s landscape while reappropriating territories with the aim of creating (more) space for one community at the expense of the others. While Mostar was largely in ruin, many international organisations still had offices in the central, ‘neutral’ zone. The multiple fractures characterising the post-war city—the ethno-national divisions, the frustration of/at the international organisations, the corruption, the uncertainty, the war traumas—created a palpable sense of crisis that translated into two opposite attitudes; the international community’s hypermobility and the local community’s immobility. The foreign officials I met at that time were always busy, and all the appointments with them were scheduled for breakfast or lunch time in one of the two hotels close to the central zone, Ero and Bristol. The internationals were constantly moving from one meeting to another with an urgency one might expect in the face of a looming crisis. As Coles writes (2007, 85–115), an important part of their job was also to remain visible, which explains their permanent state of hypermobility. Local politicians blamed the ‘internationals’ for anything that did not work and the international officials blamed the local elites for irresponsibility and procrastination. The persistent crisis created a pervasive sense of political immobility. Interviewing members of civil society, one could feel the tensions produced by the unresolved conflict but also a sense of diffidence, uncertainty, and secrecy that made it difficult to decide, plan, or even try to move from the protection of the not-saying, not-doing, and not-sharing. Not only was the process of making decisions concerning the collective good rendered impossible; to simply have an opinion, in Mostar, became almost equally problematic. Attempting to access information from the Catholic and Muslim communities, I faced the stark reality of a conflict that was far from settled. There was reticence in commenting on how the city was being rebuilt because this could have been manipulated. Or, as I was often reminded, the information disclosed to me must have been kept confidential and never reproduced. Aleksander Stuler, an urban planner who worked for UN Habitat until 2007, reflecting on his experience poignantly summarised, ‘Mostar was a very specific case that required attention at many different levels; a delicate status quo characterised by inertia, where a mixed reaction to any move could be expected’ (Bittner et al. 2010, 162).

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Inertia explains well the atmosphere I felt then in Mostar, the sense that doing nothing was safer because it ensured that nothing could get worse. And yet, this inertia translated into the understanding that change could still happen, if only by an external force. In fact, the international organi­ sations that intervened to monitor the process of reconciliation and post-war reconstruction had been busy drafting protocols and guidelines suggesting the possibility for the two major communities at war to reconcile. But these were often rejected by local leaders, articulating lingering animosities. That is how, in 2004, the city had been reunified; after long unproductive talks and negotiations, an international imposition determined that it was time to move on and to reinstitute a unified city council even though there was little agreement on how the city would be managed. When I returned to Mostar in December 2009, to conduct research for my doctoral project,2 the city was dealing with the legacy of that imposition. The sense of crisis was persistent. There were far fewer international officials and organisations because the majority had left to attend to other conflicts and wars. Those who remained had become even more uncertain about the possibility for a different future. It was cold, grey, and rainy; walking around the empty streets of Mostar I had the clear impression of being in a ghost town. At the time of my arrival, the city had been without an administration for over a year, with all reconstruction projects halted in the absence of an approved budget. Internationally authored statements, urging the local politicians to find a solution to the persistent crisis, testified to the growing global frustration and anger at the lack of progress in Mostar. If, with the ceasefire, Mostar became the laboratory for peace-building practices, after more than a decade it provided evidence for their failure. And the sense of living in a failed city had become part and parcel of its everyday life. Many times, confronted with the complicated bureaucratic system or the impossibility of accessing services, I heard people commenting that only here could this happen, the frustrated reminder of the impossibility of shaking away the permanent crisis. Yet, living in Mostar for one year—until November 2010—gave me the opportunity to explore the city differently. I discovered the existence of grassroots organisations resisting ethno-national divisions that created pockets of unity in the divided city. By participating in the rhythms of everyday life, I became more and more aware of the difficulties involved in unravelling and making sense of e­thno-national memberships, loyalties, and belongings, and the complex way such

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categories fused with spatial claims to power, sovereignty, and justice. In other words, living in Mostar made me realise that the representation of the city as the contested territory among two groups that live separately without engaging with each other is only one aspect of a much more complex story, which also needs to be told. In 1983, Manuel Castells published The City and the Grassroots where he writes, Urban history is a well-established discipline. … Yet there is a great unknown in the historical record: citizens. We have, of course, descriptions of people’s lives, analysis of their culture, studies of their participation in the political conflicts that have characterized a particular city. But we know very little about people’s efforts to alter the course of urban evolution. There is some implicit assumption that technology, nature, economy, culture and power come together to form the city which is then imposed to its dwellers as given. To be sure, this had been the general case. … [But] it is in our view that … citizens have created cities. (Castells 1983, 3)

This statement conveys the motives that pushed me to write this book, and whose title pays homage to Castell’s inspirational work. Whereas many accounts of Mostar have been written to assess the progress made in bringing peace, reconciliation, and democracy to the war-torn city, this book enquires into the everyday of the city, to understand how the urban space becomes divided and what it means for Mostar to be a divided city. In other words, this book considers how the citizens of Mostar navigate the city, make sense of it, and envision its future. In doing so, this book aims to shed light on the existence of small yet radical pockets of inclusion where people mix, cooperate, and socialise across ethno-national boundaries. This book explores the formation of ethno-national identities spatially; it will account for how people move within the city, how they socialise, and how they use public space. As other scholars working in Mostar and, more generally, BiH, I too share ‘the discomfort’ (Hromadžić 2015) in categorising people in Mostar as ‘Muslim’, ‘Croat’, ‘Serb’ (or ‘mixed’) because of the limits of these ethno-national categories and their power to flatten complex dynamics into stereotypical representations of which group lives where, or wants what. These ethnic categories are both important and misleading. In Mostar, I have spoken to young, cosmopolitan, well-travelled individuals concerned with racism globally but

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adamant in refusing to befriend those not belonging to their own ethnic group—proving the extent to which shifting contexts and coordinates could change their perception of social justice and inclusion. I have met older citizens who remember how, during the era of Yugoslav federalism, their friends were from all ethnic backgrounds, suggesting that ethnic differences were known, but they were not, alone, a reason not to be friends with someone. I sat silent, listening to one of the few remaining partisans venting his frustration at the demise of the secular Yugoslav dream where everybody was just a socialist and everything worked fine. I mingled with many who were born right before or after the war; they preserve childhood memories of ethnic-related abuse, refugee camps, and foreign languages they acquired to attend new schools, but some decided to believe that people are to be judged according to their actions instead of their ethnicity and mobilise to create a more inclusive society. I have girlfriends who have partners from ‘the other side’ and met women who would never dare such a thing. I met parents of young children who are vocally pro-ethnic division and segregation (especially in schools) and others who teach their kids that ethno-national differences are not a reason for conflict, embracing what they describe as the ‘spirit of pre-war Mostar’ (see also Summa 2016, 196). More importantly, all these narratives and stories of ethnic exclusion or inclusion are not consistent. Rather, the like or dislike of the ‘ethnic other’, projects of inclusivity and exclusivity, and internal mobility in the city often depend on the context and the audience of the conversation. Stereotypes of the ‘ethnic other’ as the culprit of all evils are thus still present in daily conversations, especially when the need to place culpability for the many dysfunctionalities of the city must be satisfied. But then someone will most likely conclude that, all in all, we are all just people. It is important to remember that ethnic groups have always existed and they were not created by the secession wars. Accordingly, one should avoid romanticising pre-war Mostar as the city of peace and tolerance in stark contrast to the post-war city of hatred and division. Differences based on ethnicity were always present, but what has changed is the articulation of these differences as motives for outright segregation and intolerance. In one of his latest articles, Stef Jansen (2016), author of some of the most eye-opening portraits of post-war BiH, reflects critically on his scholarship (and legacy), arguing that ethnographers in the region might have downplayed existing nationalist voices, or addressed them as a direct product of brainwashing campaigns initiated during the

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conflict—arguments that somehow proved that people are not fomented by ancient, unsettled hatred, and thus rejecting essentialist/primordialist approaches. I interpret this as Jansen’s call to account for post-war BiH in all its complexities, by throwing light on both nationalist and ­antinationalist voices, which often coexist. This book was written with the opposite goal, that of making visible anti-nationalist practices in the city best-known for its nationalist voices. All in all, we both claim the need to challenge existing representations of post-war BiH to find the ways to portray complexities that often challenge entrenched binaries of division/unity, nationalism/anti-nationalism, conflict/solidarity. Of course, the book asks, in a country ruled by ethnic politics, is it possible to escape the logics of ethno-nationalism? And if this is possible, where do we search for resistance to entrenched patterns of division? If the political impasse in Mostar has become consistent with normal everyday life, how could movements countering the social injustice produced by spatial segregation possibly take place, and what would they look like? Jansen is addressing (mainly) ethnographers in this region to reflect on whether they might have been too lenient with nationalisms and why. This book embraces this call for a different reason. Mostar has been extensively analysed in terms of how its nationalisms dictate urban poli­ tics, but few have asked whether there is more to nationalism in Mostar than simply division and stasis. Indeed, existing processes of urban rebellion and movements against nationalism have been downplayed—they are too small, too short-lived, or too thinly populated to make them relevant. This book wishes to further a debate into the politics of representing Mostar (and BiH) to critically rethink how we understand notions of normalcy, identity, and ethnicity by embracing the very socio-political nuances engendered by the rhythms of everyday life. In short, the books aim to unsettle what we think we know about the city of Mostar. If the city was taken as the exemplary case-study of how the implementation of peace, reconciliation, and democracy prove difficult in deeply divided societies, this book proposes to re-examine Mostar once again, but this time to explore the social excess and surplus of action beyond ethnic divisions: the inconsistencies of ethno-national programmes, the moments of spontaneous solidarity, and the projects forcefully countering ethnic segregation. Overall, this book suggests that the division of Mostar, albeit real and present, is unstable, unsolved, and changing. This book discusses the many ways in which Mostar remains ‘divided’; its infrastructures, political impasses, and contested imaginaries

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account for the entrenched divisive practices that resign Mostar to one of the most researched ‘divided cities’. But also, the book wants to make visible the manifold ways in which divisive practices are resisted either because of contingencies or as part of organised movements. I do not intent to draw a picture of Mostar as devoid of conflict or to suggest that the division has been solved. Rather, I wish to reflect on how ethno-­ nationalism and movements against it are relationally shaped in order to assess how the perceived sense of immobility hides and holds very different political projects. In this introductory chapter, I begin by discussing the emergence of the ‘divided city’ as a pressing urban phenomenon and I briefly review the scholarship on ethno-nationally divided cities and to situate the case of Mostar. I pay attention to the work of scholars who look at inter-­ ethnic movements, supra-nationalist groupings, and the everyday life of ethnically polarised cities, and I explain how this book attempts to make a critical intervention in this field of research. In the second part of this chapter, I discuss the theoretical choices that underpin this research and I explain how Lefebvre’s theory of space production not only inspired my work but provides innovative tools for the study of divided cities more generally. Lastly, I reflect on my place in Mostar—as a foreign researcher, an activist, and an educator—to trace the different ways in which the material for this book has been collected, analysed, and interpreted. In doing so, I also wish to contribute to methodological discussions about how to approach the study of divided cities.

Ethno-nationally Divided Cities and the Relevance of Mostar as a Case Study Urban scholars have long explored conflict and divisions in cities (Marcuse 1993). If levels of division, segregation, and inequality are traceable in many cities, they become extreme in the case of what goes under the label of ‘divided cities’. These are places where segregation materialises through the erection of walls, the existence of buffer zones, internal checkpoints, and the production of material or immaterial borders that limit internal mobility and fuel (often) violent conflicts. Belfast, Beirut, Jerusalem, Nicosia, or Mostar are among the most popular examples of this urban typology. Conflict, in these cities, is characterised by ethno-national aspirations to exclusive sovereignty that manifests spatially into the desire to acquire more territory for one community at

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the expense of others. I use the concept of ethno-nationalism, following Connor (1994), to define a type of nationalism that is linked to ethnicity. Nationalism is sometimes used in non-ethnic terms and not all ethnic groups identify over a particular state. Ethno-nationalism refers to an ethnic group that strives for its own state. In other words, the term refers to ‘both the loyalty to a nation deprived of its own state and the loyalty to an ethnic group embodied in a specific state, particularly ­ where the latter is conceived as a “nation-state”.’ (Conversi 2004, 2). ­Ethno-nationalism defines political strategies that raise ethnicity as the chosen category to determine alliances and enemies but also, the concept refers to how the safeguarding of ethnic boundaries fuels aspirations of independence towards the creation of ethnically homogeneous nation states (see also Anderson 2008, 2013). Thus, ethno-nationally divided cities become both the stage on which struggles over urban territory play out and the incubator of broader conflicts over state sovereignty as such. Often, these divided cities belong to highly contested states—Bosnia and Herzegovina, Israel/Palestine, and Lebanon are clear examples—in which ethno-nationalism generates antagonistic claims to political power, feeding conflicts whose violence waxes or wanes over long periods of time (Bollens 2007; Calame and Charlesworth 2009; Pullan and Baille 2013). In a historical moment when nationalisms are on the rise, the study of these extreme cases of division has found renewed interest. So far, the diverse and multi-disciplinary literature about divided cities has interrogated how to manage conflict through the potentials and limits of consociational agreements (McCulloch and McGarry 2017), how to foster reconciliation via ‘peacebuilding in practice’ (Oberschall 2007), or how to enhance inter-ethnic dialogue, transforming antagonism into agonism, and in turn producing a shared society (Nagle and Clancy 2010). Yet, with the intensifying of research into divided cities, a number of scholars have also pointed to the limits of their shared label. Firstly, by grouping very different case-studies under this category, we obscure the many differences among these cities by focusing instead only on what they have in common: their division. This leads to simplified analyses that reduce historical, economic, and political complexities to stereotypical repre­ sentations of urban polarisations, which might limit the scope of urban research rather than broadening it (Allegra et al. 2012). Each city that became known as a ‘divided city’ has a different history that led to different conflicts, which need specific solutions: there is no universal formula for solving the crisis of ethno-nationally divided cities. Yet, as this book

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argues, there could be a benefit to looking at all these cities as morethan-divided searching for moments that disrupt the facts of the division shedding light on the possibility for these cities to host dynamic movements towards inclusion to which attention might not be given. This is an idiographic account of Mostar that does not seek to compare and define the experience of this city in relation to other similarly fractured environments at a general explanatory level. This book details the complexities of Mostar and its urban division as a process (rather than a fact) in order to solicit a shift in the literature about ‘divided cities’ that could engage with these extreme cases as not only places of division and conflict, but also as sites of solidarity, confusion, and resistance. Secondly, and directly relating to my first point, to label these cities as divided normalises their representation as places of permanent (and often unsolvable) partition annihilating the very possibility of social transformation. Proof lies in the fact that scholarly research about divided cities tends to be about management and transition rather that change, which is often perceived as impossible. For instance, the scholarly literature on Mostar tends to probe urban segregation by looking at its effects on the reconstruction and management of the city or everyday life. They examine how religious communities have been rebuilding their spaces in order to affirm their (antagonistic) identities (Makaš 2007) or criticise the conduct of planners who were never interested in rebuilding shared spaces—allegedly to boycott the process of reconciliation (Calame and Charlesworth 2009; Bollens 2012). But the very facticity of Mostar’s division is never substantially questioned, which thus gives the impression of an immutable reality. Crucially, these analyses are mainly based on interviews with officials, group leaders, and policy-makers. Yet, engaging solely with elite actors reflects a narrow selection of a specific layer of the population not only in terms of their public authority but, more importantly, their political membership (O’Leary 2005; Sasso 2016; Wilford and Wilson 2006). In fact, as in many other ethnically divided societies, power positions are bestowed according to ethnic quotas, and largely taken by candidates who are willing to comply with such a system—de facto facilitating and empowering nationalist discourses and divisions. The existing literature concerning the contested reunification of Mostar similarly fails to consider that elite understandings and visions of the city’s future do not always comply with that of the citizenry, assuming simply that Mostar’s dwellers are (silent) members of ethno-national communities whose views are automatically pre-determined.

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However, ethnographic accounts of post-war life in Bosnia and Herzegovina have already successfully challenged such an assumption, demonstrating that ethno-national categories are not static or solid (Hromadžić 2015; Kolind 2008; Jansen 2008; Palmberger 2010). Rather, such categories are negotiated according to the a­ lways-changing contingencies of everyday social agency. Thus, citizens do not passively inhabit their acquired constitutional identity but proactively engage with it, often in challenging ways. Similarly, this book embraces an understanding of ethnicity as a process of becoming (Wilmer 2002) and it will argue for the possibility of seeing the formation of ethnic groups as non-teleological, and to understand their crystallisations as the s­ocio-historical result of violence and the contingencies of conflict. A similar approach has already facilitated research into supra-national or inter-ethnic movements, such as the LGBT movement or the feminist groups in Belfast, or the ‘You Stink’ campaign in Beirut (Nagle 2009, 2016). As Nagle emphasises, these campaigns are rare, but also fundamental to peacebuilding. In fact, ‘nonsectarian social movements… contribute in different ways to innovative forms of peacemaking that lie outside of more official and established forms of conflict management …[T]hese social movements strive to challenge and unsettle the basic grammar and structure that support violent separation in the divided society’ (2016, 24). These non-sectarian groups are often unacknowledged both by academic scholarship and the international organisations guiding reconciliation processes. For instance, Kappler, discussing the positive roles of grassroots supra-ethnic cultural associations in divided societies, concludes that these are often side-lined because ‘they might not have a clearly articulated policy agenda nor do they respond to formal demands of project organisation’ (2014, 166) even though their activities and networks are fundamental to peacemaking. Accordingly, this book accounts for people in Mostar as individuals whose identities are constructed in complex and multi-layered ways, revealing unexpected moments in which ethno-nationality loses its centrality, becoming merely one among many factors, and not always the most relevant. By drawing on much of the debates highlighted so far, this book aims to make two critical interventions. Firstly, it wishes to contribute to the emerging literature about Mostar’s everyday life. Scholars such as Hromadžić (2015), Laketa (2015b), Moore (2013), Palmberger (2016), and Summa (2016) have written on the everyday life of this city by reflecting on the persistent feeling that Mostar is surely divided, but not

1 INTRODUCTION 

11

entirely so. This literature has started challenging the ossified representation of Mostar as a hopelessly ‘divided city’. This is not because the process of reconciliation has progressed substantially but rather because of the realisation that the ethno-national division cannot account for or explain everything that happens in Mostar. If it is evident that the city struggles to be reunified, and if this affects the ways in which people understand their position in the city and the limits that it entails, it is also clear that social dynamics often escape the logics of division, reflecting instead the fluidity and inconsistency of daily life. Accordingly, the book gives importance to moments and gestures that create inclusion and solidarity (even when they do not challenge openly ethnic politics and divisive practices) in order to reflect on what resistance could be/mean in Mostar, as well as other places of deep division. Secondly, like Wollentz et al. (2017), Kappler (2014), and Forde (2017), who have researched bottom-up approaches to ethno-national reconciliation in Mostar, this book looks at grassroots activities that transcend lines of division. It accounts for cultural and artistic projects that reappropriate public spaces to subvert divisive practices and create—temporarily—inclusive environments where ethno-national belongings lose their saliency. Overall, this book is an attempt to engage with the divided city of Mostar in all its complexities. Its goal is to make visible, rather than obscure, what does not make sense within established practices of division, in order to challenge the representation of this city as a permanent case of urban division—the missed opportunity. Conceptually, this book proposes to consider the city of Mostar as more-than-divided. This means that whilst the book interrogates the facts of persisting division, and how the process of reconciliation has been largely boycotted, it also surveys everyday practices and the activities of organised movements that contest, erase, and often re-establish ethnic boundaries in complex ways.

Henri Lefebvre and the Production of Space in Mostar This book was inspired by Henri Lefebvre’s call to multiply the readings of the city as a means to challenge normalised (and normalising) urban representations, and in so doing, forge radical strategies for promoting social change and justice (Lefebvre 2006 [1968]). As I have already discussed, the issue of representation is crucial when approaching the study of ‘divided cities’ given their tendency to be portrayed as places of absolute violence, segregation, and intolerant group behaviour, leaving little

12  G. Carabelli

or no space for imagining them as other-than-divided (in the present and in the future). Lefebvre argues that the ways in which cities are represented is itself a productive practice (1991, 40–46). Representations are ‘shot through with a knowledge (savoir)—i.e. a mixture of understanding (connaissance) and ideology—which is always relative and in the process of change… Representations are thus objective, though subject to revision’ (Lefebvre 1991, 41). The representation of a city, contrived through the discursive framework of elite knowledge/power, conveys the essence of an ascribed ‘urban reality’ that is adequate to a particular class project. Yet, being an abstract construct, this representation is also a simplification of urban dynamics, insofar as they remain silent on the complex realities of everyday life. Representations are programmatic in the sense that they facilitate a specific understanding of what the city is meant to be, and to become in the future. In this sense, representations support the idea that the present (and future) is plannable (and predictable). For Lefebvre, these representations play a crucial part in how we get to know a city because they shape our imaginaries and expectations, as well as limiting the very possibility to conceive change (Lefebvre 1991, 48–53). In fact, urban representations become normalised and, as such, are rarely challenged. This is why the majority of scholarship on divided cities is shaped by the ‘facts’ of division, yet rarely focusing on the often imperceptible (though no less real) dynamics of social change or resistance to such representations. In contrast, Lefebvre’s theory of space production provokes a confrontation with the ways in which cities are mapped and represented (in abstract terms) by giving credence and analytical weight to the contingent and contradictory practices embedded in ‘everydayness’. In fact, it is by living in cities that people not only make sense of the built environment, but decide how to use it and, often, reappropriate these infrastructures to counter imposed ideologies and norms. In other words, it is only by looking at the interplay of urban design, political discourses, and everyday movements within the city that a more complex rendering of urban dynamics becomes possible. Such an approach is also conducive to capturing the emergence of actors and movements that rebel against existing urban directives (often imposed without the consent of the citizens) to produce alternatives ways of living and using the city. Accordingly, this book also critically engages with the activities of existing organised groups of citizens, which attempt to disrupt the normalised cartography of the city in order to imagine and produce social change. The aim is ultimately to look beyond ethno-national divisions

1 INTRODUCTION 

13

and to challenge the main representations of Mostar as divided in order to account for the possibility of an urban revolution, which could produce a different urban space. In particular, the research interrogates Lefebvre’s claim for creativity and art in imagining and producing heterotopias: ‘the liminal social spaces of possibilities where something different is not only possible, but foundational for defining of revolutionary trajectories’ (Harvey 2012, x). This is a crucial point of Lefebvre’s theory that must be accounted for in relation to the scholar’s commitment to Marxian theory and its inherently revolutionary content. In fact, the theory of space production was written with a practical intent, i.e. to explore the capitalist mode of production, delineate its dominant spatial form (abstract space), understand its mechanisms, and in turn disrupt its rhythms to create a new, different space (heterotopia) (Lefebvre 1991, 419–420). The introduction of Lefebvre’s thought into the critical study of divided cities has only recently emerged, particularly in relation to the cases of Belfast (Nagle 2009, 2013), Jerusalem (Rosen and Shlay 2014), and Skopje (Véron 2016). Most Lefebvrian analysis has attempted to understand ethno-national divisions and the struggles against them through the lens of Lefebvre’s notion of the ‘right to the city’, in relation to the ‘right to urban life’, as understood as a ‘place of encounter [and] priority of use value’ over alienation and exchange value (Lefebvre 2006 [1968], 158). Though initially premised on the ‘working class’ as the true ‘agent’ of an urban revolution (ibid.), he later acknowledged the significance of much broader urban social movements—particularly in relation to the Paris uprisings of 1968—which went well beyond the traditional working class (Lefebvre 1991, 55). There is, therefore, a certain tension in Lefebvrian studies between more traditional interpretations of the right to the city as a fundamentally anti-capitalist project that transforms the entire field of social relations (e.g. Purcell 2002), and more fluid approaches that start not from canonical texts but from the concrete realities of urban struggle (in all of their complexities and contradictions) that give life to the very idea of a right to the city (Harvey 2012). It is from this latter perspective that Lefebvrian scholars have attempted to understand counter-movements against ethno-national divisions as particular instances of political struggles against alienating discourses and practices. As such, this book shares with these studies the commitment to understanding how individual citizens and urban movements instigate their own discourses on urban rights—on a right to a city without ethnic antagonism.

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And yet, almost a decade ago, Nagle (2009, 328) made note of the fact that, ‘[Lefebvre’s] ideas have not been applied to ethno-national “divided cities” with any systematic rigor.’ Since then, and notwithstanding the near-ubiquitous use of the ‘right to the city’ frame, the systematic incorporation of Lefebvre’s core framework into the divided cities literatures has barely progressed. The reason for this is not hard to fathom, as Lefebvre made little reference to questions of ethnicity and ethno-­ national identity throughout his oeuvre. As previously noted, Lefebvre’s true purpose was to deconstruct the spatial conditions of possibility for the capitalist mode of production grounded in the construction of abstract space, which attempts to abolish all particular socio-historical qualities, including ethnic identity (Lefebvre 1991, 49). Nevertheless, and in line with his general commitment to a relational theory of space (i.e., space as process [Lefebvre 1991, 83]), Lefebvre was clear that ‘[a] bstract space is not homogeneous; it simply has homogeneity as its goal, its orientation, its “lens”. And, indeed, it renders homogenous. But in itself it is multiform’ (Lefebvre 1991, 287). Abstract space is thus expressed by its parcelisation, which has its analogy in the social and technical division of labour. Such differences possess an inter-changeability, in as much as they are part of the same ‘whole’ (the capitalist market and space of commodity exchange), yet their differential content expresses the inherently multiform character of capital accumulation: on the one hand, accumulation presupposes the element of competition as a social mechanism of rationalisation, innovation, and growth. Thus, in concrete reality, “[c]apital exists and can only exist as many capitals” (Marx 1973, 414, emphasis added. See also Marx 1977, 40–51). On the other hand, the production of commodities takes shape through a multitude of companies, branches, industries and geographical regions, including spaces of consumption and reproduction—‘“public facilities”, blocks of flats, “environments for living”’ and so on (Lefebvre 1991; cf. Lefebvre 2009, 233–234). As Kipfer puts it: Demarcated by property divisions, transportation routes, and lines of functional and social segregation, these parcelized social spaces… represent forms of minimal difference… [which] dissociates everyday life, peripheralizes the working class, imposes much of the weight of reproduction onto women, and banishes new immigrants to “neo-colonial” shantytowns and the worst public housing tracts. (2008, 202; see also Lefebvre 1976, 84–85)

1 INTRODUCTION 

15

Drawing upon the adage of colonial administration, the production of abstract space, and its continued reproduction, relies on the fact that ‘it divides and rules’ (Lefebvre 1991, 388). What, then, is the relationship between abstract space—as a dialectical process of unity/fragmentation under the dominance of capital—and the politics of ethno-nationalism? At first sight this is not an easy question to answer. But its resolution surely lies in the broader framework outlined in The Production of Space, which was directly engaged within the problem of abstract space itself.

The Spatial Triad, or on the Process of Unravelling Space in Mostar Lefebvre’s reference to the conceived, perceived, and lived provides the core theoretical framework for the dialectical reading of social space. Considering the interplay of physical, mental, and social space, as they inherently co-participate in the production of ‘the urban’, this book undoes the process that leads to producing Mostar as a divided city. This Lefebvrian investigation necessarily engages with the ­ materiality of space as well as the ways in which cities are created (and recreated) through social interactions, negotiations, and imaginaries. In fact, Lefebvre was the first to argue that space is not a passive locus of social relations (1991, 11), but rather the product of social interactions and contestation. As a means of exploring the process of space production, Lefebvre elaborates the analytical tool of the ‘spatial triad’. He thus imagines urban space as the result of a continuous interaction of three moments: representations of space, representational spaces, and spatial practice (1991, 38–42): Representations of space (conceived) refer to the conceptualised spaces of those in charge of designing and building space, such as planners, architects, and bureaucrats (the dominant strata). This is the dominant space of any society, and corresponds to the dominant mode of production, constructed by hegemonic classes according to a certain politico-economic agenda, carefully choosing symbols, signs, and forms to develop a certain plan. The level ultimately congeals itself in the form of discourse. Representations of space could either be written ­descriptions and definitions of space, as well as maps and plans.

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Representational spaces (lived) are the inhabited spaces, the space of dwellers and users. Representational spaces are directly lived and could be passively experienced, or appropriated and changed by imagination. The level of the space of representation is the level of the symbol and it directly links to the process of making sense of space and its material practice by interpreting its materiality. Thus, representational spaces overlap physical space and make use of the built environment. The level of representational spaces must also be understood as the level of the irrational, of emotions and instinct. In other words, this level accounts for social imagination and the ways in which it is produced. Representational spaces are alive and they “have a practical impact in the ways in which they transform and modify urban texture” (Lefebvre 1991, 42, emphasis added). Spatial practices (perceived) are ‘the specific spatial competence and performance of every society member’ (Lefebvre 1991, 38). Spatial practices count on the production and reproduction of space and guarantee continuity and a certain level of societal coherence. Spatial practices result from ‘articulation and connection of elements or activities’ of individuals (Schmid 2008, 36). Therefore, this level refers to the ways in which a society is held together both at the level of infrastructures and everyday material (re)production.3 While the three moments of the triad aim to express the indivisibility of social space, and the always-connected relationships of the conceived, perceived, and lived, the three moments of the triad must also be understood as a means to disentangle space, with the final goal of ­reconstructing the historically specific ways in which the three moments cohere. As Lefebvre emphasised: The understanding of space cannot reduce the lived to the conceived, nor the body to a geometric or optical abstraction. On the contrary: this understanding must begin with the lived and the body, that is, from a space occupied by an organic, living, and thinking being. This being has (is) its space, circumscribed in its immediate surroundings, but threatened or favoured by that which is distant. Within the reach of the body, that is, of the hands, it is what is useful or harmful to it; beyond this proximity begins a social space that stretches out without well-defined limits into physical and cosmic space. Three distinct spheres and zones: the mental, the social, the cosmic – the lived body, the close, the distant. (Lefebvre 2009, 229)

1 INTRODUCTION 

17

What is being set up here is a type of ontological layering, whereby the inter-related elements are conveyed as existing in a type of e­mergent order, somewhat akin to concentric circles. In this way, Lefebvre accounts for the historical manifestations of the spatial triad—as ‘a history of space’—where, ‘[t]he lived gives rise to spaces of representations, imagined, beginning with the body and symbolised by it. The conceived, the distant, gives rise to representations of space, established from objective, practical, and scientific elements’ (ibid.). Thus, the ‘lived’ is correlated to representational space (‘spaces of representations’), the epicentre of social space, which is then combined with representations of space that convey meaning to the ‘distant’. In between these two is ‘the close’, the ‘immediate surroundings’ of the body that form the field of immediate perception constituting spatial practice. As Lefebvre also made clear, it is ultimately representations of space that dominate any class society, which is ‘tied to the relations of production and to the ‘order’ that those relations impose, and hence to knowledge, to signs, to codes, and to “frontal” relations’ (cited in Merrifield 1993, 523). Class society by definition contains a dominant class, which forms itself as ‘organiser’ of society’s rhythms and relations to nature (van der Pijl 2007, 23); the conceptualisation that renders this organisation systematic is therefore the de facto (but not necessarily absolute) dominant ‘space’ of society.4 With the totality of the triad intimately related to the specific social relations of any society, it then follows that the relative weight of each moment will vary according to historical change, ‘wherein now one, now the other prevails against the negation of one or the other’ (Schmid 2008, 34, emphasis added; see also, Merrifield 1993, 525). As Lefebvre crucially notes: Think of medieval space: on the one hand, the space of magico-religious representation, with hell below, God in heaven above, and the terrestrial world between the two. But this did not prevent representations of space: the construction of the first maps, the knowledge of navigators, merchants and pirates; the Mediterranean as the centre of the world, etc. The history of space would show how spaces of representation and representations of space diverge and come together, with practice ‘really’ changing the nature of space and the space of nature [espace-nature]. (2009, 229)

Thus, the social relations that gave rise to medieval space (indeed, that give rise to all pre-capitalist ‘spaces’) engender representations of space

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that are circumscribed by the limited abstract understanding of the world, and where the material production of everyday life predominantly flows through qualitative representations, ‘a qualified space that is rendered as such not by [abstract] geography, but by religion’ (Galli 2010, 14). While the steady accumulation of scientific knowledge was never entirely absent, its delimitation gave rise to an over-determination of representational space—the symbolic ‘poesy’ that articulated the material meaning of abstract knowledge. Understanding the socio-historical constitution of the three moments is essential if a proper understanding of their articulation under capitalism is to be grasped. For just as Marx noted the historically unprecedented nature of capitalism in terms of its formal separation of politics and economics (Wood 1991), so too Lefebvre understood capitalism as the dominance of a formally separated abstract space constituting the representations of space within bourgeois society. This dominance implied a historically novel separation between the symbolic coordinates shared by all members of society, and the process of systematisation wielded by the dominant class that gave meaning to symbolic content (Merrifield 1993, 524). It should be noted, of course, that this book does not engage with a critique of capitalism as a socio-economic system, nor the specific spatiality of capital accumulation. However, it is undeniable that the present mode of spatial production is ultimately determined by the advancement of the capitalist world system and, as such, these systemic dynamics are also to be found in Mostar’s urban production just as much as in other cities, albeit with geographically specific manifestations. With these concerns in mind, and in light of the above analytical deconstruction of triad’s three dimensions, we can start to appreciate how the relationships between the three main groups of actors within the story of Mostar—the European powers, ethno-national elites, and everyday citizens—occupy often contradictory positions with respect to the three moments of space production. Lefebvre’s historical reading of social space, in which one particular moment dominates at a particular point in time, leads him to categorise space in somewhat ‘epochal’ terms. Indeed, like Marx, he makes a clear distinction between the ‘modern’ (capitalist) and ­ pre-modern worlds, which are underpinned (respectively) by ‘abstract space’ and ‘absolute space’. This latter term refers to the fragmented and the particular, the socio-political importance attached to natural objects, sacred

1 INTRODUCTION 

19

sites, and rituals based on ‘the bonds of consanguinity, soil and language’ (Lefebvre 1991, 48). Though abstract conceptions played a part in pre-capitalist societies, their basis in absolute space expresses the relative dominance of representational space shared between all classes and groups in society. And while abstract space (and the kernel of representations of space) eventually came to dominant, absolute space ‘lived on, though gradually losing its force, as substratum or underpinning of representational spaces’ (ibid., 49). In understanding the how and why absolute space lives on during the epoch of abstract space, it becomes possible to arrive at a more concrete understanding of the relationship between capitalism and ethno-nationalism. For as Lefebvre makes clear, the historical phenomenon of nationalism is itself a product of two principal elements: market formation and political violence (Lefebvre 1991, 111–112). Embedded within the wider world system of commodity relations and competition, every particular space (state) grounds itself by the ‘lived body’ of the People-nation, and the ‘close’ corresponding to the frontiers of the state. Bound by fate, blood, and loyalty, these mythical (and representational) elements (and spaces) provide protection, cohesion, and security against ‘the distant’—the abstract domain beyond the community’s borders populated by the incomprehensible content of transnational capital and ‘other’ nations. And yet, not all nations experience these dynamics in the same way. For while every national market is ultimately signified by its historical roots—hence the ‘British’ pound (which cannot be used directly in the US market) and the ‘American’ dollar (which likewise cannot be used in Britain)—some nations (and national currencies) are more international than others. Thus, the Atlanticist West has always embodied a radically transnational, ‘cosmopolitan’ drive, embracing the distant as a means of uniting the world through the ‘rational’ and ‘civilised’ practice of commerce and private gain. And yet, ‘[i]n the case of the English-speaking West… we are looking at a universalism in which the rest of the world is considered a backward anomaly’ (van der Pijl 2007, 144). At around the same time Yugoslavia was experiencing its undoing, then US Secretary of State James Baker explained to an audience at the Aspen Institute in 1991 that, ‘[w]e must begin to extend the trans-Atlantic community to Central and Eastern Europe and to the Soviet Union.’ But Baker was clear as to the nature of this possible trans-Atlantic extension:

20  G. Carabelli the trans-Atlantic relationship stands for certain Enlightenment ideals of universal applicability. These values are based upon the concept of individual political rights and economic liberty rooted in European ideals of the 17th and 18th centuries and first planted in the new American nation. (Baker 1991, emphasis added)

Thus, from the above discussion on the connections between capitalism and (ethno-) nationalism, the dominant practices among various classes and groups within Mostar correspond to: (1) A predominant moment of representations of space (abstract space) among EU actors, in the form of ‘rationalising’ the city, recreating the European cosmopolitan ‘ideal’ within Mostar’s problematic divisions, and establishing adequate conditions of investment for international capital and market relations; (2) A contradictory fusion between the two moments of representations of space and representational spaces (abstract and absolute space), insofar as Mostarian elites aim to establish a ‘normal’ city, but on segmented, divided, and ethno-nationally specific terms, and through the grammar of ‘consanguinity, soil and language’; (3) The contradictory divisions between different forms of representational spaces among urban dwellers who are, in different moments and contexts, both bound by established ethno-national norms yet also going well beyond them in unpredictable ways. This framework thus speaks to the above discussion on the dynamics of the spatial triad, insofar as ‘cosmopolitan’ European actors evoke the ‘distance’ inherent in the abstract space of capital—itself a citizen of the world—while local elites fuse the cosmopolitan with the local, who aim to (partially) internalise the discourse of the ‘normal’ European city, if only for the benefit of ‘their own’ people. Meanwhile, Mostar’s citizens are caught in the middle—no doubt eager for the return to ‘normalcy’, but not necessarily in tune with normalcy understood by the neoliberal EU nor even the iron cage of ethno-national belonging. Thus, while the power of ‘Europeanisation’, and the relations of force underpinning it through the sinews of neoliberal geopolitics, remains always in the background as the politico-economic context, the present study of Mostar’s spatial divisions, practices, and discourses aims to uncover the dynamics of everyday life, and their seemingly ‘banal’ (yet often transformative) ramifications within the context of a divided city.

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21

Thus, the representations of space stand for the ways in which cities are planned, imagined, and built at the bureaucratic-elite level. In this book, I account for recent plans of the development and regulation of the city developed after its official reunification in 2004. In addition to this material, I critically explore the ways in which the city of Mostar has been described and addressed in the main policy documents produced by the international administration in order to provide the reunited city with a Statute. Representational spaces account for the moment of both ethno-national elite strategies as well as the practice embedded in the everyday life of citizens, and the multifarious and contradictory spaces in which urban dwellers negotiate imposed directives and plans to find their own space within the city. In this book, I account for my experience of living in Mostar to discuss everyday practices and rhythms through vignettes and life stories. While the above analysis has focused on how different actors embody divergent mixtures of representations/representational space, spatial practice is to be understood as the ways in which urban cohesion is created through everyday practices. On the one hand, this moment refers to the space of infrastructures (e.g. roads, distribution of services, etc.), often planned, directed, and implemented by elite actors that enable the city to become one by establishing connections within a territory and creating a community of users (citizens). On the other hand, this moment refers to the ways in which citizens practise the city, how they make use of its built environment to create their own communities of belonging. In the book, I question the administration of public utilities, which existed as divided along ethno-national lines in the aftermath of the war and should have been reunified as part of the reconciliation process to shed light on the spatial practices of administrative elites. In fact, by deciding how to rehabilitate a shared provision of services, the urban administrators are consistently projecting their understandings of the city (their representations), which are informed by their political positions aligned to ethno-national partitions. I also discuss what I call the ‘infrastructure of socialisation’, a way to picture and explore how the citizens of Mostar come together and socialise. Crucially, spatial practices are not only informed and initiated by the elite willing to maintain (or not) a city united. Rather, citizens create their own infrastructures of socialisation to form communities of belonging that often go well beyond what dominant groups intended.

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These three moments co-participate in the production of space, which is pictured as three-dimensional: material social practice refers to what is perceived (the body experiencing the world); the production of abstract knowledge refers to what is conceived (the knowledge used to maintain and reproduce power structures and the system of signifiers that mediate society’s rhythms); and the creative practice refers to what is lived (the emotional, sensuous, and symbolic dimension of everyday life). These three moments are superimposed and it is through their interactions that space is produced as one. There is no temporal order because the three moments works in unison to create (social) space. Temporality comes into play because the analysis of space production is aimed at understanding society in a historical context. As Lefebvre put it, ‘without this concept [totality] knowledge itself ceases to have a “structure”. It becomes scattered into fragmented studies which replicate exactly the division of social labour instead of controlling it and understanding it’ (Lefebvre 2002, 180).

The Notion of Space as Becoming In a dialectical fashion, the three moments of the spatial triad stand in contradiction to each other, but they do not produce a synthesis. Space is produced as one by the interaction of these three moments, which are not independent but rather exist in relation to all others (Schmid 2008, 33). As Milgrom (2008, 270) notes, ‘while this appears at first glance to be a circular argument, it is actually an acknowledgement that the production of space is a continual process, and that space is always changing as conceptions, perceptions, and lived experiences change’ with it. The open nature of the spatial triad accounts not only for the effort to understand how space is produced, but is also a way to engage with the analysis of its becoming. This point is made crucial in reference to the modalities of social change. In fact, by focusing on the process of becoming, Lefebvre attempts to understand how a strategy could be elaborated in order to interfere with the dominant mode of spatial production (abstraction), to produce a more equal and just society. As Harvey notes, Lefebvre’s dialectical method is that of an ‘immanent critical inquiry’ (2012, xiii). Investigating social reality by unfolding space-production along the three moments could be useful not only in exploring contemporary socio-political dynamics, but also in exercising an active and vigilant willingness to be critically part of the present by understanding

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contradictions and the ways in which they are solved to become newly evident once more. In fact, Lefebvre understands the importance of dialectics in the attempt to explore the relationship between possible and impossible, which ‘point[s] the way towards a different space, the space of a different (social) life and of a different mode of production’ (Lefebvre 1991, 60). However, in order to produce change, it is necessary to consciously produce difference. In fact, difference is constantly produced and reproduced by the capitalist mode of production, yet not all differences are equal in kind. In order to produce revolutionary differences, it is necessary to engage with creativity and to imagine how the present could be made into something else (to interrogate the relationship between the possible and impossible). The right to difference is complementary to the right of the city and it means the right ‘not to be classified forcibly into categories which have been determined by the necessarily homogenizing powers’ (Lefebvre 1976, 75). This point becomes relevant when considering that the existing literature about Mostar tends to examine the conduct of empowered elites that have been elected within a system favouring ethno-nationalist claims. As a consequence, these representations of Mostar render the city as if it were void of life. Citizens are often depicted as victims at the mercy of political elites. Accordingly, the citizen-victim becomes in need of being helped and supported by external actors (e.g. the international administrators) in order to achieve a better life. In contrast, by drawing on Lefebvre’s theory, citizens quickly regain their agency from their everyday usage of the city, their understandings of the urban, and their hopes and desires, and their right to not be classified as ethno-national subjects, which are all taken into account as vantage points over whether or not imposed directives (urban administration) are followed or countered in (urban) practice. The understanding of the moments of the spatial triad as always reconfiguring themselves according to present (and shifting) circumstances means that my spatial enquiry does not look at space as fixed, but rather in its own process of transformation. This notion of space as a productive process became of crucial importance for two main reasons. Firstly, it supports an exploration of how the city of Mostar is divided (beyond common sense notions) by looking at the ways in which the division unfolds as a (contradictory) process, not as a given fact. Secondly, by accounting for the idea of space as ‘in becoming’, it is possible to state that the future of the city has not been determined,

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but rather is open to new possibilities. The very idea of change—of a Lefebvrian revolution—becomes a concrete potential (or a concrete utopia, in Lefebvre’s vocabulary) if the mechanisms of socio-spatial production are sufficiently understood, and change is sought after accordingly (I will return to this later when discussing the concept of revolution in Lefebvre’s work). Furthermore, to allow the possibility of Mostar as a city other-than-divided initiates new enquiries into what might dissolve the ‘facts’ of division in order to facilitate the emergence of new narratives.

Space Is Always Political Another key concept in Lefebvre’s theory is the understanding of space as always political (Lefebvre 2009, chap. 7; cf. Smith 2010, 225ff ). However, I wish to emphasise how the idea of space as political will relate, in this book, to the dialectical character of space production and, in particular, to the ways in which the dialectic production resonates with the movement set into motion by the contradictions of the real. Because (social) space contains its own contradictions, which cannot be solved outright, the triad will produce new space(s) according to the ways in which these contradictions relate to each other at any given historical moment. Yet they will be kept as such at particular intermediate moments, in always-new forms and shapes. Making reference to Aristotle, I argue that it is in this movement provoked by (socio-political) contradictions that space qualifies itself as always political. It is Aristotle, in his Politics, who wonders whether a city should or should not be the space where citizens live together in ‘cooperation, harmony and collective solidarity’ (Skultety 2009, 44), or whether cities are more likely to be the sites of conflict and struggles. Reading Aristotle, Skultety argues that the Greek philosopher belongs to the conflict tradition: ‘competition is a political ideal rather than an inevitable corruption of civic life’ (ibid.). The polis and its democratic political ordering are not based on harmony, but rather peace is achieved through struggle and the competition among the best citizens. In fact, Aristotle believes that citizens should not silence their voices in order to maintain peace. On the contrary, agonism is the cipher of democracy. The problem appears when agonistic positions become utterly antagonistic. This shift occurs when citizens lose the capacity to (re)negotiate their political positions and their identity, which weighs upon them as a social

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constraint. If citizens are forced to act upon a certain set of ideas and beliefs that infer their identity as fixed and immutable, they will be taking on pre-arranged practices—those required to perform their identity. Antagonism is reached as a fixed point in which existing political positions have been cemented through repetition and (re)presentation, to become non-negotiable or changeable. Movement and dynamism, in contrast, support agonism. For both Aristotle and Lefebvre, movement is the key to progress. On the one hand, democracy is based on the capacity of citizens to negotiate their identity in order to maintain the possibility of an open dialogue guaranteeing the democratic process(es). On the other hand, Lefebvre’s production of space is a continuous process of becoming, where ‘quality’ depends upon the relation of its formative moments and the reassessment of contradictions. For Aristotle, lack of movement is defined by antagonism and war. For Lefebvre, immobility is determined by the alienation of citizens from the means of spatial production, which confines them to becoming passive space-users. This book looks at the possibility of thinking about the contradictions of the real by accounting for the city as more-than-divided. In other words, space becomes political by looking at the spatialisation of divisive and counter- practices. Thus, I aim to challenge political discourses and international representations of Mostar as the divided city that cannot ‘move forward’. Mostar tends to be depicted either as the victim of the war or a victim of the political system. The concept of Mostar as morethan-divided accounts for the multifarious ways in which the city adjusts to the events of war and division; a place where people negotiate new understandings of what is ‘normal’ with humour, sarcasm, and cynicism. This book entertains the idea that changing the representation of Mostar as ultimately divided is necessary to consider the idea that social change is possible, even in places of deep segregation. Surely, this requires further discussion on how social change could be conceptualised in cities such as Mostar and what this entails. If a radical restructuring of the city still depends on constitutional reforms, this book highlights the potential held by existing spaces of difference that test already the possibility of living in a divided city without embracing divisive strategies or nationalist ideologies. This book defines resistance as the practice of producing differences (other than divisive movements) and it understands resistance as a spatial practice that, interfering with the production of Mostar as a divided city, creates new meanings and openings towards a different future.

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‘The Urban’ and the Nation-State Lefebvre’s analytical engagement with cities depends entirely upon the concept of ‘the urban’. Cities are taken as the main unit of analysis and depicted as dependent on (and yet potentially and historically independent from) the nation-state. On the one hand, the emphasis is given to scales—the relationality between the global, the national, the urban, and the family, which demonstrates the commitment to elucidate a theory capable of understanding the micro and macro levels of society by looking at their moments of intersection (Brenner 2000). On the other hand, the prominent importance given to cities is clear from Lefebvre’s reflections on the right to the city, as the political right of the citizen to own urban space and participate in its production. Lefebvre questions the very concept of citizenship by discharging it from the nation-state and attaching it to the city (see Purcell 2002).5 The key here is not just ‘the city’ (though this is now a crucial site of struggle in the contemporary world); rather, the struggle is fundamentally over urban relationships. In this sense, ‘the urban is not simply limited to the boundaries of a city, but includes its social system of production’ (Gilbert and Dikeç 2008, 254). In Lefebvre’s wider interpretation of ‘class struggle’, the notion of citizenship becomes central to renegotiating the agency of urban dwellers. Certainly, Lefebvre’s writings on cities were historically specific— as France was a specific state-form in the 1960s—and as such his theory mainly addresses the French bureaucratic-administrative organism alienating citizens through ever-more direct and extensive means. As opposed to this, Lefebvre imagines cities (and their inhabitants) as becoming proactive agents with the potential to counter the main state-led directives, and interfere in the process of space production: ‘the right to the city stresses the need to restructure the power relations that underlie the production of urban space, fundamentally shifting control away from capital and the state and toward urban inhabitants’ (Purcell 2002, 102). In fact, if we understand scale not as an objective entity but as socially produced through political struggle, then the importance of cities becomes evident in the process of rescaling power dynamics (Purcell 2002, 103). Citizens could gain visibility at the scale of the urban and become actors in renegotiating distributions of social power with the state (Brenner 2000, 374). This discussion on the state and its relationships with cities is also central in this book. Lefebvre criticises the nation-state because of its centralisation, which is based on his experience of the French state in the

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1960s. In contrast, contemporary BiH is far from being a strong nationstate or a highly centralised one. On the contrary, it is a highly fractured and contested state, which is socio-territorially fragmented and whose administration is still largely governed by the international body of the Office of the High Representative (OHR).6 Because the degree of political centralisation greatly affects the limit forced upon the state in terms of its capacity to impose its main directives, in the case of Mostar it becomes important to address how political fragmentation (at the city and state levels) affects the design and implementation of directives for the city. In particular, it becomes crucial to engage with state constitutional law in relation to the ways in which citizens of BiH acquire political subjectivities (citizenship) as part of ethno-national groups (this will be discussed further in Chapter 2). In fact, the articulation of power along ethno-national lines means that the administration of Mostar is framed accordingly. Hence, political elites are elected to represent ethno-national interests, and citizens vote as part of communities constructed along similar lines. To reflect upon the role of the urban vis-à-vis the nation-state, it becomes necessary to explore the ways in which scales (of political power) are negotiated and produced. By looking at existing counter-movements and the agenda of activists fighting for social justice, it becomes clear that they use Mostar as a platform to negotiate change at the national level. In fact, their demand for reforms must address the state as the political entity capable of changing laws, but their activities are organised in the city as a way of attaining visibility (within and outside the country). For instance, grassroots activities that produce a space that is not polarised along ethno-national lines are implemented at the urban scale. Yet their quest is irremediably aimed at state authorities that alone could reformulate the constitutional law to reform the legal understanding of citizenship as derived from ethno-national membership to foster processes of inclusion (which will also favour social justice). This further complicates the relationship between urban activism, the urban revolution, and the withering of the state as posited by Lefebvre. During my fieldwork in Mostar, the idea of the state was, for the majority of my respondents, an abstract entity removed from their experience. Activists engaged in political activities by approaching the reform of the state as one of their goals. This is because of the felt need to make changes in the constitution so that the imposed ‘abstract space’ of ethno-national categories could be challenged. Yet, events that followed my departure, such as the plenum movement in 2014, proved that citizens have become

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tired of waiting for the state to be the prime initiator of reforms and they have already proposed to take action in their hands by attempting to discuss possible reforms during participatory and self-managed groups (the plenums) across the country. This and other initiatives exemplify well the struggle over rescaling power dynamics in BiH. Addressing the OHR and the international organisations who helped draft the constitution of BiH as the actors imposing an abstract space to order and rule the everyday means that the state could become an ally in the process of reform. In fact, one problem lies in the fact that both the OHR and the nationstate project their notions of abstract space onto the country, which are often contradictory, producing further fractures. Accordingly, the citizens have revisited the idea of the state as the site of reform conducive to social change and formed more radical fronts that refuse to engage with state authorities.

Approaching the Study of Mostar, Methodologically The material presented in this book was largely collected during a yearlong ethnographic project in Mostar (November 2009–October 2010). Some material was collected during a previous project on the reconstruction of sacred spaces after the war (December 2005 and June 2006) and during shorter yearly visits from 2011 until 2013 when I continued my collaboration with local activist groups. Later, I returned to Mostar in 2014 with a group of postgraduate students for a summer school. In other words, I had the opportunity to assess the process of rebuilding Mostar and the reassessment of everyday life over the course of a decade, and to collect data and record my impressions of the city over this longterm period. My first research project in Mostar (2005) was based largely on elite interviews, which were never easy to set, and often unproductive. Sitting in front of representatives and spokespersons, I often felt I was the unwilling spectator of the nth rehearsal of their political agendas and well-digested stories. It must be recalled that Mostar has been a case study for multiple international research projects and interventions. This means that officials, representatives, or leaders of community groups have been approached several times for interviews, which also explains their reluctance to agree to new ones. For instance, the person who deals with the public relations of one of the religious communities in Mostar (I prefer not to identify which one) suggested that I read the material that has been published already rather than arranging new interviews. This reveals

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both the fatigue of being under the spotlight for such a long time and the sense that everything has already being said. Surely, the importance of the interview material I gathered is not diminished by its lack of unexpected information. Rather, the ways in which officials dealt with me—specifically how they dealt with being interviewed by a foreign researcher— could further expose the qualities of the many encounters the fieldwork provoked. During my longer fieldwork in 2009–10, elite interviews were also conducted with representatives of the main political parties and religious communities, local and international officials working on the reconstruction of the city, and civil society actors working on cultural projects that targeted peace and reconciliation. Extracts of these interviews are published in this book with the consent of all the interviewees. Most my respondents did not wish to be recognisable in the book so their names have been changed or anonymised. Interviews were not however my main research tool. Rather, much of the data presented in the book is based on observation, daily conversations, and participatory research. As discussed previously, to engage only with elites is also problematic because it privileges voices that tend to be supportive of nationalisms (as these same nationalisms empower them). Because of this, and challenging more usual approaches to the divided city, I did not engage with my respondents as ethno-national subjects. Of course, I learnt to decode the ethnic origin of names and surnames, but I never assumed that my respondents felt comfortable declaring their ethnicity or that it mattered to them. When people are approached as members of an ethnic group, especially in divided cities, they tend to reproduce ethno-national discourses, divisive patterns, and sense-making paradigms as if they were expected to do so. So much so that, when they say or do something that differs from what the majority of people in their community would do, they feel the need to point it out. For instance, the woman who became, in Mostar, my teacher of Croatian always wondered why I had chosen to live on the ‘other side’ (she lived in west Mostar and I in east Mostar). I asked if she ever went to ‘my’ part of town, to which she replied that she did not because none of her friends did and she felt uncomfortable there. My teacher was responding as ‘the’ Croat living in west Mostar would most likely do. The truth is, during the year I lived in east Mostar, I met her occasionally browsing the goods of the Chinese shop nearby my flat. This made me realise that even if she went to ‘the other side’, she preferred not to acknowledge it as this would have complicated her position within established ethno-national practices in Mostar. This does not suggest that all those who do not wish to cross such boundaries

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never do so. Instead, I suggest that by approaching interlocutors as part of one ethno-national group, there is the expectation that they either conform to or counter stereotypical behaviours of the group, whereas, in fact, everyday practices tend to be less consistent and not always rigidly shaped by ethnic dogmas. Hromadžić’s (2015) ethnographic work in the Old Gymnasium of Mostar shows that young people from different communities who attend separate classes mix and flirt in the shared bathroom during their breaks. Yet, when asked, they say that they would never seriously date someone from the other side. Even if the contingency of having a shared bathroom brought them together, erasing ethno-national barriers, these young people respond discursively to the possibility of a mixed relationship by inhabiting routinised patterns of sense-making that condemn dating ‘the other’ to a subversive act with ruinous consequences. These examples show clearly the spaces of contradictions, inconsistency, and paradox that this book inhabits as a means to render the complexities faced by living in a deeply divided society. It contrasts discursive and material practices of creating Mostar as rigidly divided with less rigid modes of inhabiting the city. This is because writing about this city is political. To select data and information to create a portrait of Mostar, a city of multiple contradictions, means to take a side and to allow or refuse the possibility for this city to be other than its ossified representation as a place of violence and hatred. Many would argue that the choice to downplay moments that disrupt the persistent division depends on the fact that these are not significant or representative of the city. For instance, Laketa, who is the author of a fascinating research into the ‘stickiness’ of the division in Mostar, writes: Most high school students do not socialize with peers of different ethnicity, some mention having acquaintances, and only a few report being friends with someone from the opposing ethnic group. Thus, the discourse on mutually hostile and exclusionary ethnic groups in Mostar permeates not only school life, but social life as well. The geopolitics of division is often re-enacted and supported by young Mostarians. (Laketa 2015a, 10)

The fact that the majority of the young people she has interviewed do not engage in inter-ethnic socialising means that those who do—those who have acquaintances and the few who have friends on ‘the other side’—are not enough to trouble representations of Mostar as divided. And rightly so, as she shows, most young people socialise within their

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ethno-national group. But what about the others? What about those for whom the division is problematic because they do not fully subscribe to it? This book reflects on the roles of what does not fit into the geopolitics of division in order to shed light on the multiple facets of resistance in Mostar and to acknowledge the fact that movements towards different understandings of being and living in Mostar exist and might contribute to creating the possibility for the city to become less divided and more inclusive. This is what Lefebvre theorises as heterotopias, those spaces that incubate ‘revolutionary difference’ and hold the ultimate potential for social change to happen. For my analysis, I draw largely on fieldwork diaries where I have kept notes on what I saw, heard, read, and thought while living in Mostar. Even though I moved there in November 2009, it took me a while to settle in, make friends, understand the political situation, and learn how to navigate the city and engage with people. After all, I was and I am a stranger in the city. Many scholars who write about BiH are from the region, which is an advantage surely but also presents a set of challenges different from the ones I faced, especially with regards to their ethnic affiliations (see Hromadžić 2015). Even though it was not possible to identify me as part of one of the three ethno-national communities, I was one of the ‘internationals’ in town. On her experience as a researcher in BiH, Jones writes ‘my positionality in this politically and emotionally sensitive context was as an outsider… I was often seen to speak for, and from, the international community and my position of relative privilege meant some participants did not feel I was able to understand their experiences and situations’ (Jones and Ficklin 2012, 3). This is how I felt at the beginning of my stay in Mostar and here it is important to emphasise that the international community does not stand as an abstract foreign entity in the everyday of BiH, but rather is embodied in the several international agencies for co-operation and development operating in the territory and, more importantly, in the OHR, which is still overlooking the state-building process. Thus, one of the main challenges set by doing research in the area is that of negotiating the position of the researcher with the existing unfavourable understandings of the foreigner official, researcher, or developer i.e. the ‘liberal imperialist’ (Cox 2008, 250). I was fortunate to connect with people, create friendships, and be accepted as a new member of local communities. More than that, becoming friends with many local activists and participating in the design and development of projects that aimed at

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grassroots reconciliation, especially targeting young people, made me realise the existence of groups within Mostar that not only oppose ethnic politics but move and live in inclusive spaces that remain separate from the divided city. In other words, as many other books, this project has been written because of my friendships in Mostar and thanks to those who allowed me to become part—even if partially and temporarily—of Mostar’s dynamics by letting me observe, listen, ask, and learn. This book draws significantly on data gathered while working in Mostar as part of one grassroots organisation (Abart) working broadly in the field of art production. I approached Abart because I was interested in learning more about their projects and their desire to reappropriate public space through site specific art interventions. What made me curious about Abart in the beginning was that they did not make sense in Mostar. They invited international artists, created festivals, curated contemporary art exhibitions, and worked across boundaries as if they were in a ‘normal’ city. They promoted art and culture to create new spaces where to discuss modalities of being together. They were passionate, proactive, and full of expectations for the future. Everything about them was at odds with immobility, crisis, and division. I became more than an observer and I joined their efforts shortly after meeting them. I participated in the design of new projects, fundraising activities, and the implementation of some of their initiatives. I started as a volunteer with the aim of observing their group dynamics, concept-development, and approaches to Mostar. I quickly became more active in the group, and this is why parts of this book are autobiographic and account for my own work within Abart discussing how becoming part of the collective meant also that I became not only attached to Mostar differently (the city became more than a case study for a research) but also my research became part of my political and activist engagement with the city, moved by the desire to contribute to social change. As Cerwonka and Malkki describe, ethnography is ‘simultaneously a critical theoretical practice, a quotidian ethical practice, and an improvisational practice’ (2007, 164). Ethnography is about encounters between humans—between affective beings—and the social artefacts produced and possessed by humans. The very social processes bound up with the ‘production’ of everyday life carry with them a weighty emotional content and context (whether or not this affective dimension is perceived by the researcher), and whose meaning cannot be wholly reduced to objectively determined criteria. Thus, one of the associated problems is how

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to engage, manage, and account for emotions (from both researcher and participants to the research) within the framework of an academic project. This book has been written engaging with these emotions rather than suppressing or suspending them (other scholars have written about this topic, for example, Bollens 2012; Dumper 2014). I wrote my doctoral dissertation from a position of deep frustration that fed the desire to rectify the overly negative representations of Mostar. I owed that to the many activists and socially engaged individuals I befriended during the time I spent in the city whose work goes largely unnoticed. A young activist once confessed how tiresome it is to be interviewed for research projects not because she dislikes talking about what she does, but rather because interviewers are interested only in the ethnic divisions, the ethnic warfare, the corruption, or what does not work. The fact that there are also people like her who fight for a different future is often dismissed as a naïve and ineffective. I am writing this book moved by the intent of complicating existing reductionist representations of Mostar. As Lefebvre states, reductionism is indeed a tool in the hands of power, which aims at the simplification of contradictions and differences to establish (and normalise) a specific body of knowledge, which itself becomes implicated in a specific set of power relations (Lefebvre 1991, 105–108). From this view, power draws on scientific production to reinforce its ideological rendering of reality and impose it. Lefebvre’s exhortation to account for the everyday (the ‘lived’) in order to complicate the representation of cities remains the basis of this entire project.

Structure of the Book The book is structured in four main chapters. Chapter 2 introduces the city of Mostar by providing an historical excursus into the urban expansion of the city during the wars of the 1990s, its destruction, and the main phases of reconstruction up to the most recent architectural interventions. Along with the discussion regarding the physical expansion of the city, this chapter engages with the shifting roles of the ethno-­ national communities throughout the history of BiH to provide a solid ground for subsequent discussions of the polarisation of Mostar in relation to contemporary understandings of the ethno-national membership. This chapter is about the physical reconstruction of the city and it focuses on the discursive strategies that underpinned the international and local approaches to peace and reconciliation. Firstly, I discuss how

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the international organisations overlooking the transition to peace (and the reunification) engaged with the city of Mostar by picturing the city as stubborn, difficult, and unmanageable, blaming the ‘locals’ for the lack of progress towards European standards, reminiscent of colonial discourses. I contrast the international imaginary of Mostar as a future European city with the local administrators’ desire to keep the city divided. I discuss how the imposition of a Statute that reunifies the city has been boycotted locally but it is almost never discussed because, in the meanwhile, attention has been redirected to discussion on the safety of Mostar, which creates uncertainty in the city and for the future. Further, the chapter explores the various means by which these representations inform and support specific spatial practices. In particular, I refer here to the process of merging the independent infrastructures of service provision in east and west Mostar to explore the ways in which urban administrators are dealing with the reconstruction of the city as a unique territory, thus imaging its inhabitants as a single community of users. Chapter 3 looks at how people move, live, and understand the limits and possibilities of the city. It continues the analysis of spatial practices by uncovering the ways in which citizens make use of the city and how their representational spaces (everyday lives) influence such practices. Drawing on small surveys that I co-designed with Abart, the chapter assesses how people socialise in Mostar and it compares contemporary practices of socialisation to pre-war habits (also gathered through small surveys). Further, the chapter presents and discusses a selection of examples of live stories collected while living in Mostar. These samples constitute the starting point to discussing the inconsistencies produced by living in an ethno-nationally divided city that pretends absolute loyalties to abstract and normalised understandings of urban behaviour— where to go, friends to make, and who to avoid. This chapter starts a more focused discussion on Mostar as more-than-divided, which is continued in the following chapter. If Chapter 3 accounts for unplanned moments that disrupt the rigid logics of ethno-national divisions, Chapter 4 looks at planned moments of resistance to ethno-national segregation. Based on first-hand experience working in Abart, this chapter discusses two art-based projects that reclaimed Mostar’s public space to create a more inclusive society: Arts in Divided Cities (2009–10) and (Re)collecting Mostar (2010–13). It compares these projects with other initiatives developed within the broad field of arts and culture production in Mostar and it discusses critically the limits and potentials of these

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initiatives. Drawing on the preceding empirical analyses, Chapter 5 discusses how space is produced and reproduced in Mostar as more-thandivided. It explores the potential presented by looking at the excess of division for reframing the study of ethno-nationally divided cities.

Notes 1. The UN Urbanism research project was conducted within the framework of the Bauhaus Dessau Kolleg in 2005–06 with the goal of assessing how international organisations and, particularly, the United Nations initiate and guide post-war reconstruction processes globally. Mostar and Kabul were the two case-studies chosen for the research. My contribution to this project was a research into the international religious networks that participated in the rebuilding of sacred spaces in Mostar and their relations to the International Organisations overlooking said process. The outcomes of the project, including my own, were later published in Bittner et al. (2010). 2. I developed my doctoral research as part of the Conflict in Cities and the Contested State and I was affiliated to Queen’s University Belfast from October 2008 for four years. This interdisciplinary project, involving also the universities of Cambridge and Exeter, compared a sample of ethno-nationally divided cities in Europe and the Middle East focusing on everyday life and the possibility of change. More information about the research and its outcomes is available from http://www.conflictincities.org. 3.  The explanation provided for each of the three moments has become an intense object of discussion within the scholarly literature. In fact, Lefebvre’s description of the three moments of the triad are not very specific; rather they leave space for the researcher to reformulate them according to their case-study. For an in-depth discussion on the different interpretations of the three moments of the spatial triad, see Stanek (2011). 4. Or to use a more classic formulation, ‘the ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas’ (Marx and Engels 1974, 64). 5. This sharp focus on ‘the urban’ distinguished Lefebvre from traditional Marxist approaches, which continued to see the workplace as the essential point of economic struggle, and the nation as the essential point of political struggle. 6. The High Representative (HR) is an international authority that exercises governmental power along with local authorities. Although this position was imagined only to supervise the process of peace building and the implementation of democracy through the enactment of the Dayton Peace Agreements, since 1997 the various HR(s) have issued over 800 decisions (Haynes 2008, 79–113). The controversy that surrounds the figure of the

36  G. Carabelli HR derives from the fact that, although HR decisions are justified as a means to overcome political stalemate, this justification merely undercuts the very democratic norms of which the international community speaks so highly (cf. Chandler 2005). As Belloni (2003) describes, ‘the High Representative powers and attitude resemble that of colonial governor’.

References Allegra, Marco, Anna Casaglia, and Jonathan Rokem. 2012. “The Political Geographies of Urban Polarization: A Critical Review of Research on Divided Cities.” Geography Compass 6 (9): 560–574. http://dx.doi. org/10.1111/j.1749-8198.2012.00506.x. Anderson, James. 2008. “From Empires to Ethno-national Conflicts: A Framework for Studying ‘Divided Cities’ in ‘Contested States’.” Working Paper 1, Conflict in Cities and the Contested State Project. ———. 2013. “Imperial Ethnocracy and Demography: Foundations of Ethnonational Conflict in Belfast and Jerusalem.” In Locating Urban Conflicts. Ethnicity, Nationality and the Everyday, edited by Wendy Pullan and Britt Baille, 195–214. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Baker, James. 1991. “Euro-Atlantic Architecture: From West to East.” Secretary Baker’s Address to the Aspen Institute, Berlin, Germany, June. http:// www.2plus4.de/USA/chronik.php3?date_value=18.06.91.&sort=000-000. Accessed March 3, 2014. Belloni, Roberto. 2003. “Dubious Democracy by Fiat.” Transitions Online, August 20, 2013. http://belfercenter.ksg.harvard.edu/publication/901/ dubious_democracy_by_fiat.html. Bittner, Regina, Wilfried Hackenbroich, and Kai Vöckler, eds. 2010. UN Urbanism. Dessau: Jovis and Bauhaus. Bollens, Scott A. 2007. Cities, Nationalism, and Democratisation. London and New York: Routledge. ———. 2012. City and Soul in Divided Cities. London and New York: Routledge. Brenner, Neil. 2000. “The Urban Question as a Scale Question: Reflections on Henri Lefebvre, Urban Theory and the Politics of Scale.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 24 (2): 361–378. http://dx.doi. org/10.1111/1468-2427.00234. Calame, Jon, and Esther Charlesworth. 2009. Divided Cities: Belfast, Beirut, Jerusalem, Mostar, and Nicosia. Philadelphia: Pennsylvania University Press. Castells, Manuel. 1983. The City and the Grassroots. A Cross-Cultural Theory of Urban Social Movements. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.

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Cerwonka, Allaine, and Liisa H. Malkki. 2007. Improvising Theory. Process and Temporality in Ethnographic Fieldwork. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Chandler, David. 2005. “From Dayton to Europe.” International Peacekeeping 12 (3): 336–349. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13533310500074077. Coles, Kimberley. 2007. Democratic Designs. International Intervention an Electoral Practices in Postwar Bosnia-Herzegovina. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press. Connor, Walker. 1994. Ethnonationalism: The Quest for Understanding. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Conversi, Daniele, ed. 2004. Ethnonationalism in the Contemporary World. Walker Connor and the Study of Nationalism. London and New York: Routledge. Cox, Michael. 2008. “Bosnia and Herzegovina: The Limits of Liberal Imperialism.” In Building States to Build Peace, edited by Charles T. Call and Vanessa Wyeth, 249–270. Boulder: Lynne Rienner. Dumper, Michael. 2014. Jerusalem Unbound. Geography, History and the Future of the Holy City. New York: Columbia University Press. Forde, Susan. 2017. “Spaces of Peace: Social Movement as Conflict Transformation in Mostar, Bosnia Herzegovina.” Doctoral diss., Liverpool Hope University. Galli, Carlo. 2010. Political Spaces and Global War. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Gilbert, Liette, and Mustafa Dikeç. 2008. “Right to the City: Politics of Citizenship.” In Space, Difference, Everyday Life. Reading Henri Lefebvre, edited by Kanishka Goonewardena, Stefan Kipfer, Richard Milgrom, and Christian Schmid, 250–263. New York and London: Routledge. Harvey, David. 2012. Rebel Cities. From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution. London and New York: Verso. Haynes, Francesca Dina, ed. 2008. Deconstructing the Reconstruction. Human Rights and Rule of Law in Postwar Bosnia and Herzegovina. Aldershot: Ashgate. Hromadžić, Azra. 2015. Citizens of an Empty Nation. Youth and State-Making in Postwar Bosnia-Herzegovina. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Jansen, Stef. 2008. “Home and Return in the Foreign Intervention in Bosnia and Herzegovina: An Anthropological Critique.” In Deconstructing the Reconstruction. Human Rights and Rule of Law in Postwar Bosnia and Herzegovina, edited by Francesca Dina Haynes, 28–53. Aldershot: Ashgate. ———. 2016. “First as Tragedy, Then as Teleology. The Politics/People Dichotomy in the Ethnography of Post-Yugoslav Nationalization.” Conflict and Society: Advances in Research 2: 164–180. http://dx.doi.org/10.3167/ arcs.2016.020115.

38  G. Carabelli Jones, Briony, and Lisa Ficklin. 2012. “To Walk in Their Shoes: Recognising the Expression of Empathy as a Research Reality.” Emotion, Space and Society 5 (2): 103–112. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.emospa.2010.10.007. Kappler, Stefanie. 2014. Local Agency and Peacebuilding. EU and International Engagement in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Cyprus and South Africa. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Kaufmann, Chaim. 1996. “Possible and Impossible Solutions to Civil Wars.” International Security 20 (4): 136–175. http://doi.org/10.1162/isec.20.4.136. Kipfer, Stefan. 2008. “How Lefebvre Urbanized Gramsci: Hegemony, Everyday Life, and Difference.” In Space, Difference, Everyday Life: Reading Henri Lefebvre, edited by Kanishka Goonewardena, Stefan Kipfer, Richard Milgrom, and Christian Schmid, 193–211. New York and London: Routledge. Kolind, Torsten. 2008. Post-war Identification: Everyday Muslim CounterDiscourse in Bosnia Herzegovina. Aarhus: Aarhus University Press. Laketa, Sunčana. 2015a. “Youth as Geopolitical Subjects: The Case of Mostar, Bosnia and Herzegovina.” In Politics, Citizenship and Right, edited by K. Kallio, S. Mills, and T. Skelton, 1–13. Online. Springer. https://link.springer. com/referenceworkentry/10.1007%2F978-981-4585-94-1_6-1#page-1. Accessed October 18, 2017. ———. 2015b. “The Geopolitics of Daily Life in Mostar, Bosnia and Herzegovina.” PhD diss., University of Arizona. Lefebvre, Henri. 1976. The Survival of Capitalism. New York: St. Martin’s Press. ———. 1991. The Production of Space. Malden, Oxford, and Victoria: Blackwell. ———. 2006 [1968]. “The Right to the City.” In Writings on Cities, edited by Elenore Kofman and Elizabeth Lebas, 147–159. Oxford: Blackwell. ———. 2002. Critique of Everyday Life. Volume II. London: Verso. ———. 2009. State, Space, World: Selected Essays. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Makaš, Emily. 2007. “Representing Competing Identities in Postwar Mostar.” PhD diss., Cornell University. Marcuse, Peter. 1993. “What’s So New About Divided Cities?” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 17 (3): 355–365. https://dx.doi. org/ https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2427.1993.tb00226.x. Marx, Karl. 1973. Grundrisse. London: Penguin Books. ———. 1977. Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. Moscow: Progress Publishers. Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. 1974. The German Ideology. New York: International Publishers. McCulloch, Alison, and John McGarry. 2017. Power-Sharing. Empirical and Normative Challenges. London and New York: Routledge.

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Merrifield, Andrew. 1993. “Place and Space: A Lefebvrian Reconciliation.” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 18 (4): 516-531. Milgrom, Richard. 2008. “Lucien Kroll. Design, Difference, Everyday Life.” In Space, Difference, Everyday Life. Reading Henri Lefebvre, edited by Kanishka Goonewardena, Stefan Kipfer, Richard Milgrom, and Christian Schmid, 264–281. New York and London: Routledge. Moore, Adam. 2013. Peacebuilding in Practice. Local Experience in Two Bosnian Towns. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. Nagle, John. 2009. “Sites of Social Centrality and Segregation: Lefebvre in Belfast, a ‘Divided City’.” Antipode 41 (2): 326–347. http://dx.doi. org/10.1111/j.1467-8330.2009.00675.x. ———. 2013. “‘Union in Diversity’: Non-sectarian Social Movement Challenges to the Politics of Ethnic Antagonism in Violent Divided Cities.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 37 (1): 78–92. https://dx.doi. org/10.1111/j.1468-2427.2012.01156.x. ———. 2016. Social Movements in Violently Divided Societies. Constructing Conflict and Peacebuilding. London and New York: Routledge. Nagle, John, and Mary-Alice Clancy. 2010. Shared Society or Benign Apartheid? Understanding Peace-Building in Divided Societies. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Oberschall, Anthony. 2007. Conflict and Peace Building in Divided Societies. Responses to Ethnic Violence. London and New York: Routledge. O’Leary, Brendan. 2005. “Debating Consociational Politics: Normative and Explanatory Arguments.” In From Power Sharing to Democracy: Post-conflict Institutions in Ethnically Divided Societies, edited by Sidney J.R. Noel, 3–43. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s Press. Palmberger, Monika. 2010. “Distancing Personal Experiences from the Collective. Discursive Tactics Among Youth in Post-war Mostar.” L’Europe en Formation 357: 107–124. https://doi.org/10.3917/eufor.357.0107. ———. 2016. How Generations Remember. Conflicting Histories and Shared Memories in Post-war Bosnia and Herzegovina. Open Access. https://link. springer.com/book/10.1057%2F978-1-137-45063-0. Pullan, Wendy, and Britt Baille, eds. 2013. Locating Urban Conflicts. Ethnicity, Nationalism and the Everyday. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Purcell, Mark. 2002. “Excavating Lefebvre. The Right to the City and Its Urban Politics of the Inhabitant.” GeoJournal 58 (2/3): 99–108. https://doi. org/10.1023/B:GEJO.0000010829.62237.8f. Rosen, Gillad, and Anne B. Shlay. 2014. “Whose Right to Jerusalem?” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 38 (3): 935–950. https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-2427.12093.

40  G. Carabelli Sasso, Alfredo. 2016. “Peace and Ethnocracy: Twenty Years After Dayton.” Peace in Progress – Bombarded Cities 26: 1–5. http://www.icip-perlapau.cat/ numero26/pdf-eng/Per-la-Pau-n26-tr-2.pdf. Schmid, Christian. 2008. “Henri Lefebvre’s Theory of the Production of Space: Towards a Three-Dimensional Dialectic.” In Space, Difference, Everyday Life. Reading Henri Lefebvre, edited by Kanishka Goonewardena, Stefan Kipfer, Richard Milgrom, and Christian Schmid, 27–46. New York and London: Routledge. Skultety, Steven C. 2009. “Competition in the Best of Cities: Agonism and Aristotle’s Politics.” Political Theory 37: 44–68. http://www.jstor.org/ stable/20452680. Smith, Neil. 2010. Uneven Development: Nature, Capital and the Production of Space. London: Verso. Stanek, Lukas. 2011. Henri Lefebvre on Space. Architecture, Urban Research, and the Production of Theory. Minnesota: Minnesota University Press. Summa, Renata. 2016. “Enacting Everyday Boundaries in Post-Dayton Bosnia and Herzegovina: Disconnection, Re-appropriation and Displacement(s).” Doctoral diss., Pontificia Universidade Catolica do Rio de Janeiro. van der Pijl, Kees. 2007. Nomads, Empires, States: Modes of Foreign Relations and Political Economy. Volume 1. London: Pluto. Véron, Ophélie. 2016. “Contesting the Divided City: Arts of Resistance in Skopje.” Antipode 48 (5): 1441–1461. Wilford, Rick, and Robin Wilson. 2006. The Trouble with Northern Ireland. Belfast: Democratic Dialogue. Wilmer, Franke. 2002. The Social Construction of Man, the State, and War. Identity, Conflict, and Violence in the Former Yugoslavia. London and New York: Routledge. Wollentz, Gustav, Marko Barišić, and Nourah Sammar. 2017. “Youth, Dignity, and Temporal Art in Post-war Mostar. Envisioning a Shared Future Through Heritage.” Paper Presented at the Workshop “Cultural Heritage in Conflicts, Heritage Studies Meet Peace and Conflict”, 15–16 September 2016, Visby, Uppsala University. Unpublished. Wood, Ellen Meiksins. 1991. The Pristine Culture of Capitalism: A Historical Essay on Old Regimes and Modern States. London: Verso.

CHAPTER 2

Imagining, Planning, and Building Mostar After the War

Introduction This chapter offers an introduction to the city of Mostar. Starting from a brief historical overview, I capture how ethnic groups gained and lost power in Mostar according to the political aspirations and plans of the many empires and rulers that dominated this territory and the balance of forces among ethnic groupings and alliances that heavily shaped the region’s expansion and destruction. The main aim of this chapter is to review the process of transition from war to peace in Mostar by focusing on the international and local approaches to reconciliation and urban management. I start by accounting for the wider state-building project of Bosnia and Herzegovina, which was initiated from the signing of the Dayton Peace Agreements (DPA) in 1995. The ways in which the State was reimagined and partitioned along ethno-national lines gave reason to legalise territorial partitioning between the ethno-national communities in Mostar as a means to end the conflict. I draw on the guidelines of the DPA and the understandings of citizenship along ethno-national lines to review the long process, guided by the Office of the High Representative (OHR), to bring peace in Mostar and subsequently reunify the city under a single administration. Here, I focus on contested discursive and political strategies adopted by the OHR to direct the process and, eventually, impose the reunification for the good of Mostarian society. Through a close reading of the official documents drafted during the contested process of reunification, I discuss the emergence of © The Author(s) 2018 G. Carabelli, The Divided City and the Grassroots, The Contemporary City, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-7778-4_2

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Mostar as an abstract entity whose future could be rectified through the correct implementation of rules based on European standards, which makes transparent the OHR’s understandings of the city only in terms of its functionality. I then trace the effects of the imposed reunification in the contemporary life of Mostar paying particular attention to the several moments of impasse that characterised its first decade as a reunited city—including the persistent difficulty in creating a city council or electing a mayor. I discuss how the imposed reunification has been boycotted, manipulated, and reshaped by (the always present) ethno-national aspirations to territorial sovereignty in subtle and more evident ways. The chapter starts with a Lefebvrian analysis of space production in Mostar by assessing the moments of the representations of space and spatial practices. The first moment—the representations of space—draws, theoretically, on the notion that the ways in which modern cities are planned, built, and represented depends on an understanding of space that is abstract and devoid of social content (Lefebvre 1991, 285–291). By focusing on how the city is imagined in legal and administrative documents, as well as how the future of the city materialises through urban design and plans, the chapter wishes to reflect critically on how space is conceived in Mostar. This is made extremely complex by the political situation of the city. Although the city has its own administration, the international peacekeeping body of the OHR continues to interfere in the decision-making process, often imposing decisions that were not agreed upon by local authorities. It is from the perspective of these divergent and inconsistent elite views and practices—between the abstract space advocated by the OHR and the relative determination of absolute space informing the ethno-nationally specific strategies of local elites— that ultimately forms the basis of Mostar’s current impasse. It should be recalled that in Lefebvre’s analysis of the conceptions of space, political centralisation is a function of the state’s ability to impose its main directives. As he notes, national state formation pivots on the ‘political principle of unification, which subordinates and totalizes the various aspects of social practice—legislation, culture, knowledge, education—within a determinate space; namely the space of the ruling class’s hegemony over its people and over the nationhood that it has arrogated’ (ibid., 281, emphasis in original). While this refers to the level of the nation-state, these political coordinates are equally applicable to other scales; for even a city cannot truly be unified in the presence of multiple claims to authority and legitimacy by different groups representing

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‘their’ people against ‘others’. In the case of Mostar, it will be important to address how political fragmentation (at the city and state levels) affects the design and implementation of directives for the city, and how these centrifugal forces impact on material infrastructures in the built environment. Furthermore, it will be of crucial importance to consider how competing ideologies (nationalisms) are struggling to attain visibility and impose a homogeneous understanding of space—itself immanent to the formation of an abstract, ‘modern’ political space and market system (Lefebvre 1991, 112)—yet one that can only be achieved by expelling the other. This discussion will further benefit from the concepts of biopolitics and pastoral power to assess how citizens are framed by dominant discourses and practices. The second moment—spatial practices—illustrates how the system of infrastructures providing services to the city is conceived and implemented by the administration. Spatial practices are what keep a city materially integrated, and in this sense they are both conceived and lived. Unpacking the (often) contradictory uses and perceptions of material infrastructures by different classes and groups thus lays the groundwork for the next chapter concerning the dynamics of everyday life (representational space, the ‘lived’). Overall, this chapter aims to explore the imaginaries and values that underpinned the process of rebuilding, reconciling, and reunifying Mostar after the war.

Mostar Before the War: Embracing Contested Memories of Unity and Division Mostar is an Ottoman, Habsburg, and socialist city whose landmarks have been destroyed and (partially) rebuilt, often with symbolic intent. The Ottoman Old Town occupies both banks of the river Neretva across the Stari Most (Old Bridge), the global (and yet contested, see Forde 2016; Makaš 2007) symbol of Mostar and its rebirth after the war. Now part of the UNESCO World Heritage List, this part of the city preserves and heightens the city’s Ottoman history. Multiple shops offer miniatures of the Old Bridge, džezve to prepare Turkish (Bosnian) coffee, socialist memorabilia, belly dance costumes, ‘oriental’ jewellery, postcards, and paintings of the Stari Most. The atmosphere of a Turkish bazaar has been joyfully crafted. The preservation of the Ottoman heritage intersects with the performance of waitresses calling out to tourists in traditional outfits, and the call to azan from the nearby minarets.

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The sense that authenticity has become a business comes as reality, especially in summer when it is difficult to walk without zig-zagging larger and smaller crowds of international tourists looking for the perfect angle to photograph the Old Bridge. A stone, set on the western entrance to the Bridge, reads, in English, ‘never forget’. This is now the Muslim side of town, which was brutally destroyed during the war and rebuilt with much international efforts after the ceasefire to prove that Mostar could survive this tragedy. Major investments came from foreign countries in Europe, the Middle East, and the United States through different channels—NGOs, registered charities, religious networks and international loans to the city of Mostar. Great efforts were put into the reconstruction of the main symbol of the city: the disappeared Stari Most, which was destroyed in 1993 during the second siege of the city. The reconstruction of the Bridge soon became, in the international lingo, the way to establish a continuum between the tolerant past and a potentially harmonious future (Armaly et al. 2004). The grand reopening of the Bridge was meant to be, symbolically, an open invitation to the city and its citizens to believe in the possibility of a future where peace and civil cohesion could be restored like the bridge itself (Grodach 2002, 63).1 Yet, the symbolic performance did not please the entire population, starting with Bishop Perić—the official representative of the Catholic community in Mostar—who decided not to attend the event and made bitter comments about the whole enterprise, stating, ‘we are aware that the Old Bridge cannot be a symbol of the necessary social renewal, peace, coexistence and tolerance’ (Traynor 2004). The new-Old Bridge, selected as the main symbol of reconciliation, was not by itself enough to foster a dialogue between the two sides. Above the Old Town runs Tito Street, where impressive Habsburg buildings stand in ruins, dangerously overlooking cars, pedestrians, and stray dogs. Walking towards the western side, crossing the Bulevar—the unofficial border—traces of the Habsburg heritage are also visible. In fact, under Habsburg rule, the city expanded westwards through the building of streets, highways, a central train station (where today the Bulevar resides), and improved gasworks, street-lighting, and general infrastructures. It is again walking in this part of town that the material remnants of Yugoslavia are so visible, especially in the high-rise residential quarters. After the Second World War, Mostar became an industrial city hosting metal-work factories, cotton textile mills, an aluminium plant, food processing, and wine production. Due to this industrial expansion, the number of urban residents increased

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from 18,000 to 100,000 inhabitants, and ‘[d]istinctions between East and West were blurred as citizens moved into new job-based apartments, leaving behind old family residences in the mahale [Ottoman neighbourhoods]’ (Bing 2001, 240). At this time, the Habsburg railway was relocated to the east part of Mostar (where it now stands) and replaced with a large boulevard named (inspirationally) Bulevar Narodne Revolucije (Boulevard of the People’s Revolution). Religious affiliations and differences were preserved under both Empires (Donia and Fine 1994; Malcom 1994), yet soon became conflated with national belonging (i.e. Croat-Catholic, Serbian-Orthodox, and Bosniak-Muslim) under the Habsburgs, who tried to confront the emergence of divisive nationalist sentiment by promoting the multi-­ ethnic notion of bošnjaštvo (Bosnianism). Before the war, the different ethnic and religious communities were spread throughout the city, with many mixed neighbourhoods and cordial relations among these communities. Around 6000 Croats lived among the east bank’s 30,000 predominantly Muslim residents and 15,000 Bosniaks resided among the 45,000 majority Croat populace of the west bank. One third of the marriages in Mostar were interreligious (Hayden 1996, 788–790; Robison and Pobrić 2006, 249; Yarwood 1999, 31).2

The Wars in Mostar: Urbicide Problems in this multi-ethnic city started soon after Bosnia and Herzegovina seceded from Yugoslavia (following Slovenia and Croatia) (March 1992) and was internationally recognised as a sovereign nation-state (April 1992). Units of the Yugoslav People’s Army (JNA) attacked BiH with the intent of arresting the dissolution of the Socialist Federation, and arrived in Mostar in early April (Donia and Fine 1994, 240–241; Malcom 1994, 234–236) keeping the city under siege for three months until a Croat-Muslim counter-offensive expelled them in June 1992. A year later, the Croatian Defence Council (HVO) attempted to evict the Muslim community to make Mostar an exclusively Croat city and the capital of what they envisioned as a separate entity within the borders of the newly formed nation state: Herceg-Bosna (Donia and Fine 1994, 248–254; Grodach 2002, 66–70; Malcom 1994, 240–241; Mazowiecki 1993; Hayden 1996).3 During the second war in Mostar, the Bulevar—the main artery dissecting the city north to south—became a front line and, at the end

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of the war, the unofficial border dividing the city into two halves. The war transformed a street into a territorial boundary. Thereafter, ‘the contested nature of the town made it a target of nationalist leaderships keen to consolidate their power symbolically and demographically’ (Bieber 2005, 422). Whereas, in other areas of the country, post-war internal migrations guaranteed the creation of an ethno-national majority, the two dominant communities in Mostar continued to inhabit the same territory, with both claiming their inherited right to stay in the city (often at the expense of other groups). As Bieber (2005, 421) recalls, ‘in the aftermath of the war, crossing to the other side was even formally restrained’. If post-war life began by reinforcing this line of division, it was with the arrival of the international organisations in Mostar that the ‘ethnic border’ was legitimised as a necessary step forward in the process of reconciliation, favouring—incidentally—copious internal and external migrations. Following the newly implemented logic of ethno-territorial belonging, citizens of Mostar (but not only those) moved towards territories where the majority of their community was already settled. West Mostar became a Croat enclave and east Mostar a Bosniak/Muslim territory. The number of Serbs declined dramatically to less than five percent. The concept of urbicid (urbicide) was chosen by a group of Mostarian architects as a central theme for a monograph which aimed to visually display the destruction of Mostar’s physical landscape. Later, scholars like Martin Coward drew on the destruction of Mostar to conceptualise the notion of urbicide as the process that ‘[destroys] a specific existential quality through the destruction of the built environment’ (2006, 428). Coward understands heterogeneity as the main target of urbicidal attacks. In fact, he argues that urban infrastructures—the built environment— are shared in the sense that urban dwellers possess them in common, and use them to ‘[n]avigate through, or orient themselves in relation to, the places and spaces around buildings’ (2006, 428). Cities are here understood as mixed spaces in becoming. It is the process of inhabiting and using the built environment that produces diversity (in usage, understandings, roles, etc.). The urban fabric is, in other words, a catalyst and producer of both difference and cooperation—a clear enemy of ethno-nationalist attempts to purify and homogenise territories. Coward draws on the philosophical work of Jean-Luc Nancy (1996) to suggest that a community is the sense of being with others, the experience of sharing with other beings. As such, urban infrastructures are necessary

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for co-existence, for being together with and forming a community because they guarantee, to a certain extent, the very existence of the possibility of relationality between beings. This resonates well with Lefebvre’s notion of spatial practices as the city-infrastructures that ‘ensure continuity and some sort of cohesion’ in cities (Lefebvre 1991, 33). Not only does the urban fabric create the conditions of possibility for encounters to take place, it also provides a space in which people acquires the competence to navigate the city and share its infrastructures with others. Coward’s analysis also expands beyond destruction, to infer that ‘[h]ouses cannot simply be rebuilt if the very terrain of community has been reorganised into antagonistic enclaves’ (2006, 436), and thus implicitly criticising post-war directives that aimed to rebuild what had been lost in order to recreate a multi-ethnic environment—like the case of the Old Bridge. In fact, it would not be sufficient to rebuild what has been lost or damaged for the sake of recreating heterogeneity—rather, a community could only be re-established in its original heterogeneous form if individuals wanted, and were given the opportunity, to recreate experiences of co-existence by re-establishing meaningful (and sociopolitically grounded) relations with others in a shared space. If, however (as happened in BiH), citizens become part of antagonistic communities expressed through politico-legal structures of division, which are themselves grounded by constitutional law, they would hardly have the required opportunities (infrastructures) to reorganise their urban experience with others outside of their new, socio-spatially homogeneous communities of belonging, which all but de facto boycotts the process of reconciliation. An example of this emerges from the restructuring of the education system according to ethno-national curricula, which led to the creation of ethno-national schools, and thereby obstructing processes of socialisation outside one’s community through entrenched segregation (Kovač et al. 2017; Hromadžić 2008).

The Dayton Peace Agreements (1995) and the Geopolitical Context of Bosnia and Herzegovina In order to understand the present socio-political dynamics at play in Mostar after the war, it is necessary to firstly account for the wider state-­ building project of Bosnia and Herzegovina, which was initiated in 1995 with the signing of the Dayton Peace Agreements.4 The DPA included a

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new Constitution and institutional arrangements for the new born state, which crucially shaped the country’s post-war scenario and informed the modalities of its (re)construction. A consociational (power-sharing) system was envisioned as the best option among those available. In a manner that differed from all other former-Yugoslav Republics, BiH was declared a multinational state constituted by three distinct peoples: Bosnian-Muslim/Bosniak, BosnianCroat and Bosnian-Serb, thus de facto precluding the very possibility of the legal existence of a (united) Bosnian identity. As a result, the legitimacy given to the three constituent peoples imagines (and enacts) citizenship on an exclusively ethno-national basis. Consequently, minorities and those who do not primarily identify with one of the three ethno-national categories are left without constitutional validation and excluded from politics, undermining, as a side effect, the very same project that brought them into existence. The Sejdić-Finci case against BiH exemplifies well such a constitutional inconsistency (Cirkovic 2016). Dervo Sejdić and Jakob Finci are both Bosnian citizens; the first belonging to the Roma community and the second to the Jewish community. Both are actively participating in the political life of the country, but according to Articles 5 and 7 of the Constitution, they cannot be elected members of the Presidency and House of People because they do not belong to one of the three constituent peoples. After having appealed to the European Court of Human Rights (2006), the High Court has declared that Articles 5 and 7 of BiH Constitution violate Article 14 of the European Commission of Human Rights (2009)—i.e. citizens should not be discriminated on the issue of their ethno-national belonging. In September 2011, the parliamentary Assembly of BiH set in motion a constitutional reform to comply with the directive of the High Court, which—at this date—has not been yet formalised. After the Peace Agreements, BiH was (re)imagined as a state comprising two primary geopolitical entities: The Federation of BiH (arranged into ten Bosnian-Croat or Bosniak cantons) comprising 51% of the territory, and The Republika Srpska (with a large Serb majority) occupying 49% (Chandler 2000, 67). A special status was granted for the area of Brčko that, for its strategic position, was declared a multi-ethnic District and administrated separately (cf. Bieber 2005; Jeffrey 2006) in a manner referred to by Robert Farrand, as a ‘mini and accelerated Dayton’ (cited in Chandler 2000, 85).

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The DPA drew on census data (1991) and ethnic mappings as the necessary hard facts determining the ‘reality’ of separate ethno-nationally homogeneous enclaves, although this situation was far from the landscape of pre-war Bosnia where people were intermingled on a very wide scale. By breaking up the territory of BiH into smaller administrative units, the DPA reinforced nationalist claims for each nation’s right to self-determination by giving them territorial authority in a way that Campbell described as ‘reminiscent of apartheid’ (1999, 400). To reimagine BiH as such triggered various internal and external movements of population willing to live within the community of belonging (even if their residence was elsewhere prior the war). The result was a de facto constitution of quasi-homogeneous ethnic enclaves whose political stability was achieved through a ruling ethnic majority, which tends to safeguard its own interests. Thus, the post-war scenario rarely encouraged the recreation of mixed neighbourhoods. According to 2006 unofficial statistics, 90% of the population of BiH lives in ethnically homogeneous spaces (Robinson and Pobrić 2006, 249). Given these premises, the very idea of cooperation and dialogue between contending parties becomes totally inconsistent; as Soberg notes, ‘given strength to the entities, the federal institutions did not represent the real centres of power in BiH’ (2008, 716; see also Yiftachel 2006; Anderson 2013). In other words, in the narrative of Dayton, the articulation of sovereignty becomes formally an ethnic issue, and thus legitimating ethno-national groups as the main political actors by transforming the democracy into an exclusive ethnocracy. Borders can be understood as spatial divisions that ‘provide most individuals with a concrete, local, and powerful experience of the state, for this is the site where citizenship is strongly enforced’ (Lamont and Molnar 2002, 183). Boundaries can emanate from a central power in order to normalise and administer territorial sovereignty, but it can also be constructed by local interests (e.g. an ethnic minority reclaiming its boundary from within a nation-state). In both cases, the boundary constructs otherness by drawing a line of difference. In Dayton, the line of difference was symbolically represented by the ethnically qualifying hyphen that inhered in the new mapping of Bosnian citizenship, i.e. Bosnian-Muslim, Bosnian-Croat and Bosnian-Serb. This recategorisation was already contained within the preceding Vance-Owen plan (1993), where:

50  G. Carabelli Cantons were given ‘ethnic’ labels on the map, and at the same time the impression was given that the precise boundaries on the map were not yet final. This had the entirely predictable effect of inciting renewed competition for territory. And, worst of all, it incited competition between Croat and Muslim forces for parts of central Bosnia where there had been a mixed Muslim Croat population. (Malcolm 1994, 248)

Within the Dayton framework, ethnicity has been called into being as a static and rigid phenomenon, which discards the possibility of understanding ethnicity (as nationality) in a dynamic and socially constructed way. If ethnicity was instead understood as a process of becoming, the ‘facticity’ of ethnicisation could have been taken into account as, in essence, a political, social, cultural process. This alternative perspective opens the possibility of seeing the formation of ethnic groups as non-­ teleological. Hence, the crystallisations of ethnic groups are merely the socio-historical result of violence and the contingencies of conflict. As Hayden (1996, 789) writes, ‘various ethnographers from mixed regions have consistently reported that while national differences were recognised, tensions were low in the 1980s until political events from outside of these regions overtook them.’ In line with the framework discussed in Chapter 1, the spatialisation of ethno-national categories, which rewrote the geopolitics of BiH, is partially articulated through abstract space, which is a ‘product of violence and war, it is political; instituted by a state, it is institutional. On the first inspection, it appears homogeneous; and indeed it serves those forces which make a tabula rasa of whatever stands in their way, of whatever threatens them—in short of differences’ (Lefebvre 1991, 285). This abstract space is created through processes of reductionism. Firstly, by reducing three-dimensional realities into two dimensions, ‘defined by its “isotopy” (or homogeneity), a property which guarantees its social and political utility’ (ibid., 285). This resonates with the practice of ethnic mappings that reconfigured BiH in a number of cantons assigned to one or other community. Such a practice reduced the pre-war reality of ethnic-mingling to the post-war reality of ethnic-separation. The reduction was meant to simplify complex inter-ethnic dynamics to flatten them as antagonistic, and thus the need to create borders between the communities. Secondly, reductionism is enacted by denying that space is social and preferring an understanding of space refracted through the ‘logic of

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visualization’, which ‘tends to relegate objects to the distance, to render them passive… By the time this process is complete, space has no social existence independently of an intense, aggressive and repressive visualization’ (ibid., 286). This resonates with the rebuilding of the Old Bridge in Mostar that filled post-war narratives that celebrated the rebuilding of this symbol as the omen for a successful process of reconciliation. Yet, this is again a reduction that does not engage with the changed dynamics of the city and the fact that this bridge, in the Ottoman town, has become a Muslim monument. To recall, the goal of abstract space is homogeneity, which is both produced and productive (Lefebvre 1991, 288). Yet it is always a specific, politicised homogeneity, expressed by the multitude of particular political spaces (states) across the capitalist world system. Read in this light, engender this specific homogenisation, yet with two contending identities claiming the same territory. As such ethno-national divisions, becoming normalised, sustain, justify, and produce further division in the city and the country. The case of Mostar—in which two ethnic communities almost equal in size inhabit the same territory to which each side makes exclusivist claims—soon became an exceptional case study for peacekeepers, who came to see Mostar as a laboratory ‘to work out at the micro-scale the key parameters of shared governance and territory needed for the effective functioning of Bosnia Herzegovina at the macro-scale’ (Bollens 2007, 213; see also Grodach 2002, 63). In fact, the unresolved nature of ethno-national ownership in the city fuelled renewed attempts by nationalist groups to monopolise urban space in the capital city of Herzegovina, which led to an increase (and diversification) of efforts on behalf of the main international actors, local and international NGO workers, and activists to neutralise existing divisive practices, and to imagine a different future for the city.

EUAM (1994–1997): Dividing Mostar, Temporarily Given the bellicose atmosphere permeating the city, the presidents of BiH and Croatia agreed on permitting the European Union to provide an interim administration with the aim of settling lingering animosities and opening the way to the reconstruction of the city (1994). The EUAM (European Union Administration of Mostar) became the organ in charge of administering the city, headed by the Special European Representative. The first challenge confronted by the EUAM (1994–1997) was the

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formulation of a strategy capable of overcoming both the polarisation of the city and fostering the process of reunification. The municipality of Mostar was reorganised into six sub-districts (three Bosniak and three Croat) and a central—neutral—zone around the area of the former frontline. Each of these districts could obtain a certain level of autonomy in decision-making. The idea was to separate the intolerant communities while fostering a dialogue between them at a higher level of city governance. But, the lack of general goodwill and suspicions with regards to cooperation, combined with a complicated administrative system, resulted in a complex and inoperable arrangement, thus leading to the failure of the first experiment (Bieber 2005, 422–423). As Bieber (2005, 424) points out, ‘ironically… the international presence reinforced the division between Bosniak and Croat parts of town … Rather than challenging the ethnic division of the city, the rigid power-sharing system—instituted by the international administrators—both accepted and perpetuated the post-war status quo’. The empowerment of ethno-national groups as the prime political actors, and administering the city as a mosaic of ethno-­ national enclaves, merely strengthened bellicose positions of nationalist leaders that maintain strategic control of economic resources and public enterprises (Moore 2013, 77–80).

OHR (1997–2010): Conceiving Mostar, (Re)united At the end of the EUAM mandate (1997), the responsibility for implementing new strategies for the reunification of Mostar was taken directly by the OHR. Several reforms were promoted in the attempt to reunify the separate public services, schooling, and medical infrastructures, though without much success. In 2003, Paddy Ashdown (the High Representative at the time) established a Special Commission for reforming the City of Mostar with the aim of retackling the problematic division of the city. The Commission, formed by elected councillors with the representatives of the major political parties, had to come up with a viable strategy to reunify the administration of the city following specific guidelines given by the OHR, which included: (1) no changes to the current boundary of the city; (2) a unified and downsized administration for the city to end parallel structures and to ensure efficiency; (3) a composition of the city administration that reflects the last census; (4) a single

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budget for the city; (5) sufficient revenues; (6) a single assembly and electoral system; (7) full respect for the principle of responsibility of office; (8) institutional mechanisms to safeguard the vital interest of the Constituent Peoples (Commission for Reforming the City of Mostar 2003, 15). The first deadline (mid-2003) was missed because the convened parties could not agree upon how the existing separate administrations were to be united. The largely Bosnian-Muslim party (SDA) opposed the idea of transforming the existing six administrative units into one, fearing that an alleged numerical majority of Bosnian-Croat citizens would entail the political dominance of Bosnian-Croat elected representatives. The impasse was resolved by the direct intervention of the HR Paddy Ashdown. In August 2003, he stated that although the convened Commission failed to agree on a working draft, the process had to be continued to correct the negative signal that BiH sent to Europe and to meet the impatience of the citizens of Mostar (OHR Press Office 2003c). In September 2003, the HR established a new Special Commission for Reforming the City of Mostar. In this instance, the representatives of the main political parties were supported by international experts to facilitate the discussion (including an International Chairman). In December 2003, the Chairman of the Commission, Norbert Winterstein,5 circulated to the OHR, the Council of Ministries, the Government of the FBiH, the Government of the HerzegovinaNeretva Canton, and the Mayor and Deputy Mayor of Mostar a report on the current state of progress. He stated that the Commission discussed a strategy that was able ‘to examine the legal measures necessary to reform institutional structures and improve administrative and financial performance’ (Commission for Reforming the City of Mostar 2003, 56). The rationale for such a reform is both economic and social (as part of neoliberal geopolitics as discussed in Chapter 1)—as the HR wrote in a comment welcoming the finalisation of the Commission’s work: as Mostar overcomes its reputation for discord, it will also begin to attract an even-larger volume of foreign and domestic investment and recover its status as a major tourist attraction in BiH. The reunification of the city will mean its administration is better able to serve its citizens, effectively delivering proper education, healthcare, and other services. The six municipalities that existed hitherto cost every man, woman and child in Mostar 310 KM. (OHR Board of Principals Press Office 2004)6

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The compiled report summarises the main issues discussed by the Commission and envisions strategies to restructure the city as a single entity. Despite the delegates’ agreement on general guidelines, there was no unanimous decision regarding the status of the city of Mostar and the electoral reform (the final proposal was in fact mediated by the Chairman). Regarding the legal status of the city, two contending positions arose. One proposal was to organise Mostar as one municipality, while the other was to organise the territory into a satellite of smaller units of administration monitored and coordinated by a central organ (either reducing the existing six municipalities to four city areas or increasing the number to 37 mjesna zajednica on the model of former Yugoslavia).7 The disagreements that arose with regards to the electoral system reform were the consequence of a lack of common vision over the legal status of the city. Different scenarios tended to materialise depending on the level of centralisation or decentralisation of the administration, i.e. whether the political representatives should be elected by smaller units within the city area, or whether the election should be held in the form of the entire city as one electoral unit. The discussions were also complicated by the fact that, according to State electoral law, political representatives should be chosen guaranteeing a fair ethno-national representation with consideration to the census data of 1991 that become obsolete after war-induced processes of displacement and internal movement. With the political parties refusing to adopt the final proposal, the HR imposed its recommendations in January 2004 with effect from March 15, 2004, officially ending the political polarisation of the city (Bieber 2005, 425–426). As Soberg noted, ‘the only viable way to move the country forwards is for the HR to impose reforms’ (2008, 216; see also the concept of inertia in Chapter 1). The Statute has not been altered since,8 primarily because the City Council has not yet legally accepted it. In fact, to amend the Statute, the City Council would first have to accept it, and only later attempt to vote against it with a minimal threshold of two-thirds majority of elected councillors (Commission for Reforming the City of Mostar 2003, Article 58). In April 2009, Ljubo Bešlić (acting Mayor at the time and current Mayor of Mostar) said to the International Crisis Group (ICG) that the city would never adopt the measure (ICG 2009, 5, fn. 28). Regarding the contested status of the city, the OHR abolished the existing six administrative units brought about by post-war agreements

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in favour of one single entity (Commission for Reforming the City of Mostar 2003, Article 3). The six units were transformed into electoral constituencies (ibid., Article 7). Each unit elects three councillors for a total of 18; the other 17 councillors are to be elected from a city-wide list. At least four candidates of each Constituent People (Bosnian-Serbs, -Croats, and Bosniaks), while one of the Others is also to be elected from the city-wide list (ibid., Article 17). The City Council must have a President and two Vice-Presidents from different Constituent People (ibid., Article 25). The Mayor must be elected by the City Council from amongst the Councillors by a two-third majority (ibid., Article 44).9 The final Report is not only an executive document. As I will show in the next section, the language and narrative of the final Report spells out how the Chairman conceived Mostar, the role of cities, the conception of the rights and commitments pertaining to the citizens of Mostar, and the legal measures taken to reform the city as a united whole. According to the final report, ‘Mostar is a city with a noble and historic past, yet in the present days is mostly acknowledged as being the emblem of political divisions and structural inefficiencies’ (ibid., 12). Mostar was a city in the past, but this city is no more. Instead, contemporary Mostar represents the antithesis of the (idealised) city and, as such, it needs to be fixed especially because ‘it has failed to deliver acceptable levels of service and responsible self-government to its citizens’ (ibid., 12). Currently ‘the city of Mostar has never come to life and it is a dead letter on a paper instead of a normal or close to normal situation’ (ibid., 13). The city has only itself to blame, however, because of its ‘stagnancy and stubbornness’ (ibid., 49). The narrative of the document primarily depicts Mostar as a comatose body with a stubborn resistance to any attempts at resuscitation. This physical analogy (the city as a body) ‘is by extension an appeal to unity and, beyond that unity, to an origin deemed to be known with absolute certainty, identified beyond any possible doubt—an original that legitimates and justifies’ (Lefebvre 1991, 274–275). To use the rhetoric of the city as a body means to appeal to the myth of origins and to eliminate ‘any study of transformations, in favour of an image of continuity and a cautious evolutionism’ (ibid., 275). In fact, the history of the conflict or the highly-contested nature of BiH as a nation-state are never accounted for creating a bridge between the abstraction of Mostar as a united city and its future. The status of city is given in terms of its functionality; in fact, to become a city again, Mostar should prove itself

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capable of delivering certain services to the citizens and self-government. According to HR Ashdown’s understanding, ‘politics is a practical business. It is about identifying problems and solving them. And that is what the reform process is ultimately about. About creating a better life for you, and for your children’ (OHR Press Office 2003b). The seemingly proven incapacity to function precludes the possibility of any future change unless some sort of (external) assistance is provided. For this purpose, ‘the aim of the reform is that of actively engaging local authorities in determining the future structure, administration and functioning of Mostar so that the city could develop as a normal, unified city in line with European norms and standards’ (Commission for Reforming the City of Mostar 2003, 12). All those ‘special regulations that would establish Mostar as an exception are no longer required’ (ibid., 22), thus ‘Mostar can begin its work to become a truly European city and a model for BiH’ (ibid., 49). The implementation of the reform is not presented as optional, but as the only solution to guarantee a future for the city (as a city), which incidentally internalises the European spirit. Although the document’s narrative never clarifies what it means by ‘European city’, it makes clear that the European city is ‘normal’ and therefore normatively correct. The discourse underlining the document deals with being European in two ways. First, it renders belonging to Europe as the condition to be considered normal, and therefore more of a necessity than an option. Second, it reifies the process of becoming European as the mere practice of following rules and accepting norms (being functional). The main problem stems from the fact that Mostar is in BiH, but its future is imagined as European, erasing all the socio-historical complexities of its own context. As Lefebvre also argues, functionalism is a means of political reductionism that invokes neutrality through the use of scientific and technical means (Lefebvre 1991, 106). In this case, the reduction is made on two levels. Firstly, the level of the city: here, complexity and contradiction are flattened so that simple and clear rules could be imposed to maintain an order that is justified by ‘scientific’ approaches to best management. Secondly, the level of Europe/ being European: again, the idea of becoming part of Europe is equated with normality, which implies that the local administration needs to follow the imposed guidelines to become normal (democratic, efficient…). It is also interesting to note that this document is written by a representative of the international community chosen by the delegate of the European Community in BiH. The EU had effectively co-supervised the

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post-war military interventions and implementations of policies and regulations to reform the newly born nation-state, yet, apparently, Mostar is entirely to blame for being dysfunctional. If the various EU representatives were effectively in charge (or at least supervising the implementation of their rules), why is there a total absence of blame (at least from official pronouncements) on their conduct as well? One answer points toward the neo-colonialist logic undergirding international intervention, i.e. the moral duty to export democracy (civilisation) where there is none (see Chandler 2000; Cisarova-Dimitrova 2005), which automatically absolves the West from its mistakes in the name of liberty and human rights (see also Majstorović and Vučkocav 2016). Sentences like ‘Citizens of Mostar have demonstrated their desire and hope for a normal city’ (Commission for Reforming the City of Mostar 2003, 54), or ‘There are signs that the people of Mostar want a normal city, organized according to normal and widely accepted European standards’ (ibid., 55), render the roles played by the citizens of Mostar as somewhat problematic. Citizens tend to be pictured as stand-still figurines, victims of recent tragic events desperate to obtain the normal city they deserve. What obstructs them in carrying out a normal life seems to be the absence of a single administration and a legal framework within which the everyday could be performed (Galli 2010, 81). As aptly noted by Agamben (2005, 30–34), any political reflection upon the role of ‘people’ in western politics has to start by accounting for the ‘amphibolous’ nature of the term. In contemporary European languages, ‘people’ translates simultaneously into both a functionally equivalent political subject and the category of those belonging to lower social classes.10 One the one hand there is the People—a coherent and essentially homogenous ‘body politic’ and, on the other, the people, a multiplicity of needy bodies excluded from the channels of political empowerment. This double-meaning of ‘people’ is constructed along the same categories that define, according to Agamben, contemporary (bio)politics: bios (People/ political subjectivity) and zoé (people/bare life). In other words, the term the people contains a fundamental biopolitical fracture—that which cannot properly belong to the whole of which it is already a part. Galli captures this tension in the following way: [W]henever… democracy wants to make itself concrete… it brings into the smooth spatiality of the State a lacerating conflict against the ‘internal enemy,’ thus undermining from within the fundamental task and objective

58  G. Carabelli of modern statuality: peace… [W]ithin this framework, we can observe a sort of ‘dynamic of attrition’… among the spaces of the State, the Subject, and Society… Within the space of the State, the border between individual, Society, and State (as well as that between the private, the public, and the statual), thus proves to be… a frontier – a place of struggle, advances, retreats, and, in every sense of the word, movement. (2010, 46–47, emphasis added)

Thus, what Galli calls the ‘frontier’ as ‘a place of struggle’ in modern society could be reconceptualised along the lines laid out by Agamben about the struggle that the people conduct to become the People. Yet this tension mysteriously vanishes in the text of the Report, where people are often called into being as victims, deprived of their capacity to act, crying out for help, and thus forcing the OHR to act in an authoritarian manner to cure and to heal their (bare) life. In doing so, the people of Mostar lose the political possibility of becoming the People and the ability to decide their own destiny. The ‘frontier’ is thereby annihilated, so that the possibility of becoming involved in the political is made impossible by the undemocratic authority of the OHR. The ‘silence of the users’ is also for Lefebvre, the ‘entire problem’ (Lefebvre 1991, 365) because until the people becomes the People no change could be made in urban politics. Interestingly, the document also expands on the ways in which citizens could voice their desire to have a single city again. Public hearings were organised on November 13 and 17 and December 2, 2003 with the following groups: business leaders, professors and intellectuals, journalists, and young people. Representatives from the business community lamented the high costs of doing business in Mostar due to tax-revenue supported redundancy measures and general bureaucratic fragmentation. The intellectuals stated that reform is needed, but citizens must be educated on the benefits of such reform to counter the efforts of anti-reformists. Journalists proved to be the biggest sceptics— according to the Chairman of the Commission this could possibly be ascribed to ‘the political biases that unfortunately affect their profession’ (Commission for Reforming the City of Mostar 2003, 57). The youth complained about being left out of the reform process, which led to the conclusion that ‘they demonstrated to be the reformers and leaders of tomorrow’ (ibid.). In contrast to the conventional practice of drawing on numbers and statistics in order to evidence claims, this time the International Representative mentioned neither how many participants

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attended the public hearings nor how many were effectively in favour of reform. Further, against the standardised practice of labelling citizens as part of an ethno-national community, the participants at the public hearings were categorised on the basis of their occupation (and yet, legally, citizens of BiH are part of one three Constituent People through which they attain their political subjectivity). This time the convened participants were not the People of BiH, but rather the people of Mostar. The subaltern position of the citizens of Mostar is further evidenced by the problematic—and yet reiterated—call for their active participation. In fact, since April 2003, when the first Commission was called to work on a draft document, the HR invited citizens to speak up and send their own proposals for the new City Statute (OHR Press Office 2003a) and yet the OHR website (main channel through which the OHR disseminates news and official documents) was made available in local languages only from September 9, 2003. Another point to be made concerns the ways in which the document renders the sought-after process of transformation highly emotional when engaging with the citizenry: ‘[o]ne key-unifying factor remained: the understanding that the citizens of Mostar deserve better’ (Commission for Reforming the City of Mostar 2003, 49), and further: ‘the reform is needed not for the parties and not for the politicians but for every man, woman and child who want a better future in the place they call home’ (ibid.). As already noted by Cisarova-Dimitrova (2005, 53), one of the main strategies used by the OHR to impose unilateral decisions is to employ ‘rhetorical figures such as the country’s endangered European prospects or its image in the eyes of a putative “Europe” (ostensibly symbolizing the affluent “civilized” world)’. To this we should add the intense references made to the real victims of the political impasse—the people—to whom the OHR is directly appealing and concretely helping by substituting the local politicians (corrupted and nationalist) in the decision-making process (Cisarova-Dimitrova 2005, 52–53). The sentimental connotation of the concluding paragraph to the Report is also very telling. The fact that the reform is made for the ‘everyman’ is striking, meaning that the supposed-to-be-ordinary human is not a neutral character, but is instead the one who deserves better because of their sufferance and patience. I am not here discussing the merits of the citizens of Mostar, but questioning the choice of addressing in an official document not to a legal category such as the citizen, but to a quality of being that the citizen may or may not possess. Further, the

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everyman of the Report is an abstraction and does not account for the real needs, desires, and visions of the citizenry. Rather, to describe the citizens of Mostar as victims deprives them of their political subjectivity. Again, citizens are depicted as detached from the politics of the city and its participatory dynamics, as external observers of what happens in the city. However, central to understanding the mechanisms that brought about the urban division (and its maintenance) is not only the analysis of historical and political dimensions, but also of how the division was supported (or contested) in everyday life—by citizens themselves. Who are the citizens of the various documents released by the International Community? Citizens, according to the DPA, gain political subjectivities as parts of one of the three Constituent People (to which they are invited to adhere). Ethno-national groups are the main interlocutors of political debates and campaigns, de facto empowering pre-existing nationalist discourses—yet the HR is working for the people, the victims of the conflict, those who have no power. They are not only victims of the local corrupted politicians, but also of a system that does not recognise them unless they fit into ethno-national categories. As Rancière noticeably argued: The Rights of Man turned out to be the rights of the rightless, of the population hunted out of their homes and land and threatened by ethnic slaughter. They appeared as the rights of the victims, the rights of those who were unable to enact any rights or even any claim in their name, so that eventually their rights had to be upheld by others, at the cost of shattering the edifice of International Rights, in the name of a new right to ‘humanitarian interference’. (2004, 297–298)

As seen, the main disputes within the Commission for Reforming the City of Mostar concerned both the status of the city and electoral law reform. Since an agreement could not be reached, the Chairman proposed a mediated draft, which was later approved and published by the OHR. Article 5 of the proposed Statute makes clear that ‘the city shall be a single, undivided area according to the state of the area span marked by cadastre lines on 1 January 1991 and modified in 1995’ (Commission for Reforming the City of Mostar 2003, 25). However, in contradiction to this, Article 6 states that in ‘the City of Mostar, 6 city areas shall be formed corresponding to the former city-municipalities. These areas are electoral constituencies according to Article 15’ (ibid., 25).11 The proposal appeared to be a safe compromise to placate the delegates. Yet since the

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election of political representatives is the main democratic tool guaranteeing the effective participation of citizens in the political life of their city, instructing them to vote within an area created by the post-war dynamics of nationalist partitions means to perpetuate the system while trying to change it. In practice, such a strategy empowers candidates elected from virtually homogeneous communities (due to the post-war internal movements) in contradistinction to the original intent of recreating a political space in which a more heterogeneous community could exercise its political powers (the reunited city of Mostar). The final Statute also details the modalities of such elections. Each electoral constituency (regardless of the actual number of inhabitants) should elect three candidates belonging to the three Constituent People, de facto limiting (or instructing) the free choice of the citizens or fuelling political parties’ negotiations to position adequate candidates according to their ethno-nationality.12 The proposed solution does not seem to be consistent with the main goal of reuniting the city. In fact, whereas the territory has been formally reunified, the internal divisions became instrumental to political games dictated by nationalist goals, i.e. maintaining political power administered and divided among ethno-­ national lines. The system does not encourage (or favour) popular political initiatives (or even the creation of parties) outside of ethno-nationalist subjectivities. In conclusion, the very idea that to reunite a city is sufficient to declare its territory as one undivided space seems highly problematic. To conflate the idea of city with its territory means to imagine (and understand) it as emptied of people, human interactions, human labour, and the affective ties binding citizens to their city (and each other). It is an abstraction and, as such, limits the understanding of urban dynamics by simplifying the mechanisms characterising the everyday, which is far more conducive to the needs of bureaucratic administration.

Distracted Politics or the Politics of Division? Garbage Collection and Electricity Infrastructure, or How to Keep a City Divided When Declaring Its Reunification A decade passed. Paddy Ashdown vacated his post as High Representative in 2006 and three other HRs have since taken up the same position.13 The OHR is still in charge of overseeing the process of

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democracy building and actively working with (supervising) local politicians. In Mostar, Ljubo Bešlić is still the mayor. After being elected in 2004, he acted as a mayor in the 14 months of political impasse while the City Council decided upon a new mayor, to be re-elected in 2009.14 A closer analysis of the ways in which the unifying directives of 2004 were implemented will clarify the extents to which the imposition of the Statute affected not only the administrative and legal apparatuses, but also the everyday life of Mostar and its citizens. In a long interview with the magazine START in May 2011,15 Mayor Ljubo Bešlić discussed the main issues regarding the process of reunification which began in 2004. When asked for his opinion about the status of the ‘divided city’, he promptly corrected the interviewer: ‘I have to disagree with the assessment that the city is divided’, he argued. ‘[The division] exists in the minds of someone in Sarajevo or Banja Luka. The truth is I cannot say that the city is fully reunited, but Mostar is safer than other cities in BiH, because there is no violence like there is in Sarajevo, for instance, where there is always a new victim of crime’ (START 2011). I will return later to the issue of public safety. For the moment, it is sufficient to focus merely on the assessment that the city has been reunited. In another occasion, writing the foreword for a new publication about Mostar in 2008, Mayor Bešlić wrote: Three national communities Croats, Bosnians and Serbs and citizens of other nationalities to a significant extent, retained their presence in spite of war and migration, so Mostar is now practically the only truly multi-ethnic town in Bosnia. It is expected, and I am personally and as mayor and as a man an optimist, the city of Mostar, as such, will be guiding BiH in its integration into Europe. (Bešlić et al. 2008, emphasis added)

In fact, the opinion of the Mayor is widely shared by other politicians in charge of the administration of the city. When I met the then spokesman for the Croatian Democratic Union (Hrvatska Demokratska Zajednica, HDZ) in Mostar in 2010, he also confirmed that the division is just a matter of misperception. For instance, the spokesman argued that although there are two curricula in the school system, this is not an effect of divisive ethno-national strategies, but rather the democratic possibility given to students to study in their own language. He clarified further that there is no division in Mostar and went on explaining that this is a European model, the multinational system (personal communication 17/06/2010).

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The attitude of the political class regarding the problem of the reunification of the city is indeed peculiar. On the one hand, the imposition of the Statute changed the perception of the city. If once Mostar was described as divided (its main characteristic), today the city administrators find difficulty in describing it as such. Indeed, they are all democratically elected representatives of the city of Mostar, ‘one’ territory. However, they also feel compelled to make sense of certain characteristics of the city such as the segregation of the educational system, still existing parallel institutions, not to mention an assessment of everyday life. The main challenge seems to be that of formulating coherent descriptions of the situation without falling back into the trap of depicting Mostar as divided. Thus, various strategies have been elaborated accounting for both the ways in which administrators talk about Mostar and how they practically manage the city. Another example, in July 2010, I interviewed three people working at the Spatial Planning Institute of Mostar, curious to learn about how planners were addressing the process of reconciliation and reunification of the city. In a personal interview, the Director of the Institute, Salem Bubalo, said that the main obstacles are a conspicuous lack of a budget and almost non-existent investors, which limit the possibility of both rebuilding and expanding the city. In fact, existing plans imagine the expansion of Mostar northwards with the construction of a new neighbourhood (the North Camp). The original vision included a new stadium (capable of hosting up to 40,000 people), 5000 parking places, pools, cinema, hotels, 3000 housing units (hosting 15,000 people), schools (one school has already been opened), and daily care centres. Dr Bubalo hopes that the development plan could attract new inhabitants and boost tourism as if the economic benefits could guarantee the success of reconciliation practices. But, when solicited to answer more delicate questions, such as which school (which curriculum) would occupy the space planned for a school or which church would occupy the religious space, he declined to answer, adding that this is about politics and not planning (personal interview 20/07/2010). The answer is consistent with the idea that architecture and planning are practices not concerned or dealing with the political or social realms (see also Gunder 2010; Lefebvre 1991, 308). As many have discussed, politika (politics) came to be, in the everyday realm, the space of corruption. Politics does not refer to the practice of administration, debate, and decision-making, but rather to what is not transparent (Kolind 2008). As an extension of

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this, to be associated with politics amounts to a kind of guilt by association. Yet the emphasis given to neutrality uncovers the necessity of avoiding difficult decisions. If the division were not a problem, then to assign a certain building (area) to a community would not have been an issue. It is a problem (and as such must be avoided) because the division of the city has not been overcome. Politicians and officials are downplaying it (or ignoring it) for the simple purpose of ignoring the inconvenient truth of division. The lamented Statute (which nobody likes, but nobody changes) becomes instrumental to these practices. The fact that the city was declared as one means that reunification is no longer an issue. The city has turned an historical page and now (somehow) functions as one. The external imposition of the Statute is also helpful in legitimising the unwillingness of the political class to actively work towards a substantial reunification. In fact, the elected councillors never agreed on the modalities of reunification and, as such, they are not responsible for its effects in the everyday. The reunification has occurred as a top-down imposition, rather than a process, while no strategy was discussed to reunify the social life of the city. The territorial contiguity of Mostar alone could not possibly have brought social and political reconciliation among the warring parties. The lack of a single vision of Mostar’s future means that many antagonistic positions of how Mostar should be conceived are fighting to attain visibility, with the consequence of social immobility. I believe that the word most often used by politicians in Mostar is ‘dif­ ficult’ or ‘complex’. This is the complexity of the ambiguous, the unspoken, and the ambivalent, which creates a real trap for the citizenry whose everyday performances depend on the (provisional and shaky) infrastructures of the city. A closer look at the administration of basic services (of spatial practices) such as electricity, water, and city maintenance further illuminates the extent to which the lack of a single vision for the future of the city affects its everyday life. The Statute of the city of Mostar prescribed that not only the amalgamation of the former six municipalities, but also the merging of parallel social infrastructures. Before reunification, Mostar had two payment bureaus, two post offices, two public bus companies, two public city sanitation companies, two water and sewage companies, two electric ­ distribution companies, two currencies, and two public pension funds (ICG 2000, 51–54). After the reunification, the two water providers were merged but duties and competencies were redistributed in line with ethno-national divisions, with a director in west Mostar—taking care of

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this part of the city—and an executive director administering the eastern part (ICG 2009, 11–12). The situation proved more difficult for other public service providers such as Komos and Parkovi; the companies in charge of city maintenance (roads, parks, nurseries, public buildings, etc.) in the east and west of the city, respectively. On 6 December 2006, the City Council voted in favour of closing the two separate organisations to establish a new public company called Komunalno. In the meanwhile, Parkovi went bankrupt while Komos refused to sign an agreement that would have compromised its finances. As Parkovi cleared its balance sheet in 2008, Komos fell under mounting debt burdens. No agreement between the two existing companies could have been made. Later, Komunalno and Komos underwent internal reorganisation (including the dismissal of workers from Komos) but the City Council never convened to discuss the organisation of the new company or the reorganisation of the two older ones. As a result, the city now has three companies—Komunalno being the city-owned company that subcontracts to Parkovi and Komos when needed, which incidentally fails to solve the original problem, i.e. how to provide a more agile service for the city (see ICG 2009, 12). To date, the situation remains the same if not worse by increasing debt burdens—coming from the costs of managing three companies rather than one. Further, citizens seem to be extremely dissatisfied with the service provided so that in summer 2017 complaints voiced in local newspapers argued that the garbage was not collected on time, creating real problems when the temperature reached 40 degrees, threatening public health and affecting tourism (C.V. 2017). Electricity is also provided by two separate companies that reflect the divisions of the country along ethno-national lines; Elektroprivreda Bosne i Hercegovina (EPBIH) and Electroprivreda Hrvatske Zajednice Herceg-Bosne (EPHHZHB), which serve the Bosniak and Croat territory in the Federation, serve the two sides of Mostar independently.16 A clear example of how this might affect the everyday in Mostar was given in February 2012 when the electrical towers holding the power cables to east Mostar fell under the heavy snow. Half of the city was left for three days and four nights without electricity (no heating, cooking, or hot water). Those who had the option went to ‘the other side’ to seek refuge. Those without the western option had to survive by their own means. In an interview with Oslobođenje, Mayor Bešlić was asked to comment on how the event evidenced the current division of the city. The mayor admitted that, if the electricity provider were one, the

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damage could have been limited, but warned against the politicisation of the story. Rather, he stated, we should consider the thousands of people who promptly volunteered to help those in difficulty, ‘people who have sacrificed themselves to help others’ (Gudelj 2012). In fact, the highly disorganised service providers and the lack of contingency plans (it should be said that this was a rare natural event) resulted in chaos, so much so that citizens effectively organised themselves with the aim of providing basic provisions for those in dire need. For instance, the Youth Cultural Centre Abrašević—which is located on the former buffer zone, but obtains its electricity from the west—opened its doors to those looking for a refuge offering hot food, drinks, and provisional shelter. The general sense of chaos and lack of strategies in administering the city brought about a shared popular sentiment against politics, which was perceived as a game played by individuals who do not in fact represent those who elected them, but act on the basis of futile legalistic arguments. The sense of frustration is galloping ahead even among those who have not given up on politics. As the local activist Jandrić (2011) commented on the political situation of BiH: I always conclude that the biggest obstacle in the development of Bosnia and Herzegovina society, democracy, human rights, economy and finance are actually all those numerous levels of government, imagined and signed in Dayton. Bosnia and Herzegovina suffers chronically of a surplus of rights of ‘constituent peoples’ and lack of rights for individuals, citizens and minority social groups. Such a constitutional composition of the country based exclusively on ethnic approach has brought us into this situation… This vicious circle pushes even nominally left-oriented parties into populism, flirtation with patriotism, nationalism, and in extreme cases open chauvinism. All with the goal of overtaking the power for the privilege it entails, and not for the reasons of wellbeing of ‘constitutive people’, not to mention the citizens.

All the social infrastructures of BiH, in either providing basic services such as water, or constituting the blueprint for practising democracy, seem to produce fractures rather than social cohesion. They instigate exasperation and discontent, alienating citizens from the active management of their political space. The lack of a strong governing institution at the state level reverberates down the scalar structure of social power. The empowered political parties and actors use their positions to manipulate

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the foreign-imported democratic tools to express their disagreement with those imposing the rules of the game.

But You Are Safe! The Logics of Pastoral Politics in a Dangerous World As many have already observed, ‘[the] consociational system allows elites to keep people in a continuous state of fear by invoking threats to their own territorial-political autonomy or highlighting the discrimination that co-ethnics face in other ethnocratic spaces in Bosnia’ (Moore 2013, 78; see also Laketa 2016; Bassuener 2015). In a rather Foucauldian way, the political class (those elected and those imposing themselves as the High Representative) asserts its authority despite the increasing dissatisfaction among the population by adopting the rhetoric of social safety. When Mostar was left without a mayor in 2009, the HR justified his direct intervention (and the partial amendment of the City Statute) by appealing to the need for saving lives. When asked about the division of Mostar, Mayor Bešlić said he could not truly say that the city was effectively reunited, but that it was certainly safer. Referring to the city park, Bešlić highlighted the introduction of ‘discreet and invisible 24/7 control and the ban on introducing pets and consuming alcohol… It is beautiful for mothers and children.’ (START 2011). Jandrić (2011), commenting on this, expressed his perplexities: ‘from all the sides we start to hear requests for building more prisons for minors, equipping the streets and schools with CCTV cameras, increasing the jurisdiction of police agents. That is as hypocritical as it gets’. The production of bare life (zoé)—the strategy of sovereign power establishing itself—is what Foucault called governmentality (see Foucault 2008). This is the bio-political rationality behind the modern state, which has been characterised since the beginning by pastoral power (Foucault 1991).17 The shepherd’s role, writes Foucault, is to ensure the salvation of the flock. For this reason, it is the shepherd’s duty to wield power and to make decisions in the interest of all. The relationship between shepherd and flock is one of devotion and absolute dependence. Whereas political power creates political subjects, pastoral power is exerted over individuals devoid of political subjectivity. The flock fully submits to the shepherd’s orders for the sake of maintaining its safety and internal order. The emphasis on safety must be seen along these lines

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as the use of a technology of power, which reduces citizens to helpless individuals to expropriate their political subjectivity in exchange for their personal security. This exchange is particularly meaningful in a post-war urban scenario, where the memories of conflict (danger, death, fear) are still fresh (Pain and Smith 2008). Citizens are constantly reminded of their perilous (supposed or real) environment to aggrandise the success of the political class in providing security, thus distracting people from the problems they originally voiced (the lack of clarity, the lack of organisation, the lack of jobs, and so on). Symptomatically, when people took the streets of Tuzla to protest against the government in 2014, they said they were no longer sheep to be manipulated by the fear of another war (see Hromadžić 2015, 190). The strategy adopted by the administrators of Mostar disguises the (local and international) political class’ demand for uncritical deference. Thus, the dominant (and reductive) rhetoric used to discuss the future of Mostar revolved around the notion of functionality, whose effect was one of reducing the idea of a normal city to that of an organism capable of providing and executing its functions satisfactorily. Therefore, the reunification of the city is conflated with the reincorporation of its territory, while the reform process was mostly intended to reorganise the existing parallel institutions. Contrary to the notion of space as a social product, mobilised in this book, space has been taken as an empty container ‘ready to receive fragmentary contents, a neutral medium into which disjoined things, people and habitat might be introduced’ (Lefebvre 1991, 308). At another level, this idealisation of the city could not provide instruments capable of informing the concrete process of reunification. In fact, the relatively quick decision (because of its external imposition) of eventually making Mostar into one could not be translated in an equally fast ‘rebooting’ of shared everyday practices. Yet, the fact that the city is legally one allows those in charge to neglect the reunification process a substantive social policy. Citizens are lamenting the dysfunctionality of the city (maladministration), which could be seen both in the incapacity of the administration to provide basic services, but also (and more importantly) in the impossibility of citizens becoming political subjects. As such, stripped of their political voice, they are seduced by the siren-calls of those who claim to operate on behalf of their wellbeing (their pastors). A major problem arises when we consider that Mostar does not have one pastor-leader, but many. Accordingly, the flock is fractured, and the sheep antagonised.

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The Administration of Mostar Today: The Challenge of Political Representation Mostar is today a medium-sized city (roughly 100,000 inhabitants) where the violent conflict has been largely resolved; no major fights are disturbing the everyday, apart from diffuse unemployment,18 widespread corruption (Pignotti 2013),19 and a high distrust in the political class. Currently, the city faces the problem of reforming its electoral system, which has proved extremely difficult. As already mentioned, in 2008–2009, the city was without an administration for over a year until the direct intervention of the HR broke the impasse by reinstating the former mayor until new elections could be held. National municipal elections were called for September 2012 but Mostar was the only city where they could not take place. This is because, in the meantime, the Constitutional Court of BiH established, on November 26, 2010, that the electoral law enforced by the Statute of the City of Mostar was unconstitutional, for two reasons. Firstly, the existing six electoral units were voting according to the 1991 census that does not reflect the current makeup of Mostar’s population.20 Secondly, the electoral system was disadvantaging those living in the former central zone, which was never made into a constituent unit, and whose inhabitants could vote only for the city-wide list. Because of the failure to implement a reform to the electoral law as instructed by the Constitutional Court of BiH, before the national 2012 elections, Mostar was the only municipality were people could not vote, a problem that recurred in 2016. For the past nine years, citizens have not been able to vote and all matters regarding the city have been handled by mayor Bešlić. The next elections are planned for 2020. At the moment, the reform of the electoral law remains unsolved and, as local elections are nearing, the discussion is becoming more and more pressing.

Conclusion The decision to reunify Mostar was given (and taken) as an imposition. As the analysis of the documents written by international officials has shown, the description of Mostar as dysfunctional and its citizens in need of help compelled the direct intervention of the international community in order to normalise the situation. Discursively, the representation of

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space emerging from the documents drafted by the international administrators visualises the urban territory as one, homogenous, and unproblematic. The imposition is meant to silence existing contestations over territorial sovereignty in order to provide the framework within which normal life could be performed. Thus, within these representations of space The [functional ] State and [its] territory interact in such a way that they can be said to be mutually constitutive. This explains the deceptive activities and image of state officials… They seem to administer, to manage and to organise a natural space. In practice, however, they substitute another space for it, one that is first economic and social, and then political. They believe they are obeying something in their heads – a representation (of the country, etc.). In fact, they are establishing an order – their own. (Lefebvre 2009, 228)

In the case of Mostar, historical particularities were never accounted for, but wiped out with the aim of proposing a different (normal and functional) future, which is conceived as ‘European’. For instance, the political and social fragmentations of the city were not engaged with as products of historical and political processes, which needed to be explored and resolved in their own terms. Rather, the division is taken as a temporary sickness of the city, a type of abnormality, which could have been healed by the imposition of a more functional structure. In the context of such maladies, ‘The physician of modern society see [sic] as the physician of a sick social space. Finality? The cure? It is coherence’ (Lefebvre 2000, 82–83). In particular, the construction of identities according to ethno-­ national membership was never challenged; yet it is the legalisation of political subjectivities as ethno-national that must be addressed as problematic (resulting from another imposition of one set of representational spaces onto an already existing set, as homogeneity versus heterogene­ ity). In fact, by delinking political subjectivity from ethno-national belonging, it could have been possible to imagine and discuss political and social issues as urban affairs, rather than ethnic affairs. Instead, there is a double contradiction embodied in a simultaneous and superimposed abstraction of political subjectivity (ethnic differentiation) and political territoriality (urban unification). From the (ir)rationality of this superimposition, even if formal democratic mechanisms are in place their social

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value will come to nothing as long as they are fractured along lines of subjectivity that subvert any meaningful social reconciliation. In the case of Mostar, the imposition of abstract space occurred in the context of a democratic apparatus. But the nature of this apparatus itself, being merely ‘representative’ (of whom, or what?), circumscribed the very possibility of legitimate opposition to the implementation of unification. There was never a question of whether categories of political representation were the key factors in producing political deadlock. Indeed, elected councillors, who never approved the City Statute, were willing to sabotage the imposed normalcy on several occasions. Proof lies in the fact that the last time citizens were called to vote for the local administration was in 2008, while the City Council had hardly approved any new plans because of their irreconcilable differences. The manipulation of democratic tools in order to keep the space of Mostar divided must also be appreciated by looking into the ways in which it manifests as spatial practice. The provision of services in Mostar is still highly problematic and this must be seen as one of the failures of the imposition of the (internationally developed) abstract space devoid of socio-political considerations. Local political authorities targeted the existing parallel companies in order to initiate a reform capable of reunifying services, but the result was nothing particularly radical, such as the creation of new companies working for the entire city. Rather, existing companies were either formally united but kept in operation as separated, or worked for a third company owned by the city. The reunification was literally paper-thin. These processes of reunification clearly show that the city’s infrastructure reproduces space as divided, rather than united. An explanation for the causes of this phenomenon must be sought by looking at the ways in which the international and local representations of space differ and conceive space separately. Again, while we can see how an imposed unification of the city, and its political fragmentation along ethno-national categories, implies modes of elite abstraction, they are not of the same kind. The abstract representation(s) of Mostar contains convergent and divergent ele­ ments that are the manifestation of political contestation along different s­ calar levels. The difference of scale here corresponds to the distance with which actors relate to their socio-spatial environment, where the actors most removed from on-the-ground developments (international) will tend further towards representations of space (abstract/distant), while local elites occupy a problematic middle-ground between abstract

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conceptions and more local concerns articulated by representational space. In this way: The coincidence of anti-statist interests between an OHR seemingly obsessed with squeezing public economic space as a key to developing the liberal peace, and nationalist management elites anxious to hold on to the public space they had captured for private gain, diverged only in the methods by which the general population would be marginalised and workers excluded… The restrictions on the public sphere cannot be understood without taking into account the interplay between external actors and these domestic elites. (Pugh 2005, 6, emphasis added)

Thus, on the one hand, the somewhat ambiguous international repre­ sentation of Mostar as unified was welcomed by local political elites as a step towards normalisation; on the other hand, the OHR has continued to intervene after the ‘reunification’ in order to solve political impasses. The HR described Mostar’s present as still disruptive: ‘The situation in Mostar is increasingly volatile, with rising tension manifesting itself in escalating rhetoric, including threats to boycott elections, a deadlocked City Council, boycotts of ceremonial events by councillors and one shooting incident’ (OHR 2012). Thus, the formal acceptance of unification by local elites is simultaneously rejected at the urban level. They describe the city as one, yet the division is never accounted for as a substantive political issue. For example, the existence of parallel curricula in school is explained as the liberal guarantee of equal rights for ethnic groups. The accent is put on safeguarding of minority rights to obfuscate nationalist discourses creating and supporting the need for a separated education system. Further, the city is planned as if an ethno-national conflict had been solved or cannot be ever solved, thus to be ignored. In fact, sensitive spaces such as schools and churches are designed without considering who will be their recipients (which is a political choice) confirming that the division is a problem that shall not be discussed. Spatial practices are instructed by perceptions of Mostar as a divided city, while the city is conceived as one. Paradoxically, the very imposition of a united abstract space became instrumental to preserve the division. In fact, to plan a united city meant—for local administrators—ignoring that the city was divided and in need of being reconciled through ad hoc spatial practices.

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This chapter has discussed how, together, the moments of the repre­ sentation of space and spatial practices produce frictions. This is because of the existence of, and competition between, multiple representations of space that imagine the future of Mostar very differently. Existing spatial practices are not designed to produce the city as one—to implement the abstract space of unification, but rather to keep the city divided, and to concretise the abstract/absolute space of ethno-national divisions. Because spatial practices in Mostar are designed by the local administration, they follow localised claims to territorial homogeneity. Instead, the abstract space of reunification, being imposed by the international actors supervising the administration of Mostar does not produce concrete spatial practices that correspond to the material integration of the city. This recalls Björkdhal and Gusic’s notion of Mostar as ‘a site of friction between the international, and the local’ (Björkdhal and Gusic 2016, 85), which produces antagonism but also collaborations. Symptomatically, the local administrators have embraced the imposed space of Mostar as reunited to avoid engaging with the reconciliation process. In other words, the existence of competing representations of space allow the political elites to produce contradictory discourses and practices, which are consistent with the idea that Mostar is both united and divided. Indeed, the existence of conflictual representations of space affect the representational spaces of everyday citizens as well. In fact, everyday life in Mostar presents contradictory movements that reflect this original split, as the next chapter will discuss in more detail.

Notes



1. It should also be noticed that the Article 2 of the Law on Implementation of Decisions of the Commission to Preserve National Monuments, created as part of the Dayton Peace Agreement (Annex 8), rules that all the destroyed monuments shall be rebuilt exactly as they were prior the war (using the same materials and employing the same building techniques). See http://old.kons.gov.ba/main.php?id_struct=83&lang=4. 2.  I agree with Hromadžić that interreligious marriages should not be romanticised nor taken as proof of a ‘uniquely Bosnian multicultural social order’ (2012, 34). Rather, pre-war ethnographic research shows that people identified with an ethnic group and negotiated their differences—often peacefully. The main change to observe in the post-war environment is the need to articulate these ethnic differences territorially

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by erecting boundaries that could establish ethnically homogeneous areas of dwelling. 3. The Croat nationalist commitment to the project of Herceg-Bosna did not end with their military defeat, nor with the implementation of several measures adopted by the international organisations to maintain territorial cohesion within the borders of the FBiH. Their ideas are still alive and fully shared throughout cyberspace (see, HercegBosna website, for instance). Also, in the 39th Report of the High Representative for Implementation of the Peace Agreement on BiH to the SecretaryGeneral of the UN, Inzko (the High Representative) writes, ‘Since the election campaign, the leaders of the Bosnian Croat HDZ BiH [Croatian Democratic Party of BiH] and HDZ 1990 [Croatian Democratic Party 1990] parties have continued to call occasionally for a third [Croat] entity. In 2010, the then Federation President (Bosnian Croat) also referred to the “realistic possibility” of BiH’s dissolution.’ (OHR 2011, Part III, Political Update, Point 18). 4. A formal agreement to end the war was reached at the Wright-Patterson Air Force Base near Dayton, Ohio, and formally signed in Paris (December 1995) by the President of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia Slobodan Milošević, the President of Croatia Franjo Tuđman, and the President of BiH Alija Izetbegović witnessed by French President Jacques Chirac, US President Bill Clinton, UK Prime Minister John Major, German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, and Russian Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin. 5.  Norbert Winterstein had previously been the Head of the EU Department of City Administration in Mostar (1994–1996). 6.  The idea of implementing reforms to boost the tourist economy in Mostar is also consistent with the internationally led plan for the reconstruction of the Old Bridge (reopened in July 2004) and the entrance of the Old Town in the UNESCO World Heritage List, which happened a year layer (July 2005). On the latter point concerning the municipal ‘cost’ to Mostar’s citizens, 310 km roughly equals Euro 160 and, in 2004, corresponded to 5% of the average annual income (see also Bieber 2005, 424). It must be noted that there is a discrepancy between the cost given by the HR and the cost given by the OSCE mission to BiH Public Administration Reform Unit for 2003; the latter accounted for a total of 288 km. According to the OSCE report, in 2003 there was one public employee for every 189 citizens (Commission for Reforming the City of Mostar 2003, 62, fn. 24). 7. The mjesna zajednica were service-oriented units with no legislative function or competency in interpreting the law. They often worked at the level of the neighbourhood to assure a closer relationship between the

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government and the citizens often providing basic services. For a more detailed account of all the positions taken by the participants at the discussion, see Commission for Reforming the City of Mostar (2003, 59–61). 8. The only amendment to the Statute was made via another direct intervention of the HR Valentin Inzko in December 2009, after 13 months of failed attempts to elect a Mayor, see later in this chapter. 9. The electoral law in Mostar has been at the centre of public debates since. More about the reform of the constitutional law later in this chapter. 10. For example, Agamben (2005, 30–34) observes that in Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address (1863), the invocation of a ‘Government of the people, by the people, for the people’ implicitly contains the ambiguity of the term ‘people’ and what it signifies (see also Blackburn 2011, 41). 11. This decision was particularly ostracised by the main Bosnian-Croat parties, which wished for a direct system to elect the Mayor and the abolition of ethnic quotas. In fact, on the strength of an alleged ethnic majority at the city level, they could risk losing fixed quotas. 12. For instance, the Bosnian-Serb population is now too small to elect one representative on their own. As a consequence the four elected councillors in 2008 were part of other parties including HDZ (Croatian Democratic Union) and SDA (Democratic Action Party). Hence, in the City Council there were four Bosnian-Serbs, but there is no political representation of the Bosnian-Serb Constituent People as such (ICG 2009, 10). 13. Christian Schwarz-Schilling (2006–2007), Miroslav Lajčak (2007–2009) and Valentin Inzko (2009–incumbent). 14. From the election in October 2008, there were 17 sessions of the city council, which yet failed to elect a mayor (Bose 2017, 202). Without an approved budget, the city of Mostar stopped paying its employees in April 2009, leading to a general strike the following summer. At this point, the HR intervened directly to approve a city budget until the end of September and that new elections should be held. In December 2009, the previous mayor, Bešlić was reinstated until new elections could be held. Two years later, in 2011, the Constitutional Court of BiH established that the voting system in Mostar was unconstitutional for two reasons. Firstly, the electoral units were voting according to the 1991 census that does reflect the current makeup of the population in Mostar. Secondly, the electoral system was disadvantaging those living in the former ‘central zone’, which was never made into a constituent unit, and whose inhabitants could vote only for the city-wide list. Because of the failure to implement a reform to the electoral law as instructed by the Constitutional Court of BiH, in the national 2012 elections, Mostar was

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the only municipality were people did not vote. Bešlić remains to this day the acting-major of the city. 15.  START is a Sarajevo-based magazine part of the SCOOP network of investigative journalists in Eastern and Southwest Europe. 16. The third provides service in the Republika Srpska. 17. The genealogy of this mode of power can, as Foucault pointed out, be traced all the way back to the ancient Judaic tradition of government (Dean 2007, 74). 18. According to the independent centre for social research, Moje Mjesto, the unemployment rate in Mostar was 35.6% in 2013 (Analitika 2013). 19.  In the Corruption Perception Index 2016, Bosnia and Herzegovina scored 39 in a scale from 0 to 100 where 0 signals a society perceived as highly corrupt (Transparency 2016). On the subject of corruption and organised crime in BiH, the article of Van de Vliet (2008, 205–235) offers an extensive account, particularly addressing the lack of a clear strategy to strengthen the rule of law in the DPA as an important factor to understand the endemic practice of corruption in the newly formed public sector. 20. Croat parties complained to the Constitutional Court of BiH that rights of Croats were being violated, i.e. that one Bosniak vote in Mostar is worth several Croat votes, because some former Bosniak municipalities had only a few thousands of voters, while one of the Croat ones had over 20,000; yet, they returned the same number of councillors to the City Council of Mostar.

References Agamben, Giorgio. 2005. Mezzi Senza Fine. Note sulla Politica. Torino: Bollati Boringhieri. Analitika. 2013. Mostar. City Profile. http://www.mojemjesto.ba/en/opstina/ mostar. Accessed October 17, 2017. Anderson, James. 2013. “Imperial Ethnocracy and Demography: Foundations of Ethno-national Conflict in Belfast and Jerusalem.” In Locating Urban Conflict. Ethnicity, Nationality and the Everyday, edited by W. Pullan and B. Baille, 195–214. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Armaly, Maha, Carlo Blasi, and Lawrence Hannah. 2004. “Stari Most: Rebuilding More than a Historic Bridge in Mostar.” Museum International 56 (4): 6–17. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-0033.2004.00044.x. Bassuener, Kurt W. 2015. “Virtual Deterrence—BiH’s Institutionalised Insecurity and the International Flight from Responsibility.” In State-building and Democratisation in Bosnia and Herzegovina, edited by S. Keil and V. Perry, 83–109. Farnham and Burlington: Ashgate.

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Bešlić, Ljubo, Zdenko Marić, and Anđelko Zelenika. 2008. Mostar u slici I riječi. Mostar in Picture and Word. Mostar in Bild und Wort. Mostar: Stanek. Bieber, Florian. 2005. “Local Institutional Engineering: A Tale of Two Cities, Mostar and Brčko.” International Peacekeeping 12 (3): 420–433. http://dx. doi.org/10.1080/13533310500074523. Bing, Judith. 2001. “Ideas and Realities: Rebuilding in Postwar Mostar.” Journal of Architectural Education 54 (4): 238–249. http://dx.doi. org/10.1162/10464880152474556. Björkdhal, Annika, and Ivan Gusic. 2016. “Sites of Friction. Governance, Identity and Space in Mostar.” In Peacebuilding and Friction: Global and Local Enscounters in Post Conflict, edited by B. Annika, K. Höglund, G. Millar, J. van der Lijn, and W. Verkoren, 85–102. London and New York: Routledge. Blackburn, Robin. 2011. An Unfinished Revolution: Karl Marx and Abraham Lincoln. London: Verso. Bollens, Scott A. 2007. Cities, Nationalism, and Democratisation. London and New York: Routledge. Bose, Sumantra. 2017. “Mostar as Microcosm: Power-Sharing in Post-war Bosnia.” In Power-Sharing. Empirical and Normative Challenges, edited by A. McCulloch and J. McGarry, 189–211. Abingdon and New York: Routledge. Campbell, David. 1999. “Apartheid Cartography: The Political Anthropology and Spatial Effects of International Diplomacy in Bosnia.” Political Geography 18 (4): 395–435. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0962-6298(98)00110-3. Chandler, David. 2000. Bosnia. Faking Democracy After Dayton. London: Pluto. Cisarova-Dimitrova, Gergana. 2005. “Democracy and International Intervention in Bosnia and Herzegovina.” Central European Political Studies Review VI (1): 45–71. https://journals.muni.cz/cepsr/article/view/4096. Cirkovic, Elena. 2016. “Architecture of Sovereignty: Bosnian Constitutional Crisis, the Sarajevo Town Hall, and the Mêlée.” Law Critique 27 (1): 23–44. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10978-015-9169-5. C.V. 2017. “Šta je uzrok komunalnog haosa u Mostaru?” [What is the Reason for Communal Chaos in Mostar?]. StarMo, September 19, 2017. http:// www.starmo.ba/mostar2/item/70031-sta-je-uzrok-komunalnog-haosa-u-mostaru.html. Accessed October 16, 2017. Commission for Reforming the City of Mostar. 2003. Report of the Chairman of the Commission for Reforming the City of Mostar. http://www.ohr.int/ archive/report-mostar/pdf/Reforming%20Mostar-Report%20(EN).pdf. Accessed October 17, 2017. Coward, Martin. 2006. “Against Anthropocentrism: The Destruction of the Built Environment as a Distinct Form of Political Violence.” Review of International Studies 32 (3): 419–437. https://doi.org/10.1017/ S0260210506007091.

78  G. Carabelli Dean, Mitchell. 2007. Governmentality: Power and Rule in Modern Society. London: Sage. Donia, Robert J., and John V.A. Fine. 1994. Bosnia and Herzegovina. A Tradition Betrayed. London: Hurst & Co. Forde, Susan. 2016. “The Bridge on the Neretva: Stari Most as a Stage of Memory in Post-conflict Mostar, Bosnia-Herzegovina.” Cooperation and Conflict 51 (4): 467–483. https://doi.org/10.1177/0010836716652430. Foucault, Michel. 1991. “Governmentality.” In The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, edited by G. Burchell, C. Gordon, and P. Miller, 87–104. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 2008. The Birth of Biopolitics. Lectures at the Collège de France 1978– 1979. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Galli, Carlo. 2010. Political Spaces and Global War. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Grodach, Carl. 2002. “Reconstituting Identity and History in Postwar Mostar, Bosnia-Herzegovina.” City 6 (1): 61–82. http://dx.doi. org/10.1080/13604810220142844. Gudelj, Jurica. 2012. “Ljubo Bešlić: Nevolje ujedinile Mostarce.” Oslobođenje, February 13, 2012. http://kliker.info/ljubo-beslic-nevolje-ujedinile-mostarce/. Accessed October 17, 2017. Gunder, Michael. 2010. “Planning as the Ideology of (Neoliberal) Space.” Planning Theory 9 (4): 298–314. https://doi.org/10.1177/1473095210368878. Hayden, Robert M. 1996. “Imagined Communities and Real Victims: Selfdetermination and Ethnic Cleansing in Yugoslavia.” American Ethnologist 23 (4): 783–801. http://www.jstor.org/stable/646183. Hromadžić, Azra. 2008. “Discourses of Integration and Practices of Reunification at the Mostar Gymnasium, Bosnia and Herzegovina.” Comparative Education Review 52 (4): 541–563. https://doi.org/10.1086/591297. ———. 2012. “‘Once We Had a House.’ Invisible Citizens and Consociational Democracy in Post-war Mostar, Bosnia and Herzegovina.” Social Analysis 56 (3): 30–48. http://dx.doi.org/10.3167/sa.2012.560303. ———. 2015. Citizens of an Empty Nation. Youth and State-Making in Postwar Bosnia-Herzegovina. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. ICG. 2000. “Reunifying Mostar: Opportunities for Progress.” Europe Report No. 90, April. Sarajevo/Brussels: International Crisis Group. https://www. crisisgroup.org/europe-central-asia/balkans/bosnia-and-herzegovina/reunifying-mostar-opportunities-progress. Accessed October 16, 2017. ———. 2009. “Bosnia: A Test of Political Maturity in Mostar.” Europe Briefing No. 54, July. Sarajevo/Brussels: International Crisis Group. https://www. crisisgroup.org/europe-central-asia/balkans/bosnia-and-herzegovina/bosnia-test-political-maturity-mostar. Accessed October 16, 2017.

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Jandrić, Robert. 2011. Interview. AbrasMedia.info, October 7, 2011. Not available online. Jeffrey, Alex. 2006. “Building State Capacity in Post-conflict Bosnia and Herzegovina: The Case of Brčko District.” Political Geography 25 (2): 203–227. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2005.11.003. Kolind, Torsten. 2008. Post-war Identification: Everyday Muslim CounterDiscourse in Bosnia Herzegovina. Aarhus: University Press. Kovač, Velibor Bobo, Anne Dorthe Tveit, David Lansing Cameron, and Maryann Jortveit. 2017. “‘Bridging Old Relations’: The (De)Construction of Ethnic Identity in the Educational Context of Bosnia and Herzegovina from the Teachers’ Point of View.” Journal of Language, Identity & Education 16 (1): 32–44. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/15348458.2016.1260456. Laketa, Sunčana. 2016. “Geopolitics of Affect and Emotions in a Post-conflict City.” Geopolitics 21 (3): 661–685. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14650045. 2016.1141765. Lamont, Michel, and Molnair Virag. 2002. “The Study of Boundaries in the Social Sciences.” Annual Review of Sociology 28: 167–195. http://www.jstor. org/stable/3069239. Lefebvre, Henri. 1991. The Production of Space. Malden, Oxford, and Victoria: Blackwell. ———. 2000. Writing on Cities. Malden, Oxford, and Carlton: Blackwell. ———. 2009. State, Space, World: Selected Essays. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Majstorović, Danijela, and Zoran Vučkocav. 2016. “Rethinking Bosnia and Herzegovina’s Post-coloniality. Challenges of Europeanization Discourse.” Journal of Language and Politics 15 (2): 147–172. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/ jlp.15.2.02maj. Makaš, Emily. 2007. “Representing Competing Identities in Postwar Mostar.” PhD diss., Cornell University. Malcom, Noel. 1994. Bosnia. A Short History. London: Macmillan. Mazowiecki, Tadeusz. 1993. “Situation of Human Rights in the Territory of Former Yugoslavia.” United Nations, Economic and Social Council, Document E/CN.4/1994/47. Moore, Adam. 2013. Peacebuilding in Practice. Local Experience in Two Bosnian Towns. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. Nancy, Jean Luc. 1996. Being Singular Plural. Stanford: Stanford University Press. OHR. 2011. 39th Report of the High Representative for Implementation of the Peace Agreement on Bosnia and Herzegovina to the Secretary-General of the United Nations (16 October 2010–20 April 2011). Sarajevo, April 20, 2011. http://www.ohr.int/?p=33514. Accessed October 17, 2017.

80  G. Carabelli ———. 2012. 41st Report of the High Representative for Implementation of the Peace Agreement on Bosnia and Herzegovina to the Secretary-General of the United Nations (16 October 2011–20 April 2012). Sarajevo, May 5, 2012. https://www.ecoi.net/local_link/224346/346002_de.html. Accessed October 17, 2017. OHR Board of Principals Press Office. 2004. Mostar Statute Provides Foundation for Normality. Sarajevo, January 28, 2004. http://www.ohr.int/?p=46787. Accessed October 17, 2017. OHR Press Office. 2003a. High Representative Welcomes Establishment of the Mostar Commission and Provides Eight Principles for its Work. Sarajevo, April 23, 2003. http://www.ohr.int/?p=48568. Accessed October 17, 2017. ———. 2003b. Open Letter from the High Representative to the Citizens of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Sarajevo, May 27, 2003. http://www.ohr.int/?p=48376. Accessed October 17, 2017. ———. 2003c. High Representative Renews Call for Agreement of Mostar Statute. Sarajevo, August 1, 2003. http://www.ohr.int/?p=47788. Accessed October 17, 2017. Pain, Rachel, and Susan J. Smith, eds. 2008. Fear: Critical Geopolitics and Everyday Life. Burlington: Ashgate. Pignotti, Arthur James. 2013. “Stealing Mostar. The Role of Criminal Networks in the Ethnic Cleansing of Property.” Master thesis, Arizona State University. Pugh, Michael. 2005. “Liquid Transformation in the Political Economies of BiH and Kosovo.” Draft Paper for TD10 International Studies Association Honolulu, March 2005. Rancière, Jacques. 2004. “Who is the Subject of the Rights of Man?” The South Atlantic Quarterly 102 (2/3): 297–310. http://dx.doi. org/10.1215/00382876-103-2-3-297. Robinson, Guy M., and Alma Pobrić. 2006. “Nationalism and Identity in Post-Dayton Accords: Bosnian and Herzegovina.” Tijdschrift voor Economische en Sociale Geografie 97 (3): 237–252. http://dx.doi. org/10.1111/j.1467-9663.2006.00517.x. Soberg, Marius. 2008. “The Quest for Institutional Reform in Bosnia and Herzegovina.” East European Politics and Societies 22 (4): 714–737. https:// doi.org/10.1177/0888325408316527. START. 2011. “Intervju gradonačelnika Bešlića.” May 5, 2011. https:// www.mostar.ba/vijesti_citanje-92/intervju-gradonacelnika-beslica-magazinu-start-317.html. Accessed October 17, 2017. Traynor, Ian. 2004. “Keep the Hate Alive.” The Guardian, July 29, 2004. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2004/jul/29/worlddispatch. iantraynor. Transparency. 2016. “Bosnia and Herzegovina.” https://www.transparency.org/ country/BIH. Accessed October 17, 2017.

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Van de Vliet, Sebastian. 2008. “Addressing Corruption and Organized Crime in the Context of Re-establishing the Rule of Law.” In Deconstructing the Reconstruction. Human Rights and Rule of Law in Postwar Bosnia and Herzegovina, edited by F. Dina Haynes, 205–235. Aldershot: Ashgate. ———. 1999. Rebuilding Mostar. Urban Reconstruction in a War Zone. Liverpool: University Press. Yiftachel, Oren. 2006. Ethnocracy. Land and Identity Politics in Israel/Palestine. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

CHAPTER 3

The Everyday Life of Mostar

The Everyday Life of Mostar This chapter attends to the everyday life of Mostar. Lefebvre writes that ‘[the everyday] is a sociological point of feedback with a dual character. It is the residuum (of all the possible specific and specialised activities outside social experience) and the product of society in general; it is the point of delicate balance and that where imbalance threatens’ (2007, 32). Thus, the everyday contains, and is shaped by, the repetitive bureaucratisation of the quotidian that oppresses the individual, which induces passivity, but it is also the site of potential resistance that feeds revolutionary trajectories. Consistent with Lefebvre’s theory of space production, I also engage with the ambivalent character of the everyday for two main reasons. Firstly, I am interested in evaluating how polarising practices and nationalist discourses shape the everyday in Mostar. I do so by presenting and discussing the results of two small map-based surveys conducted in 2011 by Abart Mostar, a grassroots organisation working in the arts field, which I co-designed. The surveys show how practices of socialisation and internal mobility changed after the war, assigning new meanings and understandings to the built environment and the city. Secondly, and drawing from five vignettes, I engage with the everyday to single out moments that contradict routinised practices of ethnic division. I point to the ways in which individuals, even when they subscribe to ethno-national logics, escape from the iron grid of e­ thnonational conformity that allows for unexpected moments of subjective ‘confusion’. I discuss these disruptions in relation to Lefebvre’s notions © The Author(s) 2018 G. Carabelli, The Divided City and the Grassroots, The Contemporary City, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-7778-4_3

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of ‘ambiguity’ and ‘spontaneity’ to give meaning to the surfacing of socio-political tensions in the everyday. Here, I confront the permanent political impasse (the sense that nothing can change) with the fluidity of the everyday to make sense of how the perceived immobility can facilitate movement. I do so by drawing on Berlant’s work to think how resistance might be understood as ‘inaction’ in times of crisis, and the conditions of possibility for a more organised movement (rather than spontaneous) that might counter ethno-national segregation. Accordingly, I discuss  together Lefebvre’s notion of the urban revolution (and, opposed to it, alienation) with political and ethical projects ‘formulated and conducted on the terrain of the affects…[that] recognize that we are not sovereign subjects’ (Hardt 2015, 215). The life stories introduced in this chapter are not intended to become representative of the city. Instead, they provide insight into the difficulties experienced by those who negotiate their lives within ethnocratic systems of power, which demand and impose ethnic membership as a means of organising quotidian space. I discuss the relevance of these moments within a broader discussion of how the city is produced and reproduced as divided, and I begin a conversation about the possibility for Mostar to become ‘undivided’, which will continue in the next chapter. By way of conclusion, this chapter resumes a methodological reflection on how to approach the study of deeply divided societies. It argues that exceptions to the accustomed practices of the ‘divided city’ point to the methodological fallacy of engaging with Mostar only by selecting cases of inter-group segregation and intolerance. Instead, this chapter argues that a critical engagement with the everyday allows for the possibility of unexpected moments of collaboration, confusion, and paradoxes to become more visible.

Urban Imaginaries. Navigating Shifting Patterns of Pre- and Post-war Mobility in Mostar Lefebvre argues that the production of the urban follows rhythms and routines that can both cement and disrupt the patterns instructed by planners and bureaucrats. These are what Lefebvre calls ‘spatial practices’ (Lefebvre 1991, 33, 38, 45). Thus, spatial practices need to be planned to ensure urban connectivity (within and outside the city) but they are also constantly negotiated in the everyday by urban inhabitants (those who live the city). For instance, road networks are designed to connect different parts of a city, ensuring territorial consistency, but it is up to the

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individual to choose which way to travel from one side to the other. In the previous chapter, I considered how the infrastructures of the city that provide services such as electricity or garbage collection have been restructured to serve the reunited city, but only on paper. As an example, I discussed how the failure of electricity provision in east Mostar in February 2012 made visible the extent to which urban division is structural (spatial practices in the city are conceived not to guarantee cohesion, but to materialise ethno-national partitions) with concrete repercussions in the everyday. This exemplifies the general boycott to the process of reunification sustained by urban elites. In this chapter, I reflect further on how divisive imaginaries and patterns of segregation have been cemented in the everyday by attending to the ways in which citizens make use of the city and move across (or within) the perceived border that separates east and west Mostar. Specifically, and drawing on map-based surveys conducted in 2011, I examine what I call the ‘infrastructures of socialisation’ to assess how people gather and socialise, and in the process form communities of belonging. By asking where people spend their spare time, the survey aimed to gather information about the spaces that become important in the affective economies of the city: the sites that ‘stick’ (Laketa 2017, 5), and facilitate the creation of emotional bonds to the city (or parts of it). Further, the surveys consider internal mobility patterns by reflecting on the location of fear in the city, as the places that people avoid because they associate them with discomfort and exclusion. The analysis of spatial practices is comparative in the sense that it confronts data gathered around movements and usages of the city before and after the conflict (and the division). In doing so, these maps aim to provide a rich portrayal of how reforms in the urban administration have shaped different imaginaries of the city, which prompts a discussion about how, in present-day Mostar, the feeling of being ‘safe’, ‘secure’, and ‘welcome’ is constructed not on (personal) experience, but rather depends on a static representation of the ‘ethnic other’ as the ultimate enemy, and the potential threat they pose.

The Infrastructures of Socialisation In spring 2011, within the framework of Abart’s project (Re)collecting Mostar, two small map-based surveys were conducted to assess socialisation practices in the city before and after the war, as well as perceptions of being safe and welcome in the old and present urban environments. The surveys addressed two separate sample groups gathered through snowballing

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techniques by the university students who took part in Abart’s project as researchers (this was a group of twentyfour university students enrolled in different departments across the Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences of the two major universities in Mostar: Sveučilište, in west Mostar, and Univerzitet Džemal Bijedić in the east). The first group of respondents included 100 people aged 35–60 who have been living in Mostar all their life and the second group gathered a younger generation, 100 citizens aged 18–35, who were born during or just before the conflict and grew up in a divided city. The first group was asked to respond the survey’s questions for the pre-war city and the second group for the post-war city. Two blank maps and a pen were given to each participant. In the first map, interviewees were invited to circle the places they associate with hanging out and meeting friends, and record what makes these spaces friendly (while the older generation did so for pre-war Mostar). For the second set of maps, the same respondents were asked to circle the places in the city they would rather avoid and explain why. The questionnaire did not ask for the respondents’ ethnicity but rather for their age and gender. In fact, the survey wanted to picture the ways in which citizens of Mostar socialise spatially without addressing them as members of ethnic groups.1 Of course, some of the comments made, especially in the set of maps about uncomfortable spaces, must be read within the frame of ethno-national tensions, but the option to identify oneself as more than an ethnic subject gave the opportunity to step out the process of performing ethno-national antagonisms that so often populates Mostar’s political debates. Thus, it is not a matter of knowing who goes where but rather to get a sense of how the city was/is used and understood. In this sense, these maps wanted to be ‘affective’ because they did not attempt to become stable and precise representations but rather to provide a feeling or an orientation of mobility in the city (Flatley 2008, 7). All the answers were then combined to draw four maps (extracts from the commentaries were also added to enhance the visualisation of the results for the final exhibition of the project’s outputs). This map-making exercise was accompanied by the making of an archive of oral histories about the pre-war cultural scene in Mostar focusing on underground arts and music production (more on this in Chapter 4). This first map refers to the practices of socialisation in pre-war Mostar (Map 3.1). It records the physical spaces that the sample associates with positive memories of being together in the city before the war. It is easy to see how the meeting places recorded on the map were spread throughout the central area (across the Bulevar). These spaces are very different

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Map 3.1  Pre-war socialisation practices. Designed by Mela Zuljević for Abart (2011). Used with permission

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in kind; there is a stadium (that was used both for sporting and music events), cinemas, cultural centres, clubs, bars, the park with the memorial to the fallen partisans of War World Two, and even entire sections of streets (especially those connecting the two main squares in west and east Mostar). While pointing at the blank map, the respondents shared memories of late summer nights spent listening to popular bands touring across Yugoslavia (Majke, Disciplina Kičme, Laibach, Psihomodo Pop, Partibrejkers among those cited most often). They recalled dancing, singing, and drinking at outdoor festivals (in Kantarevac, just off the Bulevar), playing records in the facilities of local communities (mjesne zajedinice), and also celebrating Tito’s birthday with a grand parade at the Stadium. Many remembered walking up and down ‘Korso’ (from Musala square in east Mostar to the Bulevar) to look and be seen, or sitting in the Old Town outside specific venues that catered for their ‘underground’ musical tastes. Looking at the map, the thoroughfare connecting Musala Square (east Mostar) with Rondo (west Mostar) appears as a continuous solid line; the streets connecting the two main squares across the Bulevar— Korzo from Musala Square to the Bulevar and Promenade Lenin from the Bulevar to Rondo2—are recognised as the old social connectors in the city. These streets are now separated by the Bulevar and the central ‘neutral’ area, the unofficial dividing line, which creates a decisive—if immaterial—fracture between the two sides of the city. One respondent pointed to the fact that different crowds frequented the two sides (separated by the Bulevar), though this difference was not associated with ethnicity but rather with age; ‘there were serious and less-serious sides [of this long walkaway]. The serious side went from Hotel Bristol to the pharmacy [east Mostar] and it was frequented mostly by older people. The other end—from the Bulevar to Rondo [west Mostar]—was instead the centre of social life for young people’ (Abart 2011). Crucially, it is emphasised that ‘all the happenings’ took place in the streets—open spaces that were felt to be public and shared among the population. Surely there were infrastructures facilitating these encounters that were constitutive of social life. Before the war, Promenade Lenin (the street connecting the Bulevar to Rondo, west Mostar) was an attractive street where people could stroll, sit on benches, and hang out. The area, left in disarray by the war, remained desolated for many years; overgrown vegetation, ruins, aggressive (and illegal) parking, and garbage bins did not make for inviting surroundings. The destruction and later neglect of this area quickly erased the memories connected to its previous role as social connector and

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it contributed, spatially and aesthetically, to the production of the central area as the empty space of the border dividing the two sides of the city. Spanish Square, previously known as Brotherhood and Unity Square, was the centre of the pre-war long walkaway where people socialised, but it also became the central stage of violent conflict, which explains its complete destruction. In 1998, King Juan Carlos I placed here a monument to commemorate the death of eighteen Spanish soldiers who were part of the UN peacekeepers troops that intervened to end the conflict, renaming the square (see also Makaš 2007, 309). Interestingly, all the respondents associated this area with social mingling. The square, which was dominated by a popular department store, Hit, offered benches and trees on which to sit and relax. This was the place chosen by the youth of Mostar for daily gatherings. Some refurbishment of the square took place with the beginning of the reconstruction of the Old Gymnasium in 2004, but major works to recreate a liveable public space had to wait until 2012 (Picture 3.1).

Picture 3.1  Spanish Square before renewal. February 2010. Photo of the author

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As Palmberger discusses, there is much to be said about remembering in a post-conflict city, because ‘remembering [is] a narrative act of generating meaning located in the present and directed towards the future… Remembering and its counterpart, forgetting/silencing, therefore have little to do with a mere retrospection on the past but also relate to the way one’s present and future are conceptualised’ (2016, 13). Since the conflict created a clear temporal (and spatial) fracture in Mostar, the ways people remember need to be related to their pre­ sent conditions and their expectations of the future (Palmberger 2016). Accordingly, the older generations interviewed here not only associate pre-war Mostar with their youth (often nostalgically) and with the last years before everything, including their life plans and trajectories, were disrupted (making the pre-war past almost mythical). They also attempt to make sense of what happened during the war (and after) by tracing genealogies of ever-existing and persisting differences among the population. For instance, the interviewees state that the space of socialisation (taking the entire area of the city) was very diverse. In fact, people would socialise within their ‘own crowd’ (raja). Thus, differences among the population were clear, but as one of the interviewees commented, ‘sjajno smo funkcionirali’ (we just got along together) (Abart 2011). Overall, the respondents avoided the idealisation of pre-war social life as lacking confrontations: ‘not everything was idyllic, God forbid! But there were places in the city where young people would see each other and interact much more than today’—says another respondent (Abart 2011). However, as the quote suggests, differences among the population were negotiated, rather than causing outright spatial fragmentation. In fact, there were places where a certain group would prefer to meet and spend time, but there were also places where everybody would go without (social) restraints. Crucially, when attempting to make sense of the existing spatial segregation, the respondents observed that conflict was always present and different groups were created, but membership to a group was not forced because of ethnic belonging. Rather, it depended on cultural preferences, social classes, and taste. For instance, one interviewee states that she did not like the Bulevar in the 80s and the area around the Stadium in the 90s because they were associated with ‘fancy girls’ (šminkeri) with whom she had nothing to share. Yet, the most relevant comments must address the pre-war location of social life around the centre, which is now a no-man’s land. As Simmons writes, in Mostar like in Sarajevo and other cities, there have

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always been neighbourhoods that were predominantly inhabited by one ethnic group, but in the centres of these cities ‘the various ethnicities commingled, worked together, and often intermarried’ (2005, 30). The city centre was a vibrant area that served as meeting places for different groups and it facilitated the process of encounters and interaction. Talking about the city park, which is also in this central area just past Spanish Square off Promenade Lenin, one respondent commented: They have renovated the park, kids play here now, but almost all other activities are forbidden. Before the war, teenagers used to go there in the evenings with their lovers; it was a place to sit with a drink, but now it is under 24-hour surveillance … what happened then could not be possible now. (Abart 2011)

And here, it becomes interesting to note how the securitisation and policing campaigns, advertised as one of the main achievements of the united administration to improve everyday life in the city (see Chapter 2), are assessed negatively because of the ways they have intruded into everyday life to the point of limiting social interactions in public space. While I was living in Mostar, in summer 2010, I read (quite surprisingly) the news that police would start prosecuting couples engaging in amorous activities in the city park at night. I now see the reasons why this became news, reflecting so well the changing habits of the city. The map representing post-war infrastructures and practices of socialisation tells a completely different story (Map 3.2). Even though several of the pre-war locations still exist, and actively attract people (the stadium, the Partisan Memorial, and few other venues across the city), the major change happened in the central area. The area expanding towards east and west from Spanish Square is no longer the place in which social life takes place, but became a void that clearly separates the two sides of the city. This area, which corresponds to the main space of socialisation before the war, was destroyed and then ‘neutralised’ in the attempt to create a physical border that could settle the conflict. Here it is worth recalling Coward’s notion of urbicide as the planned destruction of urban infrastructures that facilitate encounters in the city (see Chapter 2) as a means of annihilating the very possibility for heterogeneity to exist. The central area still awaits the realisation of projects to reinhabit it by recreating a shared space through the centralisation of administrative

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Map 3.2  Post-war socialisation practices. Designed by Mela Zuljević for Abart (2011). Used with permission

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units and offices for the reunited city3 (see D’Alessio and Gobetti 2009). To associate the possibility of a shared area in Mostar with the construction of a new administrative headquarter seems as though the administrators were planning a re-education of citizens to the multiplication of their identity—to become open to multiculturalism, and a multiethnic environment—by performing administrative routines (visiting offices of the public administration). The project is also consistent with the idea that a sense of the city (or of the state) as united could be constructed by giving precise rules to follow (according to functionalist models), which would eventually create a fair environment for all (see Chapter 2). And yet, how do we account for citizens as individuals rather than functions of the state? I wonder whether a different scenario could have been imagined, in which prominence might have been given to recreating meaningful and emotional relations to the city in order to reframe the present and the past. In fact, Laketa’s research into the affective bonds that young people create in Mostar shows clearly that the Bulevar has become ‘a place where affect and emotion congeal to create the effect of boundary between the two ethnic entities’ (2017, 12). But also, the space is reappropriated by the few young people who still socialise among the ethnic divides and who frequent the Youth Centre Abrašević (just off the Bulevar) and the bar Coco Loco, near Spanish Square. The central area has become an empty space, which affects the general patterns of socialisation but, as the next chapter will show, because of the area’s symbolic value in relation to memories of pre-war socialisation in Mostar, this space is often reappropriated through cultural and artistic activities that attempt to bring critical focus and discussion on the spatial segregation in the city. Even more prominently, the areas circled as focal points of contemporary social life in Mostar are clearly far from each other and the centres of the territories inhabited by each community. Braće Fejića Street in the east of Mostar and Rondo/Avenija in the west, have the highest concentration of cafes, restaurants, and clubs in the city—confirming that youth in Mostar socialise within the two areas separately and with little or no interaction. The new shopping centres, in west Mostar, and especially the most recently built Mepas Mall (the biggest so far), attract young people from both sides, although visiting the mall creates, according to Laketa’s study, anxiety in some youth from the east (Laketa 2015a, 102–103). And how could this be different when the educational system is kept rigidly separated across

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ethno-national lines? Hromadžić’ ethnography of Mostar Gymnasium, one of the so called ‘two schools under one roof’—a contested project initiated by the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) to bring pupils attending the Croat and the BiH Federation curricula under the same ‘roof’ yet without studying together (see also Hromadžić 2015a)—shows that even though teenagers in that school mix, they are aware of the impossibility of building relationships outside the protected (and heterotopic) environment of the school bathrooms because they have been fed with narratives of exclusion and fear, convinced that in the world outside the school there is no space for them to be together without inconvenience or, even worse, generating problems that cannot be easily solved. Two main comments could be made from these observations. First, the process of rebuilding the city’s infrastructures shaped, and was shaped by, the conflict and the consequent ethnic polarisation. The central area was imagined by the International Organisations that intervened to end the war and reconcile the city’s antagonising communities as ‘neutral’ (Aceska 2016; D’Alessio and Gobetti 2009; Laketa 2017). They located their offices there, also symbolically, in order to create space for pre-fabricated reconciliation practices, from the city centre to both peripheries, forging a physical void between the communities for the sake of controlling violence. This meant that, until very recently, the Bulevar and its immediate surroundings were (and still are in many cases) ruins or abandoned spaces waiting to be assigned new functions. If prior to the war this area worked as a social connector, now it stands largely as a no-man’s land, an empty, transitory space. The long-term vision was for the central area to house all the administrative buildings of the city, hoping in this way to create a new shared space (since all the citizens would need to access the same offices for bureaucratic and legal matters). This imagined ‘shared space’ would not be geared towards socialising, but rather constructed as a centripetal force in the construction of a unity citizenry. Writing in eerily similar terms, Lefebvre notes how: When an urban square serving as a meeting-place isolated from traffic is transformed into an intersection or abandoned as a place to meet, city life is subtly but profoundly changed, sacrificed to that abstract space where cars circulate like so many atomic particles. (Lefebvre 1991, 312)

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Whilst the two communities reorganised their social infrastructures by building, rebuilding, or assigning new meanings to existing venues in their own territory, they created new spatial practices that became deeply ingrained spatial habits (people socialise within the territory of their community). As the next section will show in greater detail, many of the survey participants could not fully explain why they do not ‘cross/travel to the other side’.

Mostar, the City That We All Fear The second set of maps produced within the scopes of Abart’s project investigates where people feel/felt uncomfortable in the city: the spaces of fear, danger, and the no-go areas. The question posed was whether there are/were locations that the participant would not frequent. Among the suggested reasons was a lack of infrastructure, general discomfort, and fear. Interestingly, the pre-war map (Map 3.3) shows few clear locations that the participants associated with drug trafficking, prostitution, dirt, and violence (illegal activities) or places that were frequented by confrontational groups of people. Some of the comments show racialised fear—for instance, areas used by the Roma population were associated with danger (Abart 2011). The comments gathered from the older generation in relation to spaces of fear seem to have one common denominator: that they all involved references to the police and security. For one participant, these sites were fearful because they hosted illegal activities that called for police intervention, and it was best to stay away from the police (and the places of illegality). For another participant, the police were fair and kept the situation under control, so it was a good sign to see them, but if you did, it signalled dangerous areas. Overall, Mostar emerges from the memories of the interviewees as a safe city. This chimes with Palmberger’s account of how the ‘Last Yugoslavs’ (those old enough to remember life before the war) tend to narrate ‘pre-war BiH as the “secure past” while present and future BiH is seen as insecure’ (2013, 19). This is also because of how they associate pre-war life with a sense of financial and social security that was completely lost with the war. The situation changes dramatically when younger generations are asked about fear and safety in the city. The after-war map (Map 3.4) is perhaps the most telling. The map resulting from accumulating all the provided answers is entirely

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Map 3.3  Pre-war spaces of fear. Designed by Mela Zuljević for Abart (2011). Used with permission

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Map 3.4  Post-war spaces of fear. Designed by Mela Zuljević for Abart (2011). Used with permission

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yellow—the colour chosen to represent spatial discomfort. The younger respondents did not think about a bar or a park or crime-ridden area as unwelcoming as it was for the older generation. Rather, the majority circled an entire ‘side’ of the city—most likely the one they did not live in. One respondent (referring to west Mostar) candidly wrote that there is no specific reason for the answer provided, but rather a sense of reluctance to cross to the other side (‘even though there is not a specific threat, I prefer not to go to the other side’) (Abart 2011). Another respondent, confessed: ‘I don’t go to the other (east) side. I am fearful, but also nothing attracts me there. I know nobody who goes out there too’ (Abart 2011) bringing attention to how the existence of parallel institutions and places for socialising result in the impossibility of getting to know people who are from ‘the other’ side/community (see Laketa 2015b; Hromadžić 2015b). The above results lead to three considerations. Firstly, in this map, unpopular areas are defined according to where people socialise, rather than according to other signifiers, as it was in Map 3.3 (illegal activities, lack of hygiene, or violence). Thus, spatial discomfort is caused by the overwhelming presence of people who do not belong to the same ethnic group as the respondents and it is accentuated in areas where these ‘others’ go to socialise; the processes of inclusion and exclusion are drawn on the basis of where time is spent and emotional/personal bounds made. Secondly, the map of contemporary Mostar shows that the entire city is unpopular, which registers a strong sense of uneasiness among the population that surely affects mobility, and a sense of ownership and belonging. In fact, younger people felt uneasy in explaining what they feared about going to ‘the other side’ and retreated in the comfort offered by the unquestioned representation of Mostar divided in two halves, one of which is safe and the other to be avoided (ironically, the majority of young people in Mostar shared this normalised, even if problematic, understanding of the city). Thirdly, before the war there were clear voids—unwelcoming spaces linked to criminality or disorder that were also patrolled by the administration to protect the (good) citi­ zens of Mostar. After the war, voids are linked to spaces of socialisation (bars, cafes, clubs, the two centres of social life in east and west Mostar and also, symptomatically, the entire half where one does not belong) as if deviance manifested itself in being from a different ethno-national community.

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Everydayness: Flexible Identities, Porous Borders, and Surviving Mostar Lefebvre writes that the everyday is a product and, as such, it is primarily controlled by those who own the means of (space) production (Lefebvre and Levich 1987, 9). The modern city dweller, in his view, has a passive experience of cities because the rhythms of the everyday are largely dictated by needs, duties, and desires that are imposed onto citizens by centralised forms of power (Lefebvre 1991, 51). And this is where Lefebvre’s theory of space production becomes revolutionary; if, as Lefebvre suggests, we could understand how capitalism produces abstract space that renders citizens passive to its dictates and procedures then we could also interfere with the mechanisms of its spatial production (to initiate the urban revolution), and in doing so, urban dwellers could free themselves from the oppressive chains of capitalist spatial rhythms to propose new modalities of living in the city that also involve a more direct control of urban production processes (self-management). Accordingly, the ‘critique of the everyday life is a question of discovering what must and can change and be transformed… [this] critique implies possibilities as yet unfulfilled’ (Lefebvre 2008b, 18). It is in everyday life and starting from everyday life that genuine creations are achieved, those creations which produce the human and which men produce as part of the process of becoming human: works of creativity. These superior activities are born from seeds contained in everyday practice… The human world is not defined simply by the historical, by culture, by totality or society as a whole, or by ideological and political superstructures. It is defined by this intermediate and mediating level: everyday life. In it most concrete dialectical movements can be observed… The repetitive part, in the mechanical sense of the term, and the creative part of the everyday become embroiled in a permanently reactivated circuit in a way that only dialectical analysis can perceive. (ibid., 44–45)

Through an ‘endless appeal to what is possible in order to judge the present and what has been accomplished’ (ibid., 45), the everyday contains absolute potentials because it is not fully predictable, ‘yet, it still makes critical differences to our experiences’ (Lorimer 2005, 84). Approaching the study of the present means to privilege the tension between routinised rhythms and creative movements that enact change (and here I point

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to my understanding of practice as constitutive of the world in its own right). Such an analysis becomes a way to capture ‘the tension of [the] present tense of becoming, a not yet enacted moment where we meet and greet ourselves in the affect that inspires action’ (Dewsbury et al. 2002, 439). This idea of potential ‘combines temporalities in complex ways. It exists as a presence within the now that is predicated on an imagined future concertinaed back to uncover or recognize what presently exists. Potential exists only to the extent it is found’ (Cooper 2014, 78). Of course, as Lefebvre rightly suggests, the everyday is both about mindless repetitions that do not favour (or imagine) social change, and moments of illumination that shed light on alternative ways of living and being in cities (what is possible); this is the desire that produces revolutionary difference (Lefebvre 1991, 385). Drawing on examples from my experience of living in Mostar, this section engages with two key and interconnected Lefebvrian concepts, ‘representational space’ and ‘everydayness’. As argued in Chapter 1, representational space already finds a place within the moment of representations of space (the conceived). Thus, while today elite practices are often associated with the dominance of abstract space—the construction of markets, bureaucratic systemisation, and urban spaces adequate to leisure/consumption—they are often accompanied by the residual elements of blood, soil and language, and the ‘shared’ history that articulates these elements. It is these residual aspects that allow elite hegemony to reach down into the realm of the everyday, to (partially) colonise its rhythms and mould its body towards a spatial shape and temporal flow that is conducive to the reproduction of abstract space. Yet given that the moment of representational space belongs to the lived experience of the everyday (Lefebvre 1991, 33, 39–45), it alludes to more than simply the passive acceptance of dominant codes of conduct, but rather to a multifarious processes of making the urban by living in the city, reappropriating its infrastructures, following patterns that are both suggested, imposed, and legitimised but also creating unexpected dynamics that disrupt—by reinterpreting—space as it was conceived, designed, and built. The moment of representational space thus also captures the creativity and excess of urban living; the emotional and sensual bases of oppositional forces that contest the dominant representations of space (and some articulations of representational space, as with the discursive core of ethno-nationalism) and reappropriate cities to remake them according to people’ needs

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and aspirations (which are often neglected or silenced in planners’ and administrators’ agendas). Importantly, representational space does not always follow rules of cohesion or coherence, but it is rather produced by dreams, passions, and intuitions that might as well challenge one’s habitual prac­tices and understandings of the city. In other words, representational space overlaps physical space and assigns meaning to it. For instance, people in Mostar frequent certain spaces (as seen earlier in the post-war socialisation map) because they feel ‘safe’ here having embraced ­ethno-nationalist discourses that depict members of the other communities as ‘dangerous’ even when there is little or no evidence for this. Thus, representational space, assigning meanings, also instructs or alters spatial practices in cities. In this section, I explore the ways in which everyday discourses and practices confirm or challenge narratives of ethnic segregation. In doing so, I wish to reflect upon the representations of Mostar as ultimately divided by considering the many ways in which citizens of Mostar disrupt and contest this narrative in their daily life—rendering the division more complex, less definitive, and much harder to represent in absolute terms. By ‘everydayness’, Lefebvre conceptualises the atmosphere of a city, the affect produced by the sum, and negotiations, of urban rhythms (Lefebvre and Levich 1987). Again, the concept of everydayness both organises passivity or tokenism that preserve the status quo and holds difference and change. Even though there is a sense that everydayness is made immutable by sets of routines that determine and shape each single day, it is easy to point to changes and differences between the experience we have of two consecutive days that can never be identical. Surely, what ‘changes’ between days does not (most likely) suggest revolutionary trajectories, and this depends on how the production of desires has also been hijacked by the capitalist mode of production whereby the demand for new commodities requires the elicitation of desire (Lefebvre 1991, 395). For these reasons, Lefebvre argues, some treat the everyday with impatience—wondering why nothing ever changes or gets better (Lefebvre and Levich 1987, 11). Instead, he suggests turning our gaze towards the moves and actions that disrupt the rhythms of the city in order to appreciate their political potential. In this section, I reflect on the rhythms, riddles, and spatial and temporal practices that collide in Mostar with the aim of picturing its complex patterns of everydayness. Overall, this section wishes two make two separate, yet interconnected, interventions. On the one hand, I want to explore the micro-

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movements of the everyday—what makes each day unique and different from the others—as a means to trace the potential of difference to produce social change in relation to ethnic polarisation. I am interested here in the kind of difference that, for Barthes, ‘requires the displacement that opens up a space of desire’ instructing revolutionary trajectories (Ffrench 2004, 294). On the other hand, I wish to connote the sense that Mostar is immobile and stagnant through a dialogue with Berlant’s (2007, 2011) notions of ‘flat affect’ and ‘lateral agency’ to interpret the pervasive sense of immobility as a sense-making strategy that aims at survival.

The Vibrancy of Sameness and the Opening to Difference When my landlord asked me if I wanted to join him for coffee on a Sunday morning, I accepted without much thinking. He and his family had been extremely generous to me; helping me to settle in and navigate the city, and sharing memories and stories that could contribute to my research. Sitting in an isolated, tiny café far from the city, I asked what is so special about this place and I was told that the air here is better than in Mostar. I drank an espresso, quickly. He suggested I order something more. I said I was fine and that I had made plans for the rest of the day. The conversation remained quite superficial, interrupted by long pauses of uncomfortable silence. Then he invited me to plan a trip together for the next weekend. I declined with a smile. I said that I was not interested in dating if he was aiming at that. Becoming somewhat irate, he asked why I accepted his invitation for a coffee. I stared at him, puzzled. He continued, ‘in Mostar, to go for coffee it’s not just for coffee!’ In that very moment, I learnt an invaluable lesson about the social implications of drinking coffee, which is not ‘just coffee’, in Mostar (see also Hromadžić 2015a, 99–102). When I told this story to my girlfriends they laughed and said it happened to me just because I was foreigner and people (men especially) related to me differently. I am still unsure about their assessment, but certainly coffee must be approached as a serious affair in this city. To ‘meet up for coffee’ is a major bonding everyday activity. Cafés are always highly populated and the ratio of café spaces to the number of inhabitants is surely very high. To go for a coffee is a way to sit down and catch up with friends, but significantly the café is also the place where local news is discussed aloud, sports are followed, business contracts signed, new friendships are made, fights burst out,

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and romantic dates arranged. The café is where you go to meet your own crowd, a sort of second home that signals your belonging to the space and to a certain social layer of the city. Daily routines crucially materialise in the practise of drinking coffees, which is why I will expand on the everydayness of Mostar through coffee encounters. I started taking a language class in January 2010. My instructor, Branka, taught English to children in a small Language School in west Mostar, but she offered to teach me Croatian in the absence of classes for foreigners (there were not that many in town at the time). She was a very extroverted woman in her early 20s. The first month, we used our bi-weekly hour to chat about life, work, family, and friends. I learnt that she had left Mostar when the war started and relocated with her family to Australia. They returned to Mostar only three years before we had met and here she completed an undergraduate degree in Croatian language and literature (at the University of West Mostar, the only Croat university in BiH). What I remember about her, after all these years, is her friendly and warm smile. We formed a close bond, and soon took the habit of going for coffee after class. The first thing I heard from her is that she would teach me the Croatian language. If this was not clear enough, Branka emphasised that we were learning Croatian instead of Bosnian (Serbian was never mentioned) because Croatian grammar and syntax is more correct. I asked how different these languages are, reporting that my first teacher, back in London, also from BiH, used to say that Serbian, Croatian, and Bosnian are very similar. Branka explained confidently that this is because my former teacher had left before the war and never went back to BiH. Now the languages had evolved to become very different, somehow suggesting an almost natural evolution (see also Grbavac 2015; Jozić 2012). After this conversation, we never spoke of this subject again, but during all the following classes, she invited me to observe and record on my notebook how differently people ‘where I lived’ (east Mostar) would say things. For instance, she recommended to ask for ‘hleb’ at the bakery rather than ‘kruh’ as she would say, somehow compromising her mission to teach me the better grammar and syntax by coming to terms with the fact that both words would have allowed me to obtain bread successfully. On a warm evening of February 2010, after class, I was sitting in one of the new trendy cafes in Rondo. I was with Branka and, unannounced, the head of the school decided to join us. The head of the school, Marko, was a man in his late 40s, stern and very self-confident.

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He told me that the language school was not his only occupation and that he was also working at the university in west Mostar. The conversation began on very general terms and he seemed genuinely interested to learn more about my research project. I explained that I was looking at everyday practices and how they were affected by the management of the city in relation to the ethnic polarisation. Somehow unexpectedly, he questioned my knowledge of local history. Did I know that the two sides of the city are very different, culturally? He found problematic that I wanted to research the city as if it could be one and made sure I understood how my project was flawed. He told me how Mostar’s spatial growth and aesthetics powerfully capture the cultural differences among the two sides and preached to me about the absolute superiority of the Croats over the Muslims. He went on, explaining that west Mostar looks better, more modern, and that there are very few signs of the war because of the attitude of people living here, the Croats, who are proactive and hardworking. The other side, instead, is a ruin and nothing works because the people there are lazy. I realised how unprepared I was to interact with nationalist narratives, and I did not question or challenge his points as strongly as I could have. Branka sat silent sipping her cappuccino throughout the conversation. Then, when Marko stated that he feels as if his country were Croatia and that (his part of) Mostar should not be in BiH, she joined the conversation adding that, she felt the same. In fact, in her spare time, she preferred to travel to Split (on the Croatian coast) rather than Sarajevo, which she found extremely cold and unwelcoming. I never saw the head of the school again, but I kept meeting with my teacher for coffee. A few months later, Branka started dating a man from a nearby town, Ante. They met online and he travelled once a week to Mostar to spend time with her. On a Saturday night, I was invited for coffee to be introduced to the new boyfriend. Ante was also in his early 20s, very outgoing, and funny. We spent the entire evening in a café in Rondo talking about travels and work. When I announced that I was heading home, Ante asked whether they could walk with me, and I quickly replied that it was not necessary because I lived nearby. Unexpectedly, Branka intervened suggesting that they could indeed come with me and we could take the longer route to my house so as to cross the Old Bridge. I looked at her, surprised. She must have noticed. She explained that her boyfriend had never been to the OId Town because she never went there as she had no friends on the other side, but since I lived on that side

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we could all go together. And so we did. We walked to the Old Town and stood on the top of the bridge, admiring the pretty landscape of the Ottoman quarter. In fact, I met her walking around the Old Town a few more times, when she was no longer my teacher but was still living in Mostar. We of course went for coffee, in her ‘other side’ without even discussing it. Later that year, Branka left her job at the school (and our weekly meetings) and became an air stewardess for a Saudi airline. She mentioned it without much fanfare. She was extremely happy and excited for this new opportunity that would allow her to travel the world and have a better income. The fact that the Saudis are Muslim, like the people on the other side (with all the negative commentaries attached), was never mentioned. In summer 2010, I was drinking a coffee with my friend Sonja and we were talking about university, postgraduate programmes, and how to get funding to study abroad. She wanted to leave as soon as possible and this seemed a feasible strategy. While we were discussing funding options, she told me about her other friend, Marija, who had secured a scholarship from the city of Mostar, though not without struggling. Marija was also woman in her late 20s, who was born and grew up in Mostar. She is ‘mixed’ (her parents have different ethnicities) and, maybe because of this, she always states that she belongs to ‘the others’. Nevertheless, Marija went to a Croat school where she befriended people who became openly nationalist (a fact that seemed extremely important to Sonja). Of course, Sonja concluded, it must be difficult to be ‘mixed’ in Mostar today, but also, because of that, Marija could count on an ethnically diverse group of friends. While she was already studying at the university, the city of Mostar started granting scholarships to exceptional students, and so she decided to apply. At the office of the municipality, Marija was asked to declare her ethnicity because the city must allocate the awards according to ethno-national quotas (as for everything else). She confessed to the woman at the office that she did not want to reply because of her mixed ethnic background. Considering options available to her because of her parents’ ethnicities, the officer suggested putting ‘Serb’ on the application. Serbs are now very few in Mostar and she would have had a much better chance to get the money as a Serb with less competition. And that was how, filling in a scholarship application, Marija, who always refuses to declare belonging to one ethnicity, became a Serb (and obtained the scholarship). Of course, Sonja noted the

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absurdity of Mostar’s administration, but what can you do; ‘really?’— she asked me, frustrated. You cannot afford to stick to the ‘other’ (not declaring your nationality) if money is involved (and you need it badly). Coffees gave rhythm to my days in Mostar after I settled in, and I started to create routines that I became very attached to: my working days drinking coffee with Mela, coffee breaks when Amila finished working at the university, and often quick coffees with Francesca during her lunch breaks. On Wednesdays, I had coffee with my language teacher; on Sundays with the lady at the trafika (newspaper stand) near my first flat—a larger-than-life woman who spoke perfect Italian and liked to tell me stories from the time she spent in the country where I was born. And it is also because of these repetitive coffee dates that Mostar’s everydayness materialised as a pervasive sense of immobility; the sense that nothing changed, ever. I had the feeling that we were always enveloped in an atmosphere of immobility that was sticky and pervasive. At the beginning of my journey, observing that nothing seemed to have changed (progressed?) since my first visit in 2005, I judged this negatively and took it as a sign of neglect and political, social, and personal withdrawal (Carabelli 2013)—I was approaching the everyday with impatience. Living in Mostar for a year made me realise instead that much was going on, bubbling under the surface. But it was as if there were a permanent layer of ash covering a smouldering pile of embers. This is because the everyday is not an abstract concept, but rather one that takes shape and acquires meaning through experience. Accordingly, it was only by participating in the everyday of Mostar that I could explore its concealed dynamics. In this way: In production, it is not only products which are produced and reproduced, but also social groups and their relations and elements; members, goods, and objects disappear while groups persist or crumble away, remaining active, playing their games and developing their tactics…beneath an apparent immobility, analysis discovers a hidden mobility. Beneath the superficial immobility, it discovers stabilities, self-regulations, structures and factors of balance. Beneath the overall unity, it discovers diversities, and beneath the multiplicity of appearances, it finds totality. (Lefebvre 2008b, 238)

Later during the fieldwork, I came to discover this ‘hidden mobility’, by observing both the inconsistencies of ethno-national belonging and the work of many activists working in the city. Yet, in becoming part of

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this grassroots network, I also realised how difficult it was to gain visibility—to make space for supra-ethnic logics in a city whose routines cement lines of ethnic division. And this is why many accounts of Mostar describe a hopeless place, stuck in political stagnancy. But this does not do justice to a city whose stillness is nevertheless vibrant, nor to existing tensions between the adherence and refusal of ethnic politics. In fact, the slow rhythm of this town, where change seems an ever-present impossibility, hides and reveals many different attempts to reinterpret, digest, and remake sectarian divisions. Ethno-national categories and boundaries are constantly (re)negotiated in everyday life. As these short vignettes illustrate, the always contested terrain of representational space, with the notion of belonging to one of the three ethnic groups, certainly exists, as it affects the ways in which citizens of Mostar perceive and describe themselves. Laketa (2017) argues that through repetitions and routines the space of division sticks to people in Mostar. However, as these same stories also exemplify, ethno-nationality is not an all-encompassing definition. Rather, it is used as a marker (it mobilises) according to the specifics of the situation. Imagined boundaries between communities are surely cemented but also reinterpreted, crossed, and challenged. To a significant extent, these challenges and tensions become part and parcel of being a citizen of Mostar. In fact, the former division and the consociational power system facilitate a representation of the state as a single entity constituted by different people and, accordingly, citizens often describe themselves in this manner. The movements to disrupt the stickiness of the division could be interpreted as spontaneous, rather than planned, but spontaneity ‘is not always creative…with every risk it takes. It makes mistakes, and it fails more frequently than rational prognostication and calculation’ (Lefebvre 2008b, 218). Here, Lefebvre reflects on the notion of spontaneity as lacking concrete political strategy; for him ‘metamorphosis implies a plan and a policy’ (ibid., 57). Thus, quotidian disruptions to entrenched divisions, such as the one I presented, feed into a state of ambiguity, which is a ‘sociological category, a lived situation which is constituted from contradictions which have been stifled, blunted and unnoticed (unrecognised) as such… [and] is a condition offered to an individual by a group’ (ibid., 220). In this way, the general state of ambiguity, as a socially imposed (yet always imperfect and unstable) container of society’s ‘permanent conflict’ (ibid.) itself provides the conditions of possibility for the spontaneous emergence of social agency that takes hold of this ambiguous situation in order to further exacerbate

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its internal contradictions. Once these currents of spontaneous (disruptive) action achieve sufficient weight, ‘the ambiguity of the past and of the present becomes explicit, whereas when it was in control it was “unconscious” (unrecognized), hidden under representations and symbols which maintained and disguised it’ (ibid.). The notion of ambiguity captures exactly the feelings emerging from the vignettes I have presented; none of the characters of my stories disrupt divisive practices through coordinated political strategy (a conscious commitment). Rather, these moves were produced by contingencies (a visit from a boyfriend from outside the city, for instance) and did not shape new (counter-)practices. Even in the case of Marija, whose political project is to challenge urban divisions, to become Serb was possible because of the ambiguity produced by a field of multi-ethnic contestation. Ambiguity thus creates a space in which it is possible to be indecisive; to subscribe to, and at the same time abstain from, engaging with the rhythms of the divided city. Such a fluid state of being, informed by forces of contradiction, explains how the two communities of Mostar are not solid facts (like their representation), but rather potentials (Brubaker 2002). As such, the ambiguous foundation of ethnicisation must be explored as a political, social, and cultural process, which entails the possibility that the formation of ethnic-homogeneous and antagonistic groups is not a necessary condition, but rather the product of ‘a balance of power between classes and fractions of classes, as between the spaces they occupy’ (Lefebvre 1991, 281, emphasis in original). Ethnicity should be taken as a category that constitutes a potential for group-formation.4 In this respect, the crystallisation of antagonistic ethnic groups in Mostar could be replaced by the understanding of group polarisation as often (but not always) resulting from contingent strategies. For instance, ethno-national categories become extremely flexible depending on what’s on one’s plate: jobs, scholarships, money, and welfare. And yet, because this ambiguity does not generate or support a political project (the overt countering of ethno-nationalism), the immanent potential for a destabilisation of established and well-rehearsed discourses of ‘national belonging’ is often downplayed. As Kolind aptly summarises, these are not independent variables: Trans-ethnic narod [people, nation] is not separable form the ethnic tensions from which it materialised, to which it eventually refers, and with which it stays intertwined. Therefore, one has to avoid an inclination to

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celebrate forms of sociality that are potential rather than actual, indeterminate and fleeting rather than routinized and reliable. And yet paying attention to discourses of trans-ethnic narod is vital; trans-ethnic narod does not suppress the ethnic meaning of narod but it questions it and at times ‘renders it less important’. (Kolind 2007, 131)

As Hromadžić also suggests, ‘these ordinary people’s manoeuvrings bring into sharp relief complex political subjectivities, uneasy relationships, resistances to classification and relation, and enactment of political agency in contemporary BiH’ (2013, 270), which becomes crucial not only in assessing post-conflict and post-reunification life in Mostar but also to conceptualise how spaces of resistance could materialise in a deeply divided society. As Laketa suggests, engaging with the performativity of everyday life contributes to the ‘project of destabilising the recalcitrant forces of ethno-national identity in BiH [to show that] resistance to identify is always possible; and finally, that both the suturing and unravelling of identification must be accomplished in and through social space’ (2017, 3–4). In the next section, I continue this discussion by reflecting on how to conceptualise the dialectical movement between ‘ambiguity’ and ‘decision’ or how to imagine and account for political agency when resistance is understood through spontaneous (rather than politically planned) acts of subversion.

Space, Time, and Affect: Everydayness and the Possibility of Transformation For Lefebvre, the individual who ‘rejects uncomfortable questions…. evades problems’ (Lefebvre 2008b, 58). My uncomfortable questions are: how do we make sense of the representation of Mostar as permanently divided if the everyday proves more fluid than expected? What does it mean for Mostar to be divided? But also, considering the lack of organised political opposition to the logics of the divided city, can we talk of (imagine) resistance as the act of disengaging from organised political strategy? Reading Spinoza with Hardt, it could be said that a position of immobility is characteristic of the individual who cannot to be affected. It implies detachment, and the refusal to participate in transformational possibilities. This is because ‘the field of the affects often looks like a briar patch, impassable, and sometimes minefield’ (Hardt 2015, 220). Surely,

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to engage with transformational movements countering ethno-nationalism in Mostar resonates well with the metaphor of the minefield. Lefebvre hints to the same condition with the notion of the affective nucleus, which reveals itself as a layer of the everyday. This is ‘the sphere of non-adaption, vague rejections and unrecognised voids, of hesitations and misunderstandings. When we reach this sphere, we discover the dramatic situation of the individual in society’ (Lefebvre 2008b, 59). This attitude ‘is emptied of all expressivity which might be compromising’ (ibid., 60). Both Hardt’s and Lefebvre’s analyses attend, affectively, to the condition of being ‘still’ as the act of reproducing, mechanically, rhythms, logics, and routines that have been imposed without opening up to the possibility of being affected by other ways of being in the city. This immobility has often been accounted for as political withdrawal and passivity in Mostar, but it could also reveal the disengagement from the politics of the divided city because alternatives are stubbornly elusive. Lefebvre suggests that creativity and imagination could feed new imaginaries that accelerate the desire for social change (Lefebvre 1991, 422). But, as Berlant has noticed, the possibility to imagine change is also a privilege: The fear of an optimism for social transformation is not just the fear of people who have an investment in the norms of the world, it’s also the fear of the people for whom the world isn’t working and who have a political commitment to being otherwise, but for whom that kind of excitement is unbearable. (Davis and Sarlin 2011)

Lefebvre conceptualises this as the ‘silence of the users’, which ‘might be explained as follows: consumers sense that the slightest shift on their part can have boundless consequences, that the whole order (or mode of production) weighing down upon them will be seriously affected by the slightest movements on their part’ (Lefebvre 1991, 383). As seen in Chapter 2, the permanent political crisis in Mostar creates a sense of social immobility that stretches the present with the intent of preserving a safe space, the space in which people have created new ways of being normal ‘as a ground of dependable life, a life that does not have to keep being reinvented’ (Berlant 2011, 169). The disruptions to ethno-nationalism here presented do not ‘reinvent’ modes of being in the city. Rather, they challenge existing boundaries (whilst respecting and reproducing them) to test how far one can go. Life in Mostar does not

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favour ‘flourishment’ (Berlant 2011), but through adjustments and repetitions a new (post-war) normalcy has now been reached. Making change to the achieved balance (though dysfunctional) creates disruptions that could worsen the situation. Thus, immobility becomes a survival strategy, and in this way agency becomes ‘lateral’ and must be understood as ‘the activity of maintenance, not making, fantasy without grandiosity, sentence without full intentionality, inconsistency without shattering, embodying alongside embodiment’ (Berlant 2011, 114). Berlant conceptualises lateral agency affectively as resulting in the underperformativity of emotions, the lack of passion or enthusiasm for the creation of a different future (cf. Duschinsky and Wilson 2015). This ‘flat’ affect characterises the agency of survivors. She proposes to look at flat affect as a mode of detachment (to avoid being affected) that resists dominant affective investments and structures that organise everyday life (Berlant 2015b). In other words, resistance might not be found only in political projects whose intents are revolutionary and overtly transformative, but also in projects that aim for survival in the divided city without being affected by it. With this, I mean life orientations that favour immobility (the refusal to be affected) as a preventive action that obstructs the logics of the divided city and allow for fluidity and border crossing to exist alongside nationalist narratives, symbols, and practices. The immobility caused by the aspiration of not being affected in Mostar reveals not only the attitude of refusing to engage with radical politics (radically nationalist and radically anti-nationalist), but also that of disengaging with everything else to preserve that space of ambiguity that allows inconsistency to exist, and to take advantage of the benefits produced by attaching and detaching oneself from multiple projects (the enactment of ethnic boundaries because it provides money as in the case of Marija, the surpassing of the border if it provides a pleasant experience as in the case of Branka and Ante). Flat affect defeats the expectation of drama as the default answer to crisis and it accounts for the (unexpected) disengagement from events that should be significant for the subject, but are processed as irrelevant, often producing sarcastic remarks. When the city was without an administration for over a year, in 2008–2009, the councillors met seventeen times without reaching an agreement, postponing the discussion to the future (see Chapter 2). Construction and reconstruction projects have been halted and left to rot; the city had no financial budget approved; the OHR issued warnings to the local politicians urging them to solve the protracted political impasse—but there seems to be no viable

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solution in sight. Quite remarkably, those with jobs in the public administration continued working without receiving salaries (at least until the summer of 2010 when they went on a short strike). Surely conversations I often heard addressed the permanent crisis as the generator of major concrete problems—lack of money, difficulties in obtaining permits or certificates, navigating a city where decisions could not be made, no jobs—but I rarely perceived anger or resentment. Rather, there was a quiet acceptance of the consequences of living in an exceptional (dysfunctional) city. Humour and sarcasm were largely used as coping mechanisms, to diffuse the tension with jokes about the impossibility to understand how Mostar became such a surreal place, where nothing could work. And this was, indeed, a way of resisting by showing a critical attitude towards the dysfunctionality of the city whilst, at the same time, strategically adapting to its inconsistencies. ‘Hey… It’s Mostar!’— said with a mocking smile—served to silence many conversations about current political problems that seemed unsolvable as well as to create a critical distance between one’s everyday life and everything else that no longer made sense. ‘It’s Mostar!’ addressed and explained that, in this city, the notion of ‘normalcy’ has been forever compromised. But then, if subjects withdraw from active forms of politics, and stand still, how can they repair what does not work, or change it altogether? How do we think about the possibility of a life that can flourish, which is the aim of Berlant’s theorising of the social? Where is the motor of transformation in society? Hardt, reading Spinoza, argues that ‘the subject is more affected by the world than effective in it’ (2015). This means that the subject does not have—alone—the power to produce change, but rather that change comes from the individual’s increased power to be affected (Berlant 2015a, 275). Or as Hardt puts it: We should conceive being affected by others as a virtue. The most powerful is not the one least affected but, on the contrary, the one affected the most and in the most ways. The more you are affected in many ways, the more alive you are, and to the extent you cease to be affected, to the extent you close off from the world, that much you die. (Hardt 2015, 217)

Of course, being affected in the divided city might involve both joining nationalist projects as well as the opposite. Following Lefebvre, social change needs directionality:

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The transformation of society presupposes a collective management of space founded on the permanent participation of the ‘interested parties’, with their multiple, varied and even contradictory interests… It is an orientation… We are concerned with what might be called a ‘sense’: an organ that perceives, a direction that may be conceived, and a directly lived movement progressing towards the horizon. (Lefebvre 1991, 423)

While never entirely breaking with the Marxist approach to analysing social reality, Lefebvre’s preferred path to human emancipation was to be found not within the ‘hidden abodes’ of production relations, nor within a spectral incantation of (working class) liberatory agency, but within the quotidien of everyday life, where the general themes of alienation particular to late capitalism were most palpable, and ‘was therefore the proper scene for a true revolution that would expand human potentialities’ (Kolakowski 1981, 482). Lefebvre was concerned more with creating an animating utopia as a goad to political practice (see Katznelson 1992, 100–101), which was not well received within some Marxist circles. Castells, for instance commented on the abstract theorisation of the urban revolution as ill fated, arguing that Lefebvre’s focus on space as a means of change obscured the agency of social practice (Castells 1983; Stanek 2011, 51; Katznelson 1992, 100–103). According to Castells, Lefebvre’s appreciation of creativity and spontaneity deprives the revolution of a clear plan, thus impeding the development of a political strategy. In contrast, I propose to revisit Lefebvre’s notion that human agency is rooted in imagination in order to explore the political potential of being affected as the motor of social change by discussing the associated notion of ‘desire’. Even if Marx did not substantially engage with a reflection on creative practice, he notes in Capital that: [a] spider conducts operations that resemble those of a weaver, and a bee puts to shame many an architect in the construction of her cells. But what distinguishes the worst of architects from the best of bees is this, that the architect raises his structure in imagination before he erects it in reality. (2007, 198)

The importance of the architect is not in her technical skills that enable them to build a safe and functional environment (whatever the purpose). The importance of the architect must be seen in their capacity to imagine how space could be constructed in relation to the moment in which

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they live. Marx is not particularly interested in architecture or in a spatial analysis of the urban landscape as a means to understanding class struggle. Yet, a point could be made in favour of acknowledging the importance of imagination in the formation of urban space. The crucial point is to understand how creativity could facilitate such a process and what this entails. I believe the answer must draw on two main points. Firstly, creativity should be understood as a process and, more specifically, a social practice. Secondly, creativity is nurtured by the contradictions of reality; social contradiction produces desires for change. Accordingly, political projects of social change could be then associated with individuals’ openings towards desire (to be affected by desire) even if this creates an unbalance that may threaten (normalised) life. According to Lefebvre, disillusionment (which is consistent with the attitude of withdrawal that prevents being affected) empties space; ‘nothing is allowed and nothing is forbidden’ (1991, 97)—like spaces of ambiguity. But also, Lefebvre states that space unleashes the desire for the urban revolution. Drawing on Spinoza and Berlant, I read this as the subject’s wilful movement towards being affected that embraces the desire for social change. This desire, according to Lefebvre, ‘precedes, needs and goes beyond them, is the yeast that causes this rather lifeless dough to rise. The resulting movement prevents stagnation and cannot help but produce difference’ (1991, 395). Thus, by allowing desire to affect one’s life, the individual can step out from immobility (ambiguity) to follow more radical political paths. According to Spinoza, joy (being affected by joy, becoming joyful) signifies the power to act, which resonates with Lefebvre’s notion of jouissance (roughly translated as ‘pleasure’, ‘enjoyment’); the affect that, centring on the body and its rhythms, reappropriates the body (Lefebvre 2014) and produces differential space (conducive of social change). In the space of jouissance, ‘the body behaves as a total body, breaking out of the temporal and spatial shell developed in response to labour, to the division of labour, to the localisation of work’, and, indeed, ethno-national abstractions (Lefebvre 1991, 384). This is the festival, which is not a social occasion (a one-off event to attend), but rather the material outburst of a continuous creative engagement with the present aimed at identifying and producing the potential for change (Lefebvre 2008a, 201–227). It is the embodiment of social struggle turned towards an imagining of how difference could be fostered in the interstices of a homogenising reality. And the concept of spontaneity should be reframed accordingly. To be spontaneous is not

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to be taken as an act of thoughtless improvisation. Rather, spontaneity must be sought and cultivated as a counter-practice to the homogenising tendency in capitalist society. In fact, being spontaneous acknowledges the capacity to claim an independence of thinking, acting, and living: ‘it is impossible to seize the everyday as such if we accept it, in ‘living’ it passively, without taking a step back” (Lefebvre; cited in Elden 2004, 113). In this sense, I point to the existence of two emerging movements, both contained in the everyday of Mostar. On the one hand, there is resistance, which entails stillness rather than action. This is because it resists everything—favouring ambiguity—as a matter of survival. Immobility is thus produced both as part of political planning (the elites that freeze the possibility of reconciliation) and as an everyday practice that emerges from the difficulties of navigating the dysfunctional city. On the other hand, there is the project of the urban revolution, which implies movements towards the goal of social change. Even if I conceive immobility as a form of resistance, this does not mean that resistance is necessarily supportive of more revolutionary projects. Rather, I suggest that immobility is shaped by multiple and contradictory political projects, which are part and parcel of the dynamics of the divided city. As such, immobility could incubate movements towards social change when individuals are moved by desires (are affected) that require to take a definitive position and the embracing of radical political projects, which is the subject of the next chapter.

Conclusion Tracing the existence of change within the perceived immobility of Mostar’s everydayness demands reconsideration of the micro-politics of the everyday. Citizens of Mostar seem to reproduce divisions in and through their spatial practices. In fact, they tend to socialise (thus creating social infrastructures) within the two clearly separate halves of the city. For Lefebvre, ‘when groups degenerate (become isolated) the agon disappears … [and] the everyday lapses into triviality’ (Lefebvre 2008b, 135). It becomes a series of tactical moves (strategies to survival) and ‘reality lying between the level where there are no more actions, where reality is stagnating and coagulating, and where triviality dominates’ (ibid.). The sense of fluidity that resists and undoes ethno-national categories could be explained both as a strategy to survival (lateral agency) and as the resistance to embrace abstract categories that could endanger life (both

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the category of ethno-nationalism and anti-nationalism). As such, the sense of belonging to one of the ethno-national groups (and to a section of the city) is acknowledged but constantly renegotiated. Citizens of Mostar are fully aware of the division and they deal with this peculiar trait of their city depending on everyday contingencies, e.g. their ethno-national belonging is called in force or downplayed according to circumstances that often contain no internal consistency. If asked to mark on a map where they feel comfortable to go, they tend to draw circles within their side. If asked where they do not go, they tend to answer by pointing to the other side. The divisive spatial practices are rooted in the everyday and reproduce urban division. Yet despite socialising within two separate areas, many people also move freely across the city. Further, as the presented portraits have showed, ethno-national identities are not solid, nor all encompassing. Rather, they are flexible and versatile. This flexibility is not merely an established, absolute fact (which would thereby do away with the problem of division altogether), rather, it is the manifestation of representational space being ‘the space’ of everyday life. In other words, ‘it may be directional, situational or relational, because it is essentially qualitative, fluid and dynamic’ (Lefebvre, cited in Merrifield 1993, 523) and it shows how the capacity to be affected moves people, changing their sense-making paradigms. Though repetition creates patterns and rhythms that come to represent the city, individual movements end up challenging urban stereotypes (cf. Barthes 1977, 296). In the case of Mostar, to focus on individual experiences means to disrupt the stereotype of the city as a place of permanent division and conflict, which also means to reflect on the limits of methodologies that investigate ‘divided cities’ by attending to ethno-national communities as homogeneous entities in which all members of society act and behave consistently with the group’s ideologies. Contrary to research that draws largely on interviews with leaders or members of ethnic communities (and their various cultural, political or religious groups), the choice to engage with the ways in which ethno-nationalist understandings are challenged in quotidian practices sheds light on moments of inter-ethnic collaborations or co-existence that reframe representations of the status quo (the permanent division). In this way, we could also draw on emotions, affects, and personal and spatial attachments to the urban to question critically issues of citizenship and a sense of belonging outside ethno-national quandaries. ‘Since we don’t know how things will turn out’, writes Tsing (2005, 269), ‘it’s worth attending to states of emergence and emergency. Here hope and despair huddle

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together, sometimes dependent on the same technologies. Urgency springs up in ruined landscapes; utopian dreams, and crass ambitious, are formed.’ Ultimately, this chapter suggests a readdressing of future research about ‘divided cities’ that facilitates an understanding of how citizens manage situations of permanent crisis that well represent their everydayness. This would shed light not only on the complications and limits of living in a deeply divided society but also the strategies to survive, navigate, and even flourish that subvert the narrative of these cities as places of negativity where nothing can change or move forward.

Notes 1. Importantly, opting out from the usual requirement to declare one’s ethnic membership is one of Abart’s interventions to disrupt normalised ways to self-identify in Mostar. This will be discussed in more detail in the next chapter. 2. I intentionally use the names Rondo and Promenade Lenin despite their new post-war denominations for two main reasons. First of all, these interviews recollect memories from the Socialist time when these were the names. Second, according to my experience, people in Mostar still address these areas with the Socialist names rather than the new post-war denominations of Trg Hrvatskih Velikana (Square of Croatian Heroes)— formerly Rondo and Nikola Šubić Zrinski (after a Croatian general who served during the Austro-Hungarian Empire)—formerly Promenade Lenin. However, it should be kept in mind that the post-war names are the official ones and as such they result in official documents (including city maps). On the political implications of renaming streets and public places in Banja Luka, Mostar, and Sarajevo, see Palmberger (2012). 3. This project has been somehow interrupted by an incident occurred in 2012 during the official opening of the New City Hall on the Bulevar. The administrative offices of the city were to occupy an old elementary school that, destroyed during the war, remained as a ruin for more than a decade. Shortly before the inauguration, in March 2012, a monument dedicated to the Croat soldiers appeared in the front garden. Bosniak politicians reacted by boycotting the opening ceremony and, weeks later, an unauthorised monument to Bosniak veterans appeared in the same location. Mayor Bešlić and other Croat politicians condemned the confrontational act. This shows clearly that the attempt to neutralise the central zone by transferring here administrative units remains problematic until the ethno-national conflict is settled.

118  G. Carabelli 4. Brubaker conducted his fieldwork in the city of Cluj; a contested city that hosts a mixed population of Romanian and Hungarian speakers. After seven years of researching, Brubaker came to the conclusion that citizens of Cluj have been largely indifferent to the nationalist claims made in their names and their everyday lives are far from been instructed by ideological commitments. This is not to say that in Cluj there are not real divisions or tensions, but rather to argue that ethnic groups come into being as violent and proactively engage in conflicts only due to contingencies.

References Abart. 2011. (Re)collecting Mostar. Online Archive. http://abartarhiv.blogspot.de. Accessed October 26, 2017. Aceska, Ana. 2016. “Our Side, Their Side and All Those Places In-between: Neutrality and Place in a Divided City.” In Politics of Identity in Post-conflict States. The Bosnian and Irish Experience, edited by Éamonn Ó. Ciardha and Gabriela Vojvoda, 107–116. London and New York: Routledge. Barthes, Roland. 1977. Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes. London: Macmillan. Berlant, Lauren. 2007. “Slow Death (Sovereignty, Obesity, Lateral Agency).” Critical Inquiry 33 (4): 754–780. http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/521568. ———. 2011. Cruel Optimism. Durham and London: Duke University Press. ———. 2015a. “A Momentary Anaesthesia of the Heart.” International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society 28 (3): 273–281. https://doi.org/10.1007/ s10767-014-9194-7. ———. 2015b. “Structures of Unfeeling: Mysterious Skin.” International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society 28 (3): 191–213. https://doi. org/10.1007/s10767-014-9190-y. Brubaker, Roger. 2002. “Ethnicity without Groups.” Archives of European Sociology XLIII (2): 163–189. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0003975602001066. Castells, Manuel. 1983. The City and the Grassroots: A Cross-Cultural Theory of Urban Social Movements. Berkeley: University of California Press. Carabelli, Giulia. 2013. “Living (Critically) in the Present: Youth Activism in Mostar (Bosnia Herzegovina).” European Perspectives – Journal on European Perspectives of the Western Balkans 5 (1): 48–63. Cooper, Davina. 2014. Everyday Utopias. The Conceptual Life of Promising Spaces. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Davis, Heather, and Paige Sarlin. 2011. “‘On the Risk of a New Relationality’: An Interview with Lauren Berlant and Michael Hardt.” Reviews in Cultural Theory (2.3). Online Publication. http://reviewsinculture. com/2012/10/15/on-the-risk-of-a-new-relationality-an-interview-with-lauren-berlant-and-michael-hardt/. Accessed October 27, 2017.

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D’Alessio, Vanni, and Eric Gobetti. 2009. “Politics of Identity and Symbolism in Postwar Mostar (1996–2005).” Paper Presented at the COST Action IS803, Nicosia, April 14–15, 2009. Dewsbury, John David, Paul Harrison, Mitch Rose, and John Wylie. 2002. “Enacting Geographies.” Geoforum 33 (4): 437–440. https://doi. org/10.1016/S0016-7185(02)00029-5. Duschinsky, Robbie, and Emma Wilson. 2015. “Flat Affect, Joyful Politics and Enthralled Attachments: Engaging with the Work of Lauren Berlant.” International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society 28 (3): 179–190. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10767-014-9189-4. Elden, Stuart. 2004. Understanding Henri Lefebvre: Theory and the Possible. London: Continuum. Ffrench, Patrick. 2004. “A Different Life? Barthes, Foucault and Everyday Life.” Cultural Studies 18 (2/3): 290–305. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09502380 42000201527. Flatley, Jonathan. 2008. Affective Mapping: Melancholia and the Politics of Modernism. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Grbavac, Ivana. 2015. “Linguistic Landscaping as an RST Research Method: The Downfall of Language Policies in Post-war Context.” European Journal of Applied Linguistics 3 (1): 87–110. https://doi.org/10.1515/ eujal-2015-0005. Hardt, Michael. 2015. “The Power to be Affected.” International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society 28 (3): 215–222. https://doi.org/10.1007/ s10767-014-9191-x. Hromadžić, Azra. 2013. “Discourses of Trans-ethnic Narod in Postwar Bosnia and Herzegovina.” Nationalities Papers: The Journal of Nationalism and Ethnicity 41 (2): 259–275. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00905992.2012.747503. ———. 2015a. Citizens of an Empty Nation. Youth and State-Making in Postwar Bosnia-Herzegovina. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. ———. 2015b. “On Not Dating Just Anybody: The Politics of Flirting in a Post-war City.” Anthropological Quarterly 88 (4): 881–906. https://doi. org/10.1353/anq.2015.0050. Jozić, Želiko. 2012. “Linguistic (Un)reality in Contemporary Bosnia and Herzegovina.” In Balkan Encounters: Old and New Identities in South-East Europe, edited by Jouko Lindstedt and Max Wahlström, 33–46. Helsinki: The University of Helsinki. Katznelson, Ira. 1992. Marxism and the City. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Kolakowski, Leszek. 1981. Main Currents of Marxism. Volume 3. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kolind, Torsten. 2007. “In Search for ‘Decent People’: Resistance to the Ethnicization of Everyday Life Among the Muslims of Stolac.” In The New

120  G. Carabelli Bosnian Mosaic, edited by Xavier Bougarel, Elissa Helms, and Ger Duijzings, 123–138. Aldershot: Ashgate. Laketa, Sunčana. 2015a. “The Geopolitics of Daily Life in Mostar, Bosnia and Herzegovina.” PhD diss., University of Arizona. ———. 2015b. “Youth as Geopolitical Subjects: The Case of Mostar, Bosnia and Herzegovina.” In Politics, Citizenship and Right, edited by K. Kallio, S. Mills, and T. Skelton, 1–13. Online: Springer. https://link.springer.com/referenceworkentry/10.1007%2F978-981-4585-94-1_6-1#page-1. Accessed October 18, 2017. ———. 2017. “Between ‘This’ Side and ‘That’ Side: On Performativity, Youth Identities and ‘Sticky’ Spaces.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space. Advanced Online Publication, August 2, 2017. https://doi. org/10.1177/0263775817723632. Lefebvre, Henri. 1991. The Production of Space. Maiden, Oxford and Victoria: Blackwell. ———. 2007. Everyday Life in the Modern World. New Brunswick and London: Transaction Publishers. ———. 2008a. Critique of Everyday Life. Volume 1. Foundations for a Sociology of the Everyday. London and New York: Verso. ———. 2008b. Critique of Everyday Life. Volume 2. Foundations for a Sociology of the Everyday. London and New York: Verso. ———. 2014. Towards an Architecture of Enjoyment. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press. Lefebvre, Henri, and Christine Levich. 1987. “The Everyday and Everydayness.” Yale French Studies 73: 7–11. http://doi.org/10.2307/2930193. Lorimer, Hayden. 2005. “Cultural Geography: The Busyness of Being ‘Morethan-Representational’.” Progress in Human Geography 29 (1): 83–94. https://doi.org/10.1191/0309132505ph531pr. Makaš, Emily. 2007. “Representing Competing Identities in Postwar Mostar.” PhD diss., Cornell University. Marx, Karl. 2007. Capital. Volume I. New York: Cosimo Inc. Merrifield, Andrew. 1993. “Place and Space: A Lefebvrian Reconciliation.” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 18 (4): 516–531. http:// doi.org/10.2307/622564. Palmberger, Monika. 2012. “Renaming of Public Space: A Policy of Exclusion in Bosnia and Herzegovina.” Max Planck Institute for the Study of Ethnic and Religious Diversity Working Paper Series. February 2012. https://docgo. org/max-planck-institute-for-the-study-of. Accessed October 25, 2017. ———. 2013. “Ruptured Pasts and Captured Futures: Life Narratives in Postwar Mostar.” Focaal-Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology 66: 14–24. http://dx.doi.org/10.3167/fcl.2013.660102.

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———. 2016. How Generations Remember. Conflicting Histories and Shared Memories in Post-War Bosnia and Herzegovina. Open Access. https://link. springer.com/book/10.1057%2F978-1-137-45063-0. Simmons, Cynthia. 2005. Women Engaged/Engaged Art in Postwar Bosnia: Reconcialiation, Recovery and Civil Society. The Carl Beck Papers in Russian and East European Studies. Online. https://doi.org/10.5195/cbp.2010.150. Stanek, Lukas. 2011. Henri Lefebvre on Space. Architecture, Urban research, and the Production of Theory. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press. Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. 2005. Friction: an ethnography of global connection. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

CHAPTER 4

Grassroots Movements and the Production of (Other) Space(s)

Civil Society, Cultural Projects, and the (Potential) Dissolution of Divisions The previous chapter explored the everyday of Mostar to trace ways in which citizens disrupt polarising practices due to contingencies, needs, and survival strategies with the intent to complicate the prevailing narrative of Mostar’s polarisation as an all-encompassing, immutable fact. The representation of the city as a territory cut in half, in which two ethnic communities live separately, and where identities are constructed accordingly, is inconsistent with the much more complex dynamics of ethnic formation and destabilisation discussed in the last chapter. I accounted for these quotidian practices as disturbances and openings that create difference in the divided city and I argued that they allow for the possibility to think that social transformation is possible. In this chapter, I will continue investigating practices that challenge the dynamics of the divided city by looking more closely at grassroots activism. In particular, I am interested in the initiatives promoted by groups that do not identify with ethno-national categories and whose urban imaginaries—as ways of envisioning what a city might become— differ radically from that of an ethnically divided city. In other words, I analyse the agency of those groups that have abandoned the space of ‘ambiguity’ in favour of a transformative approach to social space (see Chapter 3). Specifically, I engage with Lefebvre’s notion of art as the revolutionary tool that contains the potential for substantial change in cities, © The Author(s) 2018 G. Carabelli, The Divided City and the Grassroots, The Contemporary City, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-7778-4_4

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and the idea of the festival as the space for political struggle, in order to locate and critically discuss the roles of art and cultural practices in Mostar. This chapter therefore engages with the aims, visions, and projects of Abart Mostar, a platform for art production and urban research active in the city from 2008 to 2014, to explore the ways in which their practice challenged the production of Mostar’s spatial divisions. This chapter illustrates how Abart’s cultural initiatives created heterotopic spaces based on the radical rejection of ethno-national paradigms. As such, I consider the possibility of protesting the divided city—by refusing to engage with ethno-national categories—as a means of initiating new social ventures that rely on the reappropriation of space. My interest in art practice is quite different from that of other scholars who have researched cultural production as a means of reconciliation (Kappler 2014; Kuftinec 1998; O’Rawe and Phelan 2016; Simmons 2005) in the sense that I am not looking at how cultural production facilitate and supports the creation of inter-ethnic spaces for dialogue. These projects, for all their admirable qualities in supporting reconciliation practices, do not disrupt the logics of the divided city because they are designed to bring together individuals who are identified and classed as members of ethnic communities. Instead, this chapter accounts for art practice as a political tool to reappropriate space whilst countering the logics of ethno-national segregation. This chapter begins with a review of scholarly approaches to the study of civil society in deeply contested states and in BiH. This critical reading serves to locate my main case study, Abart, within existing debates on the tasks, struggles, and potential of non-state actors in the process of transition from conflict to peace. The remainder of the chapter discusses in detail two projects developed by Abart in Mostar from 2009 to 2012 to reflect on three related issues; the role of radical politics in Mostar, the value of art-based projects in reappropriating space and giving new meaning to it, and the potential and limits of grassroots activism in deeply divided societies.

Civil Society and Conflict Resolution in Bosnia and Herzegovina, a Review Much has been written about civil society in post-war BiH, assessing the work of organisations whose goal is to influence public discourse and public policy. These are mainly Non-Governmental Organisations

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(NGOs) that identify as a ‘non-partisan potential tool that may help in peace implementation and long-term democratic consolidation’ (Keil and Perry 2015, 22). Researchers interested in NGOs frame the discussion broadly within the peacebuilding literature because of the roles civil society groups had covered within the national processes of reconciliation, democratisation, and state-building, often producing controversial assessments (Kappler 2014). On the one hand, starting from the end of the conflict, international donors (including states and private entities) have invested great financial and intellectual resources to instruct, guide, and support local organisations. Their assumption was that a strong civil society would have favoured dissent, counter-discourses, and resistance to ethnic politics, which could have informed a much-needed dialogue between the antagonistic communities, and thus contribute critically to post-war reconciliation, conflict resolution, and state-building processes. On the other hand, authors who conducted participatory research (e.g. Jeffrey 2013) have challenged the donors’ working assumptions by showing that NGO workers had to negotiate national and international agendas in order to gain political legitimacy, often at the expenses of being the independent voice they were supposed to be. For instance, Jeffrey observes that NGOs in Brčko tended to design their programmes and activities according to the requests of international bodies, and formed their specific goals around the technical vocabularies of donors in order to gain their trust and thus financial support. As a result, NGOs often renounced their role as voices of dissent as a basic survival strategy. Further, and because of such mechanisms, local and international NGOs had started to compete, rather than collaborate, to secure existing (and diminishing) funds. This produced a widespread unwillingness among these actors to share information and ideas, preventing the formation of alliances among groups working in the same field of action, which may well have been beneficial to the formation of a strong counter-discourse against, for instance, ethnic politics and nationalisms (Evans-Kent and Bleiker 2003). In other words, NGO workers had to learn new skills to advance their social and symbolic capital, and to become more competitive on the international ‘markets’ of assistance. Perry observes that these organisations have been often treated as agencies that deliver services and, as such, their activities have been assessed against the achievement of milestones or deliverables that cannot capture or do justice to the difficulties of democratisation or peacebuilding processes (Perry 2015, 15–40). As a consequence, financial support was made available

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mostly to projects whose goals could be reached in the short-term, often without consideration of the fact that only long-term interventions could shift ossified stereotypes instructed by nationalist logics of exclusion. The rapid deployment of funds has been so generous that an important number of associations could be established (often without much control), while NGO workers have often been associated with corruption which harms the bonds of trust among local stakeholders. Sheftel, who explores the adoption of dark humour as a means to produce countermemories in Sarajevo, reports a joke that perfectly captures this problem, ‘You know what is a good way to get rich in this country? Start an NGO. All of a sudden, EU and other international people, they will just give you money, and you can do whatever you want with it!’ (Sheftel 2011, 156). If there has always been a strong interest in the study and support of civil society in BiH, a more specific focus on the activities, potentials, and struggles of cultural organisations is more recent. Culture became the chosen platform from where meaningful bonds between people were created, and from which values such as peace, tolerance, and justice could be taught. In this way, ‘community based arts processes can be an especially effective tool to bring together identity groups through sharing common cultural experiences, raising awareness about past suffering, and engaging communities in creative projects’ (Zelizer 2003, 62). Clearly, as Kappler highlights, this attitude is also problematic in the sense that it assumes that local culture is ‘passive, backward and in need of change towards a culture of peace’ (Kappler 2014, 58). Overall, the existing literature seems to criticise the idea that empowering civil society could unproblematically lead to a more democratic politi­ cal environment. I also believe that we should revisit the notion of civil society, which is far from politically and socially homogeneous. Indeed, ethno-national divisions, much like class domination in general, would have saliency if they did not reach down into the field of civil society itself.1 In this case, strengthening civil society could equally obstruct peace and reconciliation processes. Because ethno-national divisions are entrenched in the political system, other scholars, such as Fagan (2006), for example, point towards how the transformative potential of the civil society is limited by the persisting state infrastructures that have been designed to keep ethnic communities divided. Clearly, as he argues, if the supposedly tem­ porary Constitution of BiH is not reformed,2 little will be done to challenge ethnic identities and ethnic politics (see also Moore 2013, 77). Thus, ethno-national identity will continue to be ‘a bargaining chip that can be used as leverage’ (Björkdhal and Gusic 2016, 93). Furthermore:

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It seems as though all aspects of Bosnia’s internationally-led post-conflict transition hinge on civil society development. There is an implicit assumption that a vibrant sector of local advocacy networks can entrench democratic values, heal the wounds of ethnic conflict, and facilitate economic growth, bringing an end to the international administration of Bosnia. In other words, a point in which the Bosnian state is able to be left to rule without the international community … [yet] the capacity of civil society to realise radical transformation is contingent upon more fundamental institutional and political change. (Fagan 2006, 100–101)

To be sure, constitutional reforms as well as the much-debated electoral reform in Mostar are needed to reframe the understandings and positionalities of ethnic groups, mainly because these reforms could challenge and delegitimise the ethnocratic system currently in place (see Chapter 1). Yet, it is also important to consider that these changes alone will not reset entrenched practices of segregation that became part and parcel of the everyday. This is why it becomes crucial to look at initiatives and practices that already subvert ethno-nationalist logics, and in so doing create spaces of inclusion vis-à-vis the possibility of transformative social change. In this way, I embrace Hardt’s call for ‘a practical politi­ cal theory [that] begin[s] where people are, and really existing people are primarily filled, so to speak, by passions’ (Hardt 2015, 216). For instance, in 2005 a group of citizens who lost their pre-war homes in Šantić Street in Mostar mobilised with the purpose of putting onto the political agenda the reconstruction of their former apartment blocks. This was an ethnically heterogeneous mix of families (29 Croat, 42 Bosniak and 23 Serb) who came together: By fusing the power of the administrative category of Internally Displayed Persons (IDPs) with an appeal to the notion of belonging to a local community, the protest movement developed an integrative power superseding particularistic as well as ethno-national divisions; based on this inner cohesion it was then able to successfully confront the city administration with its demands for reconstruction. Such prolonged engagement and close contact with city authorities, as well as an increased level of interaction and cooperation within the protest group, opens up a new ground for the members’ self-construction as citizens of Mostar with legitimate political claims. (Vetters 2007, 203)

This is not an isolated case, as the far larger protests of 2013 and 2014 demonstrate. In 2013, citizens occupied streets and squares to save the

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life of a new-born who needed urgent medical care but could not obtain travel documents because of the political impasse in Parliament, which could not agree on how to assign new Identification Numbers, and thus suspending the entire process as a momentary solution (Armakolas and Maksimovic 2013; Keil and Moore 2014). In 2014, citizens mobilised again to protest against the malfunctioning of the state, corruption, and unemployment, by initiating self-managed groups whose intent was to propose viable and far-reaching state reforms (Arsenijević 2014; Eminagić 2014; Murtagh 2016, Kurtović and Hromadžić 2017). These are movements that transcend ethnic politics and create networks of solidarities across the country that attempt to reframe public discourses (Eminagić 2017). In other words, this chapter draws on an understanding of the state as the ‘congealed’ site of civil society’s contending groups and power capacities. If we suggest that ‘civil society’ is merely an adjunct of the state, and whose ‘capacity’ to act is ultimately ‘contingent’ on the transformation of state structures, then we are simply implying that the prime mover in society is the state, rendering civil society actors merely passive recipients of state-led initiatives. Instead, this chapter attends to the ways in which the historically specific fragmentation process of Mostarian society into antagonistic ethnic groups provided a powerful determination over the city administration’s composition; external intervention merely ossified these divisions to the point of constitutional legality, even if subsequently reversed to little effect (cf. Robinson and Pobrić 2006). But the very fact that civil society is itself composed of multiple groups of contestations (Keil and Perry 2015, 22), mobilised around a plethora of identities and goals, means that the final composition of the state is never a settled matter and that civil society actors can create change that relationally affect administrative infrastructures.

OKC Abrašević: More Than Two Decades of Radical Activism in Mostar Approaching the study of civil society actors in Mostar presents some of the problematics of researching groups that operate at the national level or in other cities across the country. Much of the critique of these groups regarding their dependency from international funds or their slow progress in achieving substantial milestones in the reconciliation process could be applied to Mostar’s NGOs. An in-depth account of the interplay of civil society actors in Mostar would necessarily need to

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account for the various fractures between groups that may support one or the other ethno-national communities, alongside groups that favour inter-ethnic dialogue. In this chapter, I focus on organisations—Abart in particular—that resist ethno-nationalist logics in Mostar through the reappropriation of urban space via art practices. This supports a broader discussion on resistance as a spatial practice by assessing the potential and limits of such initiatives. Abart was a platform for art production and urban research founded in 2008 in Mostar. Anja Bogojević, Amila Puzić, and Mela Žuljević are the three women behind the project. Since the beginning, the group found space within the premises of the OKC Abrašević (Youth Cultural Centre Abrašević; hereafter Abrašević), thus the name Ab(rašević)art. In fact, Abart became one of the groups engaging with the wider project of the Youth Cultural Centre in expanding its scope. Abrašević existed during the socialist era as Radničko KulturnoUmjetničko Društvo (RKUD) (Workers’ Cultural-Artistic Society) where folk music was played while people gathered after working hours. The centre was one of many in the former Yugoslavia named after the poet Kosta Abrašević (1879–1898), whose artistic work celebrated socialist ideas. The centre’s premises were almost completely destroyed during the war due to its position in the middle of the battlefield (the Bulevar). After the war, in 2002, a group of local activists, artists, and international NGOs gathered on the centre’s ruins to claim a space in which young people would be provided with possibilities to be creative, and to sponsor intellectual freedom. A year later, the owners of RKUD Abrašević donated the space to the newly formed youth group, with the City Council granting official possession to the group. Thanks to international support (Pro-Helvetia, German Embassy, and the Spanish Government), the centre was partially reconstructed, and by August 2005 had officially registered as an NGO. It now consists of a café, a multi-purpose concert hall, and several shipping containers (donated by the Foundation In Defence of our Future) used as offices (see also Forde 2016, 474–476). Abrašević is often described as a special place in Mostar. It is the only cultural centre that vocally refuses to be identified along ethno-national lines. The centre is a politically engaged actor that works towards the reunification of the city by critically engaging with the legacy of war and post-war dynamics. Abrašević’s activists form, in Mostar, a community-other in the sense that they take a stand against divisive and nationalist logics in order to reclaim a (political) space from which to operate:

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‘In our space there is room for the promotion of various social and cultural movements, [for the development of] different thoughts about the world and our local community, to engage with polemics, discussions and to sustain dialogue’ (Abrašević Manifesto). Further, ‘our duty is extremely important because we are directly involved in actions willing to articulate alternatives for a more democratic decision-making process. We work towards changing the current unsustainable situation and to raise awareness of, and oppose, segregation, nationalisms, fascist and racist political attitudes’ (Abrašević Manifesto). The centre has attained visibility within and outside of Mostar by organising concerts, reading groups, theatre performances, exhibitions, and various trainings in the fields of music and media activism. In particular, the centre speaks through its news portal (www.abrasmedia.info), which helps to promote their critical stands (see also Laketa 2016, 670–671). Laketa (2017) writes that, among the young people she met, the few who have friends from both sides tend to gather here. Hromadžić identifies the centre as the place in which young people from mixed marriages meet, ‘protected by the mixing friendly center’, which, she reports, does not please ‘numerous Mostarians’ who view it suspiciously (2015, 148–149). More specifically on this topic, Matejčić (2009; cited in Hromadžić 2015, 149), writes, ‘you enter Abrašević as if entering a marked space, as if you are going to the meeting of some despised sect, so that you have to check carefully before you sneak inside… [there are] generally suspicious types who want to revive “brotherhood and unity”’. As with many other close-knit clubs, Abrašević might look intimidating in the sense the ‘strangeness’ it evokes in the eyes of some may itself convey a form of exclusion. In this way, Abrašević is also a place of marginalisation. In the wider space of the city and social dynamics, it does not attract many people (although it is very popular among foreigner travellers). Yet this marginality is strongly felt as more than a site of deprivation but rather as a site of radical possibility (cf. hooks 2004). Abrašević is part of several networks of similarly engaged cultural actors in the region of former Yugoslavia and it is also known internationally thanks to the (mainly) international donors that financially support the existence of the centre (see also Kappler 2014, 173–174). Since 2003, it has worked as an umbrella organisation for the associations working within its premises.3 In fact, the various partner groups apply for funding and keep their financial accounts through Abrašević, which also provides a working and meeting space.

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Clearly, Abrašević is politically positioned in the spectrum of leftwing politics. The refusal of ethno-nationally managed politics has to be appreciated as the active engagement with (broadly) socialist ideals. Here, I met anarchists, socialists, and revolutionaries, but also people who are not interested in politics but meet here because it is a non-ethnic (exclusionary) space. As an example, while I was in Mostar, the Antifa Festival was hosted by the centre, which gathered antifascist groups from all over Europe—not without tensions in the city. Kappler describes Abrašević as a place of nostalgia, where ‘Yugoslav holidays are still celebrated… this is not limited to a nostalgic and passive consideration of the past, but it represents an attempt to deal with the past in its intersections with the present and future’ (2012, 216–217). For instance, she explains how the centre is still frequented by elder groups of people, thus creating a space in which cross-generational encounters are made possible. Hence, the centre provides (and creates) a space for the past (elders) to meet the present (youth), and to explore ‘the benefits of the past as they may be used to creatively construct the present and the future on the one hand, or deconstructing those elements of history that impede the construction of the present and the future on the other hand’ (ibid., 217). It could be said that the politics of the centre critically engage with nostalgia as a reflective tool. It is not the kind of nostalgia typical of post-revolutionary moments, when—after upsetting history—there is a felt desire for returning to the normalcy of the past (Boym 2001, 49) but rather the aspiration to ‘mediating the passage of time’ itself (ibid.). In fact, ‘reflective nostalgia’ collects fragmented memories and displaces them to forge affective bonds with the past, often in ironic and humorous ways. In Abrašević, the celebrations of Yugoslav festivities recreate bonds with ‘the idea of Yugoslavia’, which is ‘[the] example of how a shared vision, based on ethnic and linguistic proximity and inspired by a united purpose, could bring together cultural, religious and regional differences to create a single, united polity’ (Djokic and Ker-Lindsay 2010, 1). Thus, the celebrations of the Day of Youth, or the Day of Workers, become a route to celebrating the togetherness of a (lost) time when (where) people were able to negotiate their differences and share, rather than be separate. To be sure, many in Abrašević are too young to remember what Yugoslavia was, or what it meant to live ‘as a Yugoslavian’ at the time, but this is exactly the reason behind their commitment to the Yugoidea(l). Palmberger captures this tension by comparing the stories of

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two women in Mostar, both asked to elaborate on the significance of Yugoslavia. There is an important age difference between her interviewees; the first spent her childhood and adolescence in Yugoslavia, while the second was born shortly before its collapse. While the older woman is nostalgic of the carefree years of her youth, the other employs nostalgia to express her political views; ‘nostalgia for Yugoslavia is a tool for overcoming the troubled relationship between Bosniaks, Croats, and Serbs in her country. She uses memories of Yugoslavia and a good coexistence as a “guiding star” for the future’ (Palmberger 2008, 366). The younger woman is able to select from the past what she thinks could contribute to a better future—the possibility of being peacefully together—whereas the first woman’s memories are grounded in her own past—lost and distant. Lindstrom, who also explores the categories of restorative and reflective nostalgia in Yugoslavia, comes to simi­ lar conclusions: ‘the audience for these more reflective incarnations of Yugonostalgia is largely made up of young people; a generation who came of age when Yugoslavia was disintegrating’ (Lindstrom 2005, 241). To remember and celebrate Yugoslavia becomes the way to commemorate the (idealised) past where peace and tolerance were still possible, but it is also a way to articulate the desire for a different future. In fact, the future is constructed upon ideals of tolerance, peace, togetherness, commonality, solidarity, and mutual understanding that are foundational to Yugonostalgia. In this sense, nostalgia becomes a critical tool to envision a different future (and fight for it). While living in Mostar, I spent the majority of my days observing and interacting with people in Abrašević. The fact that my data comes from engaging with such a distinctive layer of the population certainly requires further critical reflections. I should clarify that the group of people I am referring to does not represent a statistically relevant sample for the population of Mostar, and therefore should be acknowledged as such. While I frequented the centre (2009–2010), I could identify around 30 people forming the stable crowd gathering here daily. The centre can host over 300 people but this happens only on special occasions such as for music concerts. In a sense, the number of events the centre promotes is even more astonishing considering the small size of the core team of organisers; in the year of my fieldwork (2010) there were more than 100 events from movie nights to book launches, concerts, art exhibitions, and stand-up comedy nights.

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I certainly developed more than an academic interest in Abart and the activities implemented by Abrašević. There are several reasons for the personal attachment I felt towards the centre. I was moved (affected) by the unrelenting passion shown by these politically engaged actors, especially in a city where political engagement is controversial and politics equated with corruption. I observed their constant willingness to impose themselves as an alternative voice, and I joined their efforts (in only the small way I could), driven by my personal commitment towards urban justice. The exposure to everyday conversations and practices among this segment of the population made me conscious of the necessity to shine a light on their presence in Mostar and to account for their operative aspects both to understand how they interact with divisive practices, as well as to explore the reasons why they fail to attain more visibility. I strongly believe that their numerical inferiority is balanced by their highly vocal engagement—especially in a city where silent immobility becomes normalised. More generally, it is the guiding principle of this book to single out moments of disruptions, which in their own terms are creating spaces of difference. Thus, the fact that I am exploring quasi-invisible or less visible actors is consistent with the idea of challenging the dominant ‘visibility’ of Mostar as a divided city. Yet, my attachment to the centre also complicates the discussion of the material I have gathered and produced. My participation in Abart’s activities went beyond more accustomed participant observations in the sense that my presence was not that of a spectator, but of an actor (cf. Carabelli and Deiana 2017). I co-authored projects and reports, I proactively discussed future strategies for the group, and I participated in the production of written material to accompany exhibitions. I am aware of the everyday battles, the tensions, and the difficulties encountered while these projects were taking shape. I was part of countless negotiations and mediations between what we imagined could be pos­ sible and what we could actually do.

The Festival of Arts in Divided Cities As a platform, Abart wanted to produce new research about Mostar that could inform creative projects that (spatially) reappropriated the city. In the previous chapter, I discussed how the everyday contains multiple and contradictory forces, and how:

134  G. Carabelli To study the everyday is to bring its confusion into the light of day and into language; it is to make its latent conflicts apparent, and thus to burst them asunder. It is therefore both theory and practice, critique and action. Critique of everyday life encompasses a decision and precipitates it, the most general and the most revolutionary of them all, the decision to render ambiguities unbearable, and to metamorphose what seems to be most unchangeable in mankind because it lacks precise contours. (Lefebvre 2008, 226)

This could read as Abart’s manifesto. Abart’s research projects wanted to bring attention to how the facts of the urban division downplayed other processes that were equally important. Abart’s practice wished to use creativity to explore the complexities of the city so that it could be given back to the citizens (rather than fragmented among antagonising groups). We will point to the fact that there are various forms of ‘borders’ that divide the city in physical and in spiritual ways. Besides the obvious division on the national and religious basis, we will point to divisions within the ‘homogeneous nationalist constructions’, which are dissolving under the influence of new neo-liberal ideologies, so they can be further manipu­ lated for profit interests. We will try to improvise architectural and artistic solutions – bridges on land – which can act as non-conflict passages between the parts of the city, and which are more essential today than the reconstructed bridges over the river Neretva. (Application for funding to the European Cultural Fund for the Festival of Arts in Divided Cities, 2009)

The project Festival of Arts in Divided Cities was Abart’s first internationally sponsored event at Abrašević, which provided a wide visibility to the project platform. It started in August 2009 and received financial assistance from the European Cultural Fund (ECF). The idea was to engage with artists and researchers from other divided cities to better understand how art practice is challenged by the contested nature of their urban settings. After the first exhibition, illustrating the modes of divisions in Beirut, Berlin, Kosovska Mitrovica, and Mostar (hometowns of the participating artists and researchers), the project consisted of two main events. One exhibition with local artists, and one internationally designed open air festival. For the art exhibition, Interspace—I am there, there where I am not (December 2009), Abart invited three artists from BiH to comment on

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the theme of borders and divisions. Among the sculptural pieces presented, Sinancević recreated the space of a living room by assembling abandoned furniture. Before the exhibition opened, the artist had cut each wooden piece into half so that, despite the inviting atmosphere of the living room, the fractures inflicted on the sofas and chairs made it impossible to sit and relax (Fig. 4.1)—a metaphor for everyday life in ethno-nationally divided cities where, despite the end of the war, people cannot settle and ‘relax’. But also, it conveyed a strong comment on the uselessness of infrastructures that do not work because they remain (politically) fractured. The exhibition space attracted mainly actors from the local cultural scene (intellectuals and artists) who were convinced by and appreciated the metaphorical values of such interventions. The local media were invited and they also reported about the opening with positive or neutral comments. Surely, despite advertising the event widely across the city, public interest was limited. By setting up the exhibition in Abrašević,

Fig. 4.1  Demis Sinancević (2009). Photo by the author

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Abart wanted to strengthen the profile of the centre as a cultural actor in Mostar, yet such an exhibition needed a venue that was supportive of anti-nationalist discourses, which the city significantly lacked. To be sure, Abart was never interested in attracting big crowds, but rather in gathering and reinforcing bonds among people who already refuse ethno-national logics. In this sense, this exhibition did not seek to become a transformative space or a platform to educate or to convince that the ethnic segregation adversely affects the city, but rather to forge a meeting point for the existing (small) community of people in Mostar who do not oblige ethnic politics. Later in spring, the international group of artists and cultural actors4 participating in the project gathered in Mostar to design and produce a week-end long festival, the Festival of arts in divided cities (14–17 April, 2010). This time, the activities planned took place both indoors (in Abrašević) and in public space, including outdoor games (for instance a gigantic version of Twister in Spanish Square) and a walking tour.

Lažne Priče iz Historije Mostara (False Stories from Mostar’s History) Abart’s members designed a walking tour to present an alternative version of Mostar’s history. Existing guided tours have selected key monuments such as the Old Bridge and the Old Town, the Catholic Church and Cathedral, the Orthodox Church, the Bulevar, the statue of Bruce Lee in the city park, and the Partisan cemetery among the focal points that serve to introduce the city. Tourists are brought to these monuments to get a glimpse of how the city changed through the conflict and its existing division. Abart’s tour guided the convened crowd across the city to unexpected monuments; there were sites under construction, shelled buildings, new and ruined department stores, and streets. The selected sites were not aesthetically pleasing nor known for their historical importance. Rather, they were chosen because they could tell another story about Mostar. They did not engage with the pre- and post-war city to explore ethno-national dynamics. Rather, through these sites, Abart pointed to the complex, socio-political present of the city: the process of privatising public space after the collapse of socialism that is never accounted for in main political debates, the illegal construction sites that reflect on how corruption became part of the post-war rebuilding

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process, and the contested legacy of international interventions in the contemporary city. Each monument’s story was narrated through allegories, which sounded absolutely surreal, but at the same time (and indirectly) targeted real issues and formulated critical assessments of the city. The stories written for each monument were engraved in aluminium plaques and glued, on site, with a small ceremony (see Fig. 4.2). For instance, participants were taken to one of the new shopping centres— Piramida (Pyramid)—where we heard this story, The role of this pyramid represents the final decisive step in the evolution of the Third Capitalist Dynasty in the Valley of Neretva. […] It provides a connection between the private owner and the eternal cosmic order through a direct connection with the supreme deity of Stock Market. (Abart 2010, 42)

The department store was addressed as a pyramid, the monument-tomb of a capitalist monarch who created a powerful connection between Mostar (the city of river Neretva) and the global market. The clear invective was directed against rampant neo-liberalism and the ways in which the introduction of the market economy changed the urban fabric of the city. In fact, within Mostar—a partially destroyed and medium-sized city with high levels of unemployment—there are seven new shopping malls (the seventh, Mepas Mall, was inaugurated in April 2012 and brought to Mostar its first McDonald’s fast-food outlet). Another chosen site was the so-called Staklena Banka (Glass Bank): a heavily damaged building dangerously overlooking Spanish Square. This building—now also a favourite spot of street and graffiti artists—became a monument designed by Hollywood actor Steven Seagal and commissioned by the Spanish Knight De Sade for the United Spanish Emirates on the Mostarian Archipelago. In this case, the story sarcastically referred to how this square, known under socialism as Brotherhood and Unity square, was renamed ‘Spanish’ after King Juan Carlos I of Spain consecrated a monument to commemorate the loss of Spanish soldiers who intervened to end the conflict. The decision to rename the square was never discussed, but it was rather imposed by the Spanish Embassy who promised in exchange to take care of its reconstruction. Quite tellingly, the collapsing glass bank overlooking the square became the monument to the (failing) international intervention.

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Fig. 4.2  Aluminium plaque left at the Piramida Shopping Centre. Photo by the author

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The aim of the tour was twofold. On the one hand, the tour reflected on the selective nature of storytelling and how mainstream representations of Mostar always emphasise the facts and genealogies of the divided city but rarely assess other interconnected economic, political, and social processes that inform its conflicts. The tour leaders were showing how the entire city is struggling with the inconsistencies and contradictions of the post-war economic transition, incidentally highlighting what brings the city together: its problems. The tour erased the usual characters of Mostar’s stories such as the war, the ethno-national groups, and the territorial division to expose how ethno-national tensions and diatribes have also been manipulated to hide and silence other problems such as the difficult transition to a market economy.5 But also, the fantasy level in which stories took shape allowed for the authors to express their critiques outside the public/political arena. They played with names, and architectural and global history to recreate bizarre stories, which became (temporarily) true for the audience. The very authority of the storyteller was being questioned—who has the right to validate history?—and how the writing of history becomes a contentious issue in contested cities such as Mostar and the other cities within the project. But also, the stories required the audience to be vigilant and ready to filter what they had heard in order to read between the lines and to decipher hidden contents. In this sense, the tour had an educational value because it aimed to shape critical discourse that transcended ethnic boundaries. Surely, those less acquainted with Mostar’s contemporary politics needed additional explanations to interpret the allegories, but locals quickly translated the sarcastic interventions. In other words, the walking tour reappropriated the city to create a space in which critical discussion about the present and the future of Mostar could take place, by pointing out that discourses against nationalist and divisive practices not only create fractures in the city but also prevent citizens from coming together to reflect on issues that affect them all. Interestingly, despite not having permission to intervene in these public and private spaces, there was no incident with the police. On the contrary, when approached by security officers patrolling the private space of the shopping centre Piramida, they seemed more curious than hostile and quickly left with a festival leaflet having possibly assumed that an art intervention is nothing harmful. I am unsure whether the security guards read through the leaflet or what they made of it. Certainly, the fact that nobody stopped the walking tour from gluing aluminium plaques on

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private and public walls was strange to me, but not for the locals who seemed confident in the fact that nobody would care. In fact, art interventions would be perceived as innocuous; behind the idea of engaging with art as a tool of change, there was for Abart the intuition that to discuss politics through art would not be perceived as politics at all, but ‘simply’ art. Thus, this space of creativity would have allowed making more radical political statements without entering the (proper) arena of politicians (unapproachable, corrupted, and distant).

Re-animating the City: The Ephemeral (and Contradictory) Art of Festivals The main goal of the festival at large was to reanimate the city. The organisers felt that the cultural life of Mostar was moribund, and that the festival (and the initiative in general) may reinvigorate urban life. People could experience something different and playful. Yet, as opposed to many contemporary urban festivals, this one had a sour political twist engraved in the dispirited title: Festival of Arts in Divided Cities. It is certainly uncommon to gather and celebrate the contested nature of cities, especially in consideration of their associated violence. Indeed, the playful reunion wanted to celebrate the possibility for these cities to imagine a different future, as well as contemplate the potential of art as a tool to support such change. Yet the choice of hosting a festival could be seen as problematic for two main reasons. Firstly, urban festivals became part of what Lefebvre called the commodification of leisure on the global scale (Lefebvre 1991, 383). Secondly, festivals are ephemeral in nature; how do they (if at all) effectively contribute to social change? Lefebvre reflects on how leisure-spaces might appear free from the control of the established order, constituting counter-spaces that are liberated from the burdens of daily duties and commitments (1991, 383). In reality, this illusion is crafted by the state itself (and its bureaucratic apparatus) to reinforce its hegemonic power. Evidence for this more critical stand could be found in the proliferation of festivals as instrumental to urban regeneration processes worldwide. As Quinn observes (2005, 927), festivals have been burgeoning since the 1980s to accompany processes of urban renewal and gentrification. Ultimately, festivals became a way to boost flagging economies and to create jobs within the field of culture, rather than creating moments of disruption that reflect upon radical change.

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In post-conflict areas, the promotion of cultural initiatives has been widely embraced by international funding bodies as a way to support the process of reconciliation, democracy building, and the transition to a market economy (see Kappler 2014). For two years from February 2010, I had been actively involved in the process of fundraising for Abart’s projects, and I could tell how donors always emphasised the role of culture as a viable way to create jobs, to boost the economy, and ‘celebrate the culture of minority groups’. For instance, the calls for application I had processed6 always included specific requirements for potential projects that provide training which could help the targeted group find employment in the cultural sector, or to develop activities capable of fitting into wider (national and international) cultural schemes that might lead to yet further funding and become sustainable. From this perspective, art initiatives and cultural events were imagined as ways to create profits, to support cultural actors, and accompany them in the period of transition to a market economy. In contrast, Abart believed in developing projects capable of sharpening analytical and critical tools. Working in the cultural sector meant, for Abart, doing critical research that engaged with the present in order to produce a space from which one can think about a different future. It was an intellectual activity rather than a business. The Festival of Art in Divided Cities was not meant to sell, or accumulate profit. Rather, it was organised to have fun. The final tour, for instance, presented ridiculous stories that made the participants laugh. Lefebvre writes about peasant festivals to describe an exemplar of a possible future free from alienation, which resonates well with Abart’s Festival: Peasant celebrations tightened social links and at the same time gave rein to all the desires which have been pent up by the discipline and the necessities of everyday work. In celebrating, each member of the community went beyond himself, so to speak, and in one fell swoop drew all that was energetic, pleasurable and possible from nature, food, social life and his own body and mind. (Lefebvre 2008, 202)

The Festival urged people to break free from their everyday, which means their understandings of Mostar’s dynamics, divisions, and politics. The Festival produced a different space within the routinised quotidian; a platform from which to experience new rhythms, where to pause, to listen, and to reflect upon the problematic present beyond nationalist narratives. But also, and importantly, it was a space to have fun together,

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to meet and mingle, love and celebrate the uniqueness of Mostar (even if this uniqueness means often dysfunctionality). The group of wandering participants materialised the heterotopic attempt to counter the normalised production of space by allowing time and space to form a critical front. The semi-fictional nature of the stories told testified to the multiplicity of readings that Mostar holds. It created a vibrant and joyful atmosphere where to find new sites of dwelling, where to re-engage with collective and personal memories to map the city and revealing it in new ways. Talking about war-related dark humour in Sarajevo, Sheftel writes how humour could be considered as political action: ‘humour is a way of remembering and representing the past in a subversive manner; it offers an alternative mnemonic paradigm that resists the ethnically divisive historical narratives that plague the region’ (2011, 147). Humour is a way to produce, discursively, counter-narratives of truth as well as avoid ‘open discussions… [that are] dangerous and unproductive, compelling Bosnians to find new ways to communicate’ (ibid., 149). In this case, jokes seemed to make more sense than factual history. For instance, the group paused in Spanish Square to pose a plaque on the poster announcing the construction of what-should-be the Croatian National Theatre in Mostar. Why would Mostar have a Croatian National Theatre? And how to make sense of the reterritorialisation of Mostar according to ethnonational groups’ competition over space? Even if answers could be figured—the ethnicisation of politics, the Dayton Peace Agreements, the Division of Mostar—these are not fully satisfying answers when attempting to make sense of the city’s war and post-war dynamics. As such, sarcasm signals the breakdown of a system of symbolic sense-making that needs restructuring, like in Mostar. The Festival was the first event organised by Abart in public spaces. Certainly, it introduced the platform to the city. Yet, if the long-term goal was to create a different future and to defeat nationalist-induced urban polarisation, how was a four-day festival supposed to contribute to this goal with all of its temporal and spatial limitations? The event was consciously designed to be ephemeral, to reanimate the city for a long weekend. Yet, as such it could only gather a limited number of people for a short period of time. After the tour the crowd dispersed and by the end of the day none of the plaques were left in place. Only the participants knew what happened during the tour and—partially—those who stole its material evidence.

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The small crowd was made of Abart’s supporters and partner-artists from other divided cities (around thirty to forty people in total). From time to time, passers-by stopped to listen and asked for explanations, but nobody joined the group until the end of the tour. There are several interconnected factors to discuss here in relation to public participation. Surely, the walking tour attracted, again, people who were already familiar and supportive of Abart’s work. By walking across the city and performing in public spaces, the tour gathered people who joined spontaneously but did not seem interested in continuing the tour. Those who stopped and listened to the stories laughed and walked away. Few asked what was going on, curious and inquisitive. There was no strategy for attracting people or communicating the goals of the tour. Rather this was an experiment to assess what a walking crowd actually do in Mostar. It became clear that people are well versed in sarcasm, that a crowd of young people disseminating aluminium plaques is not viewed as a threat, but also that such an activity might require further explanations and preparations in order to become more inclusive.

(Re)collecting Mostar—Abart 2010–2011 Parallel to these events, the Abart team continued to plan for the future—like all NGOs, Abart needed financial support. I was not part of the first application round to fund the Festival of Arts in Divided Cities project but I became well aware of the tensions within the group when plans for future activities were made. There was no money for cultural projects in Mostar or BiH (at that time even the National Museum in Sarajevo had been closed). The only option was to continue fundraising internationally. Surely, there were less money available for BiH than the previous decade, but there were possibilities to explore. Abart had to negotiate internally between adopting the NGO vocabulary and style to become competitive at the national level, or else refuse to enter the ‘NGO national context’ and simply close down. This discussion was never exhausted and, later, became one of the reasons why Abart slowly ceased its activities in Mostar. In 2010, preparing an application for a special funding opportunity for cultural activities in BiH within the framework of the Culture for Understanding project, sponsored by the Millennium Development Goals Fund (MDG-F),7 the Abart team (myself included) came to learn the meanings behind the multiple indicators of ‘social improvement’,

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‘milestones’, ‘budgeting’, ‘indicators of success’, and ‘transparency’. We mastered the new vocabulary by reviewing successful bids from other cultural projects and strategised our goals to become more appealing according to the donors’ explicit interests and goals in BiH. This meant deradicalising our funding proposal from anything that might disturb approved directives for peace-building; our cultural project needed to show how we supported peace and reconciliation, and how the initia­ tive could foster a productive dialogue within the divided communities of Mostar. We needed to find indicators that proved that such an ambitious target could be met within twelve months. Specifically, we needed to quantify peace-building by suggesting ‘how many’ people of each group we could gather and what meaningful activities they could engage with to develop mutual understandings. We needed to show that our project was sustainable so that more funds could be raised for follow-up projects from other donors and to maximise impact. We engaged in this process with humour, and this was what convinced us that we could survive the fundraising period without compromising our radical stands. Sarcasm got us through months of intensive research and drafting. Having finally succeeded in our efforts, and obtaining funds from the MDG-F, we began (Re)collecting Mostar—the project that best represents Abart to this day. (Re)collecting Mostar started officially in October 2010 with a call sent to students from both universities in Mostar to come and collaborate with Abart on a new urban project. The open call for participation was an adopted strategy to enlarge the circle of Abart’s followers. Indeed, because Abart worked within the premises of a Youth Cultural Centre, to involve students was consistent with the main goals of Abrašević. In general, the new initiative aimed to further Abart’s investigation into the status and usage of public spaces8 in Mostar. In particular, the project wanted to look at the relationship between public space and public memories, and at the ways in which memory and forgetting relate to the usage/neglect of (public) space. (Re)collecting Mostar refers to the process of reassembling memories of the city by recuperating moments and experiences that challenge the current division. By collecting material artefacts and immaterial memories of the pre-war city, Abart wanted to reflect on how along with the silencing of stories about prewar Mostar’s shared social life went the neglect of those spaces that facilitated and supported socialisation practices in the city. Thus, memory was understood as ‘a fundamental aspect of becoming… Memories are like embers, for they retain a trace of fire’ (Jones 2011, 875). Abart wanted

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to reignite that fire, as a ‘key wellspring of agency, practice/habit, creativity and imagination, and thus of the potential of the performative moment’ (ibid., 875–876) An initial survey and related interviews revealed that the area connecting Musala square in east Mostar to Rondo in west Mostar, crossing the Bulevar at Spanish square, was the pre-war catalyst of social encounters before the war (see Chapter 3). This section of the city became the central focus of the project because it challenged existing representations of Mostar, which always account for the city’s east and west sides—usually depicted in antagonistic terms. Instead, the area under scrutiny was connecting two main squares (and social nodes) in east and west Mostar revitalising the memories of this area as a major public space. The project included four research periods (archival research and the gathering of oral histories related to this section) each followed by one artistic intervention in public space that related to the research process. The idea was to share with an invited artist the main outcomes of the ongoing research to design ad hoc performances in public space. The site-specific art works would share the produced knowledge with the wider public (by reinterpreting it) in order to create a joyful moment (and space) to reflect upon the (problematic) present of Mostar. In this sense, the recollection of memories ‘not only informs/enables the performative moment, there is a creative exchange between the two’ (Jones 2011, 877). All the material gathered (collected and produced through the artistic interventions) would be accumulated in the Archive of the City of Mostar. The Archive was envisioned as a growing entity, which could have been augmented in the future and it was to be made avail­ able to citizens and interested parties (for instance other researchers) and hosted in the premises of Abrašević (it was later digitised and made available online).9 In this way, the project also expanded Abart’s goal from animating the city though art into creating and archiving knowledge through art-led research (Abart 2013). In all, twenty-four students responded to the open call. They came from both Mostar universities and several disciplines such as archaeology, fine arts, sociology, and comparative literature. They seemed to be curious about the project and especially thrilled by the idea of collaborating with professional artists to design and develop art interventions in the city. Certainly, the call attracted students who did not subscribe to nationalist practises (no need to convince them) but it also created the possibility to form a new cooperative platform for creative social change.

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Four site-specific interventions were commissioned to professional artists, while others were designed by the students participating in the programme, along with individual research projects, seminars, and exhibitions. Rather than detailing each event, I will account for a selection of three works produced as part of (Re)collecting Mostar in order to give a sense of what sort of interventions were developed and their spatial resonance. The first is a performance in public space led by a professional artist. The second is an art installation designed by one of the participant students. The third is another performance conceptualised by a professional artist. This last work, installed in the Partisan Memorial/ Cemetery, will also give me the opportunity to explore the ways in which Abart intersected its activities with that of other organised groups of citizens countering divisive practices in the city.

Art Intervention One: Repurposing Memories Božidar Katić (Zagreb) was the first artist invited to collaborate with Abart and the students. His site-specific intervention responded to the material gathered about pre-war practices of socialisation in the city. In particular, Katić reflected on the disappearance of the department store HIT from Spanish Square and, with it, the erasure of the memory of this location as one of the main gathering space in the city before the conflict. His intervention, titled OpSjene.ver.1.0—When people should be walking upside down with their legs lifted up in the air,10 took place on March 12, 2011. The event was organised in the space facing the one formerly occupied by HIT whose ruins were removed to begin the construction of a new Croatian National Theatre, which was soon stopped due to land disputes (see Makaš 2007, 309). As a result, a banner announcing the construction of the (contested) theatre is now left to guard an empty plot. This is a space of transit. People cross it on their way across the Bulevar, but it is certainly no longer a place of gathering. Katić, with the group of students and the Abart team decided to reflect on how this area changed its function—from being a meeting place to the centre of the battlefield and then a ruin after the end of the conflict. His site-specific intervention wanted to reattach the memories of social life to this transit area and make people stop here, again. In this sense, he used memory to fragment space and time and to rebuild space from the reinterpretation of those fragments (see Jones 2011, 880). He started by drawing and cutting the shapes of people playing, cycling, and chatting. He

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then used the carved paper foils as guidelines to draw on the pavement what resembled shadows of people enjoying being together. In addition, and to recreate the atmosphere of a lively public space, the artists played sounds recorded in a park where children were laughing and playing, and burnt scents of flowers (Fig. 4.3). The result was extremely powerful. The empty space was resuscitated and shadows of life put in place as a remainder of life itself. The intervention was ultimately addressing the potential of a neglected space to host (again) life, thus becoming public in the sense of being used by people. The site-specific intervention produced a joyful atmosphere, a space of enjoyment and ‘a space for the poetic reconstruction of situations in which wishes are present—but wishes which are not so much fulfilled as simply proclaimed’ (Lefebvre 1991, 209). A curious crowd gathered to enjoy the multi-sensorial performance, many of those crossing the Bulevar stopped to participate in the joyful event. Indeed, the sounds and the flower scents also managed to attract people here and to create a

Fig. 4.3  Božidar Katić, OpSjene.ver.1.0—When people should be walking upside down with their legs lifted up in the air, Spanish Square, March 2011. Photo by the author

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space of encounter in the centre of the (imaginary) dividing line. In the days after the performance, I kept checking the space to assess whether it had started other urban interventions such as graffiti or vandal attacks. In fact, I only noticed people posing in front of selected shadows for creative photo-shoots, initiating new practices of sociality in the city.

Art Intervention Two: Reinhabiting Ruins Boris Orenčuk (Mostar) was one of the students participating in the project. As a contribution, he designed a site-specific intervention for a ruined building on the Bulevar (across Spanish Square). The project, titled Individualna Radna Akcija 1 (Individual Working Action 1), created a utopian space of beauty and normalcy within a ruin. The artist spent days cleaning the basement of the building from debris and garbage, then dressed an existing window with red curtains and placed a flower pot in front of it (Figs. 4.4 and 4.5). In fact, the title of his project makes direct reference to what in Yugoslavia was called radna

Fig. 4.4  Boris Orenčuk—Individualna Radna Akcija 1—Bulevar, June 2011. Photo by the author

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Fig. 4.5  Boris Orenčuk—Individualna Radna Akcija 1—Bulevar, June 2011. Photo by the author

akcija—working action—a collective and volunteer effort to build infrastructures or clean public domains.11 Young people were normally involved in such activities for the good of society. With the same intent (the good of the city) the artist polished the interior of the decaying building, yet this was not a collective effort, but rather an individual one. Accordingly, the artist brought attention to how the division in the city affects the capacity of citizens to create alliances that are needed to take care of Mostar, together. The result was visually uncanny, with the installation creating a visual imbalance between the beauty and colours of the curtain and flowers, and the dirtiness and ugliness of the premises. Yet, the artist also suggested how beauty could resurface from ruins and debris thanks to action.

Art Intervention Three: Confronting History Gordana Anđelić-Galić (Sarajevo) was one of the two artists invited to contribute to the final part of the project. The artist produced two site-specific interventions. The first took place under the Old Bridge (Pranje/Washing) and the second, which I will be discussing below, in the Partisan Memorial/Cemetery of Mostar. Ovo nje moj mir (This is

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not my peace) was written on a white sheet and hang on the top of the memorial to critically address the state of abandonment of the monument and to make a clear polemical statement against those allowing this to happen (Fig. 4.6). The importance of this intervention transcends the aesthetic qualities of the performance. In fact, the decision to intervene in this highly contested space served as a prop to support another on-going struggle to preserve the monument from vandalism and decadence. The Partisansko Groblje (Partisans’ Memorial Cemetery—hereinafter Partisansko) uncomfortably sits on a large area overlooking the city from the northern hills—a forest artificially planted in the 1960s (thanks to another Radna Akcija). Despite an impressive surface of 79,248 m2, and although being minutes away from the busy area of Rondo, it is now hard to locate for those less acquainted with the city. No signs indicate the route to its entrance and nothing signals (from the outside) its presence from the street. Indeed, for the entirety of my fieldwork, the memorial was fenced off, impeding (or at least making more difficult) entrance to its premises.

Fig. 4.6  Gordana Anđelić-Galić—Ovo nje moj mir (This is not my peace). Partisan Memorial/Cemetery, September 2011. Photo by the author

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Partisansko was inaugurated by Tito in 1965 and designed by renowned architect Bogdan Bogdanović as part of a monumental series celebrating the partisan victory over fascism across Yugoslavia (see Kirn and Burghardt 2012). The grand park soon became one of the main attractions of Mostar (along with the Old Bridge). In fact, the site was often acknowledged in the already presented survey about pre-war socialisation areas as a friendly gathering space. The site was damaged by the war and forgotten by the authorities of the new-born nationstate. Certainly, this monument is more than a landmark of the 1960s, and therein lies the main problem. In fact, it is the materialisation of the ideological propaganda of Yugoslavia, i.e. the celebration of the heroes who helped forge the Socialist Federation. Reflecting on similar themes, Lefebvre notes how: Monumental space offered each member of a society an image of that membership, an image of his or her social visage. It thus constitutes a collective mirror more faithful than any personal one… Small wonder that from time to time immemorial conquerors and revolutionaries eager to destroy a society should so often have sought to do so by burning or razing that society’s monuments. (Lefebvre 1991, 221)

In the aftermath of the war, its historical legacy became highly contested and the monument seemed condemned to oblivion. Overgrown vegetation, the scars of dynamite, and a general lack of maintenance had shortly transformed the well-kept park into an unwelcoming forest. During the EU interim administration, the monument’s area fell under the competence of one of the three Croat-administered city areas. They thought to transform the memorial into an amphitheatre and to host theatre performances in the summer. Certainly, the suggestive location could have added force to the envisioned programme. Yet, there was no time (or funding or both) to complete the plan before the city became united and planning decisions were to be collectively taken by the single City Council (personal interview with a member of SABNOR). The Council of Antifascists and Fighters of the Popular Liberation War in Mostar (Savez Antifašista i Boraca Narodnooslobodilačkog Rata; SABNOR) started lobbying for the intervention of the municipality to safeguard the monument as part of the cultural (and historical) heritage of the city. As a result, in 2003, a commission was formed (including then alive architect Bogdanović) to draw up a conservation strategy.

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Thanks to international fundraising, and in particular, donations from the Government of the Netherlands and the Kingdom of Norway, all the tombstones were replaced by new ones and the area cleared of garbage. In addition, a lighting system was placed and the water system repaired (though the actual water pumps have not been replaced and as such; the fountain does not work). The works ended during the spring of 2005 (when the funding was terminated). In 2006, SABNOR made a case to the national commission for the preservation of national heritage, after which the monument was successfully inserted in the existing list. As such, it is now the duty of the city, cantonal, and federative administrations to preserve it. I visited the Memorial for the first time in spring 2006 and the condi­ tion of the monument were fairly good. Certainly, it did not seem a frequented space; the water system—and all the connected fountains—was not working and a few sentences written in black paint were altering the white surface of the main wall (at the time I could not read the language at all, so I could not make sense of what was written). It was a very hot day and I remember not staying for long because there was no respite from the sun. After only four years the situation had changed dramatically. The first time I entered again in the (now fenced off) monument was February 2010. A friend of mine came to visit and I was taking her around the city when I remembered about Partisansko. We entered from a gap in the side part of the fence—obviously, there was someone using the space despite its inaccessibility. The view was poignant. The entire park had been transformed in an open-air dump. Empty plastic bottles, bags, rotting food, syringes, and garbage bags were left to cover almost the entire surface. The vegetation had grown back and took over the human construction. We walked up to the top of the memorial to discover that the tombstones had been destroyed or moved. A few had been thrown into the upper fountain. Among the graffiti were visible nationalist claims for a third entity and Fascist/Ustaša symbols. Others looked more like acts of random signification (tags with names). During the fieldwork, I often read and listened to people commenting on the state of the monument. Abrašević organised a cleaning action in March 2010 to contribute to the maintenance of the site. Former partisans and associations of the families of partisans are still gathering on the monument on special occasions such as February 14, the day of Mostar’s liberation from fascism. Yet, the city council does not have a clear strategy for the preservation of the area. The mayor seems convinced of the

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fact that since the monument has now been declared part of national heritage, it should be the responsibility of the government to distribute funds towards its conservation. The association of partisans has been expanded and it now counts on the active participation of younger people who opened a Facebook fan page and a Twitter account to give international visibility to their struggle. They also archived existing information about the monument and made the material available online with the intent of fundraising to carry out maintenance works.12 This group for the preservation of the Partisan Memorial/Cemetery is not directly engaged in a struggle towards changing the present and the future of Mostar, rather they hold tight to what remains from a memorialised past to navigate the present (and the future). However, both Abart and Abrašević did support the initiative as a way to create a common front against nationalisms. Thus, the site-specific intervention presented here must also be acknowledged to interfere in other spaces to create a het­ erogeneous platform enacting alternative politics in the city. The three artistic interventions presented address different topics: the loss of public space understood as the place where encounters happened in the pre-war (heterogeneous) city, the loss of a sense of solidarity and unity among the citizens of Mostar that could save the city from a ruinous future, and the erasure of the socialist past as a means of forgetting a shared history. To be sure, all these works draw on a common sense of nostalgia for Yugoslavia. As discussed above, this should be understood as a move towards recuperating values of unity and solidarity that could create a more inclusive environment for the future of Mostar. In this sense, recollecting memories and reattaching them to the city through artist-led interventions, is a matter of ethics, which ‘address sufferings and injustices, and how we live with each other and each other’s past lives’ (Jones 2011, 882). Importantly, these works reappropriated the existing infrastructures of the city (a square, a building, and a memorial park) to create, even if temporarily, new dynamics within these spaces. The act of recollecting invoked by the title of the project must be understood as the criti­ cal reappropriation of the memories of the shared past so that a more inclusive future could be recreated. Surely, these site-specific interventions could not alone provide the infrastructure to connect people across the many divides of the city. But they were, in their own terms, spaces that offered the possibility to live transformational experience, and to be affected by the atmospheres of joy and excitement produced by creative

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labour and political action. People who attended these events, as I said, where mostly Abart’s followers and supporters. For them, to participate in these events meant to become visible in the city and to occupy public soil to declare their desire for a different city that could allow for people to be together again. But also, it meant the possibility to direct their desires for change so that a platform could be created, a heterotopic space where ethno-nationalism had been forgotten. For those who accidentally joined one or more activities (or those who read about the site-specific interventions in the local press), the project offered the possibility to learn of the existence of groups who oppose the ethnic division as well as the opportunity to enjoy a cultural programme that is delinked from ethno-national propaganda (to become affected by the possibility that another Mostar is possible). After the summer vacation, by September 2011 only six students were still participating—the majority blamed the heavy coursework for dropping out, but many might have also lost interest along the way. Surely, many remained in contact with Abart and continued participating as part of the audience even after they left the project. A large amount of information had been gathered and stored within the very small container/office of Abart creating what was supposed to be the beginning of the Archive of Mostar. A final exhibition displayed all the work done and invited the citizens of Mostar to have a look. For the first time the exhibition space filled up quickly and an atmosphere of joyful euphoria was clearly palpable. Despite the fact that the events organised during the process (art interventions) always attracted a crowd, there was no sign of new people willing to get involved in long-term collaborations. Mid-term activities were advertised in local newspapers and internetbased news-portals, but they were silently received (with no discussions or comments initiated). The final exhibition gathered all the people who took part in the project (also by sharing their memories). In this sense, the participatory methodology adopted contributed to augmenting the existing audience, which managed to gather a significantly transgenerational audience. Crucially, when walking around the exhibition space, I noticed how the materiality of the Archive produced the envisioned (and virtual) platform for discussion. People were talking about the city, what they remembered and what they did not, what they thought was accurate and what misleading. In fairness, after having collaborated on the writing of several applications for Abart’s funding (being unsuccessful most

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of the time), I had started to feel insecure about the very concept of art as tool for change. I never doubted the importance of creativity as a way to maintain and create criticality, yet I began to think that writing proposals about how art exhibitions and performances in public spaces could create a sound basis for political discussion seemed, in fact, naïve. Until, of course, the moment I saw what was happening that evening. It was incredible; people did not leave, they stayed and talked, discussed, criticised (Abart too), made compliments, laughed, drank wine, and eventually returned home. I cannot tell whether they all discussed issues concerning the future of the city, but surely, they came together in another space (not their usual cafe), with another crowd, and experienced something (radically) different and joyful. With the conclusion of (Re)collecting Mostar and the opening of the Archive, Abart had demonstrated that art-led research could produce important results. However, if the project had addressed the potential for such initiatives to be conducive to change through educational and leisure activities, it certainly did not address the political modalities required to achieve change at the city-level. Abart’s intention to sharpen critical and analytical skills through art practice was certainly valid, but what about the system in which Mostar (and Abart) is embedded? Is it possible to neutralise nationalisms when they are institutionalised and bureaucratised? Or, is it tilting at windmills? Many conversations within Abart reflected upon the ways in which a bigger crowd could be reached and involved in long-term projects. In fact, Abart lacked a strategy to involve people in the long run. There was a sense that event promotion and advertising would not be effective because of the nature of Abart’s radical stance. Coercing people into participating would not lead to the creation of a more inclusive environment.

Conclusion: Conceptualising Resistance in Mostar, Spatially To frame resistance spatially is, in this book, strongly related to Lefebvre’s theory of space production, in tandem with the notion that interfering with the mechanisms of how space is produced socially could shape a different understanding of what cities are and could become. Lefebvre envisioned the urban revolution as a (joyful) festival, whose creative arsenal might be able to change the city (and possibly the world)

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for the better. In this way, change crucially passed through the creation and maximisation of differences. Thus, ‘heterotopias’ become spaces reappropriated from the forces of capitalist homogenisation and elite hegemony, where ongoing and engaged practice formulates new ways of thinking in order to imagine what is not yet existing, and pursuing its realisation. Certainly, to produce change, it is necessary to have vision, which entails being imaginative and critical of the present, rather than following routinised patterns. Further, as seen in Chapter 3, revolutionary struggle requires a stepping out from the space of ambiguity and to take a leap into the unknown (into the possibility that change would work out favourably). Yet, Lefebvre is cautious not to capitulate to the attractive (and disguised) promises of capitalism, so adept at the reabsorption of revolutionary energy (see also Lefebvre 1991, 383). The revolution is non-negotiable. Lefebvre sets a clear line of division between revolution and reform. The latter is to be avoided because they merely produce cosmetic change, and thus reproducing the basic contours of power and domination. Lefebvre envisions any collaboration with the state (and its administration) as a connivance of capitalism. In fact, central to Lefebvre’s theory is the notion of autogestion, the idea that societies could regulate themselves without any bureaucratic apparatus to constrain individuals’ freedom of choice. Lefebvre’s future flirts with anarchy as the space for radical self-determination. This line of thought has had an impact on some contemporary radical thinkers about the efficacy of non-statist approaches to revolution (see Holloway 2010; Shirky 2009). Yet Lefebvre’s theory of autogestion was (as with all his writings) far subtler than is usually recognised, and subsequently led to ‘a great outburst of confusion’ over its meaning (Brenner and Elden 2009, 15). It was a notion that became highly malleable in the hands of its advocates, who embarked on a number of ‘antistatist and statist political projects, antiproductivist and productivist visions of modernisation, and grassroots and liberal-parliamentary reforms of political participations’ (Brenner and Elden 2009, 15). The problem lay not in any one of these elements per se, but in the separation of these elements from one another, in treating the contradiction between an element and its ‘anti’ as something to be avoided, rather than actively pursued (see also Lefebvre 2009, 148). There was no single goal to be achieved, but a continual process of grassroots change that would rage on all levels of social life. His invocation of this strategy rested on the idea of a ‘practical struggle that is always reborn with failures and setbacks’

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(Lefebvre 2009, 135), which contains the implicit possibility that even a series of reforms might at some critical point lead to a fuller realisation of society’s creative impulses. As he argued: Certain Yugoslavs committed the error of seeing in autogestion a system, and therefore a model, that could be established juridically and that could function without clashes and contradictions, in a sort of social and political harmony. Instead, autogestion reveals contradictions in the State because it is the very trigger of those contradictions. The democratic nature of a State or any other apparatus can be evaluated in terms of its capacity to avoid snuffing out contradictions by restrictions or by formalism; it should not only allow their expression and allow them to take shape but should also directly provoke them. This does not happen without real struggles. Autogestion must continually be enacted. The same is true of democracy, which is never a ‘condition’ but a struggle. (Lefebvre 2009, 135)

While Lefebvre highlights the stifling nature of State power, in its use of formalism and circumscription, he also illustrates the perpetual nature of political struggle. None of this implies the absolute rejection of the State as a target and site of struggle. The passage above suggests that the perception of ‘harmony’ among Yugoslav citizens is perhaps what robbed them of their transformative agency in the struggle against the wielders of state power. The socialist tragedy of the twentieth century derived from the perception of the State as the ‘final’ goal for revolutionary action. Yet State institutions were not a fiction to be ignored, but an active site of contestation that must be imbued with the ideals of autogestion itself: ‘In a broader conception the modalities of autogestion may be proposed and imposed at all levels of social practice, including the agencies of coordination’ (Lefebvre 2009, 148). Thus: With the State unable to coexist peacefully alongside radicalised and gener­ alised autogestion, the latter must submit the former to ‘grassroots’ democratic control. The State of autogestion, which is to say the State at whose core autogestion is raised to power, can only be a State that is withering away. Consequently, the party of autogestion can only be the party that leads politics toward its termination and the end of politics, beyond political democracy. (Lefebvre 2009, 150)

The corollary being that to alter the state, to reform and transform it, one must first confront it in order to lay the necessary steps, not for a

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final conclusion to struggle but for the continuation of struggle from a stronger position (cf. Chandler 2004). In BiH, the realisation of a socially democratic subjectivity, and therefore transformative agency, is made difficult by the absence of clear legislation and the existence of a fragmented citizenry and state. In the case of BiH, revolutionary action must take the necessary first step of confronting the state in the struggle for its reform. In fact, social justice and reconciliation cannot happen without the guarantee of people becoming legally empowered as political subjects free of ethno-national categories and the fractured social spaces that go with it. The majority of my respondents in Abrašević seemed to be in agreement with this. To be an activist means, for those I met, to work towards the creation of a more democratic system, which could assure equality and justice. Yet little progress could be made without a qualitatively different state, which could coordinate claims for policy reforms. The understanding of radical change is, for Lefebvre, a way to interrupt the existence of capitalism in order to produce novelty. And despite a fascination for pre-historical times when Nature was harmoniously creating a united space (Lefebvre 1991, XX–CC), Lefebvre suggests the future as totally different—indeed, as an interruption. My case study, in contrast, shows how the future is imagined by selecting memories from the past—the pre-war society were ethno-national differences could be negotiated rather than exacerbated. Certainly, to deal with a post-conflict area brings to the fore a completely different dynamic. The past has been lost by a sudden traumatic accident, a wound to be healed. Accordingly, different strategies to deal with the vanished past (and its uneasy connections to the present) are engaged. In the case I presented, reflective nostalgia (Boym 2001) was engaged with as a tool to navigate a (now) distant past in order to create and imagine the future. Thus, the revolu­ tion will not erase history or to cancel the present, but will modulate the present on the memories selected from the past. This revolution is a process, a slow route leading to change supported by the affective attachment to the idea(l) of justice. Certainly, the activities of Abart have demonstrated the importance of art interventions and exemplified the ways in which art could become political. The contents of Abart’s interventions are political in the sense that they touch (directly and indirectly) upon sensitive topics to participate in and create a debate. In this sense, Abart helped nurture the notion and practice of encounter, where:

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Active affects somehow replace passive affects; people start to recognise a ‘singular essence’… As people find one another, they start to piece together common notions: they universalise, make more coherent what seems, on the face of it, only specific, lived experience. What appears particular is in fact general; our plight is that of many people… Affinity becomes the cement that bonds, perhaps only for a moment, but a moment that lingers, a lasting encounter, of people across frontiers and barriers. (Merrifield 2011, 108–109)

From this perspective, the site-specific art works reviewed in this chapter created a space that opposed the main spatial practices and mindless reproduction of division, the routinised rhythms of the divided city. The production of a space-otherwise was achieved through brief interventions in public space, as well as through the marking of the urban space by leaving traces of the interventions. Abart challenged the existing representations of Mostar-divided by producing a counter-space that voiced the desire for the city to be transformed. Difference was produced in three main ways. Firstly, Abart resisted normalised practice of rendering identities as a matter of ethnic politics by refusing to engage with the citizens of Mostar primarily as ethnic subjects. All the projects engaged with the population by inviting citizens to collaborate (or be part of the audience) without addressing their ethno-national belongings. Further, the planned activities took place in Abrašević or in spaces that have not been appropriated by a specific group (the Bulevar, Spanish Square, vari­ ous spaces of consumption) in order to claim back these places for the citizens at large. As Laketa argues ‘emancipatory politics in BiH need to be understood as a radical reconfiguration of the way bodies “make sense” of the world, in ways that build upon and expand the post-structural concept of change through discursive resignification’ (2016, 680). In this spirit, by occupying the city through walks, performances, and gatherings, Abart wanted people to experience new ways of inhabiting and using the city, which are conducive of reimagining its future as more inclusive. This also meant to alter the normalised rhythms of the divided city, which instructs patterns of mobility confined (mostly) within the two, separate, sides. Abart invited the citizens of Mostar to engage with Mostar differently by stepping out of their daily routines and reflect on the potentials held by the city—for example, in hosting cultural activities in collaborative and creative ways. Secondly, Abart’s projects disrupted the process of crafting new histories for Mostar that restart with the event of the war and erase

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completely the pre-war social dynamics. As in many other contested cities, the writing of history is a highly contentious topic, which is far from settled. Proof lies in the fact that students do not address contemporary history during compulsory education. Abart did not want to write the history of Mostar but rather strived to create a space in which many conflicting stories could be confronted. In this sense, the Archive of Mostar was proposed as an expanding space that could collect memories without attempting to rectify, order or silence them. The goal was to show how all these memories could co-exist because the act of writing one official history for the city would, forcibly, neglect the existence of many counter-histories. Abart decided to recollect memories of the pre-war city without idealising the socialist past. Rather, this was an attempt to show how the rhythms of the pre-war city worked to enhance the shared nature of public spaces despite the felt differences among the population whilst wondering how (and whether) this could become possible again, in the future. Thirdly, Abart used sarcasm as a means to create a critical distance from the past and the present that made clear how many post-war dynamics do not make sense to the entire population, transforming the post-war rebuilding process as alien, dysfunctional and corrupt. Abart’s interventions made visible processes that are downplayed within the more present discussions about the city’s divisions, such as the privatisation of public spaces that are side-effects of the restructuring of the state but are not accounted for as problematic. Abart’s critical engagement with the process of fundraising also shows that the mechanisms highlighted by Jeffrey (2013) among others (the gentrification of civil society) are indeed very clear to many civil society actors, who are often presented with the dilemma of conformity for the sake of survival, yet who simultaneously employ parody by deviating from established models of action. Abart mimicked international discourses in order to gain trust, legitimacy, and money while being critical of the ‘international guidelines for democratisation’ at the same time. Overall, my argument is that NGOs could still express dissent even when they resign themselves to becoming instruments of mainstream discourses. In fact, as in the case of Abart, they were able to manipulate the international demands for peace and reconciliation built on inter-ethnic dialogue by developing activities that produced markedly different results form that specified in their official proposals. Surely, new languages have been learnt, and new skills have been acquired to become more competitive in the donor market,

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yet Abart also successfully learnt how to take advantage of such circumstances in a rather cynical way. Accordingly, to write projects adhering to certain political strategies could also conceal disruptive intent. Overall, Abart enacted resistance to the logics of the divided city by reappropriating space for other-than-divisive projects. The experience of Abart was fruitful, engaging, and exciting for those who participated. Those interested in art could enjoy creative cultural programmes otherwise inexistent in Mostar. Others, less interested in art performance, but supportive of Abart’s radical stands, were still energised by being part of projects that create something different in Mostar showing that change was indeed possible. And it was by creating and inhabiting these atmospheres of excited joyfulness that Abart created the possibility for transformative experiences. To think about how a movement towards change could be enacted means to engage with agency affectively and to rethink agency not as a property or a privilege of the sovereign subject, but as located in encounters, ‘registering the constitutive co-implication of the many bodies that make worlds’ (McManus 2011). Affective agency challenges the individualising power of the neoliberal subject by exploring how ‘affect spaces’ become foundational for the (be)coming together of protest movements (Kluitenberg 2015). It allows us to explore the relationships between the individual and the group, the micro-politics of everyday resistance and the macro-politics of the state. It also accounts for how affect produces spaces in which this subjectivation becomes politically activated (Arena 2015). Reading Spinoza with Hardt, I am addressing the power of what brings us joy as the catalyst for transforma­ tive politics: ‘a political project, though, must not leave it to hazard but instead discover how to make last and repeat what is good, that is, what brings us joy. Joy is the increase of our power to think and act, and sadness is the decrease.’ (Hardt 2015, 219). To experience joy in Mostar through encounters expresses the possibility to be affected by the power of memories, experiences, and sensorial stimulations, and the realisation that being together could be exciting and moving. When [criticality] works, a transference relation takes hold that allows both for the figuration of the familiar and the non-relation that is always there at the start of a genuinely original encounter. A comfort zone meets an alien one and a drama develops about what kinds of repetition and change can be borne. Then, there are all the exterior pressures interfering with focus that want us to hazard wild explanations and connections because we sense we see something but can’t tell quite what it is. (Berlant 2015, 273)

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Here Berlant evokes the same criticality invoked by Lefebvre in the analysis of the everyday: the vigilant practices that disentangle the rhythms of the city in order to uncover what could be reimagined, re-encountered, and recreated. Abart promoted this attitude by recollecting public memories that rendered existing relationships with the city’s complex, multidimensional and non-linear fabric, and revealing the possibility for the creation and experience of a non-ethnicised space. Abart’s project did not focus on the needs for reunifying the city, rather they produced and enacted the desires for living in Mostar differently. For those working in Abart, besides the excitement for the projects, there were also great challenges. Firstly, there was the financial insecurity coming from working on short projects that never ensured continuity. Secondly, there was the question of whether this could become a career, or could be done alongside more standard jobs to ease the feeling of not planning wisely one’s future life. Thirdly, there was the fatigue generated by working for small groups of followers without having a sense of the impact that these projects had in the city. Abart stopped producing new projects in 2014. Reflecting on her role in the platform and the legacy of Abart, Amila Puzić says she felt as ‘there was always a kind of resistance’ (personal communication, October 2017). The resistance she felt translated into poor attendance and the difficulties to involve new people in Abart’s projects. This reflects the difficulties in altering the cemented rhythms of the city that has been shaped along ethno-national lines. But this was also what propelled Abart to continue developing new projects, as Puzić states ‘It felt great to do a pioneering job… when I read what I wrote then, it feels as if I was on fire! I can remember the feeling…’ (personal communication, October 2017). Ultimately, she continues, I think that we – we as a team – got tired of being invisible… At the end Abart was a big challenge itself and it managed to produce critical art and knowledge about the city – its history as well as its contemporary dynamics… A great thing is that Abart’s online archives actively serve as a platform for researches, curators, artists interested in what we did in Mostar… This means that all the efforts were worthwhile’. (personal communication, October 2017)

Surely Lefebvre would empathise with this sentiment: Any revolutionary ‘project’ today, whether utopian or realistic, must, if it is to avoid hopeless banality, make the re-appropriation of the body, in

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association with the re-appropriation of space, into a non-negotiable part of its agenda. (Lefebvre 1991, 166–167, emphasis added)

This book sheds light on the existence of people who have reappropriated the space of Mostar to produce different narratives about the city. They did so by reclaiming their bodies and subjectivities from ethnic politics and nationalisms. Their position is also non-negotiable (like the one of those embracing more nationalist narratives and practices) and as such they live, use, and engage with the city differently resisting the production of Mostar as divided. I visited Mostar again in summer 2015 with a group of twenty postgraduate students willing to learn about grassroots initiatives in the divided city and how they related to processes of reconstruction and urban planning.13 Interviewing a young woman who was a member of a local student organisation, the students asked her about the future of the divided city. Appearing somewhat defeated, she exclaimed: Please don’t ask me about the war and ethnic divisions. I have been told about reconciliation and dialogue all my life…I am tired of this… can we talk about what I am doing here in Mostar? [Can we discuss] the projects I do for the city to make it more liveable? I am sorry if I sound like this but… there are people like me who are normal…we disengage from ethnic-politics… they don’t belong to us… (fieldwork diaries, September 2015)

Frustrated with how outside observers constantly approach the city from a preconceived understanding of its present (and future), the young woman instead proclaimed her own urban reality to be the normal one—a reality that is not simply defined by division, and thus towards a mode of urban life that does not require ‘rescuing’ from the outside, because the possibility of living in an other-than-divided space is already an immanent possibility from within. This is why this book engages with the activities and projects produced within circles that reject ethnic politics in Mostar. These groups are surely less numerous, but they surely exist, and to make their projects visible is a crucial step to challenging the idea of Mostar as an immobile city where nothing could ever change. Yet the crucial question still stands: how to transform change into (revolutionary) transformation? And how do these experiences and different notions of Mostar as more-than-divided affect the overall process of rebuilding Mostar? Authors like Hromadžić have approached the

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topic of inter-ethnic solidarity, but ‘with some reluctance because these broader, cross-ethnic articulations of narod have been dismissed as apolitical, nostalgic, invented and over-romanticised visions of Bosnianhood and as reflections of “impaired insights” on the side of “subjective’ academics”’ (Hromadžić 2013, 261). What my examples show in contrast is that, in Mostar, there are pockets of radical change in which the discourse has moved beyond inter-ethnic dialogue as the only alternative foundation to resolve the dilemma of post-war reconciliation. The next chapter will discuss this topic further by enquiring into whether change in Mostar could happen through the conscious act of engaging with the past as a radical basis towards reimagining Mostar outside of ethnic politics.

Notes





1. For instance, the Mostar-based NGO Croatia Libertas (Croatia freedom) lobbies for the referendum in favour to the creation of a third (Croatian) entity within the borders of BiH. 2. The Constitution of BiH, written as part of the Dayton Peace Agreement, was a temporary document that should have been redrafted within the process of state-building. 3. At the time of this research in 2011, there were Zelena Glava (environmental campaigns), Abrašmedia (media activism), Abart (art production), and a group promoting sexual education in schools. 4. The group was formed by Rani Al-Rajji (Studio Beirut, Beirut), Antje Engelmann, Sonya Schonberger (independent artists, Berlin), Tanja Vujišić, Ivana Miličević, and Danica Milenković (journalists, Kosovska Mitrovica). 5.  On post-war political economy and frictions between economic interests of global elites vs. domestic actors, see Pugh (2002). In particular, the scholar argues that the implementation of neoliberal mechanisms in post-war BiH was favoured both by international and local actors eager to profit from the process of post-socialist privatisation. This, the author argues, ‘has hardly alleviated a grim social and economic situation that differentiates markedly between participants in the entrepreneurial economy and the excluded poor, unemployed, and welfare dependent’ (2002, 468). It has to be said that, as Pugh has also noticed, there has been a limited research on ‘the dysfunctional aspects of neoliberalism in peace-building’ (2002, 468). 6. Culture for understanding, MGD-F (2010: implemented by Abart); International Fund for Cultural Diversity, UNESCO (2011:

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unsuccessful); Gender Integration, USAID (2011: unsuccessful); Youth Leadership Development, USAID (2011: implemented by Abrašmedia); Youth Interethnic Exchange, US Embassy in BiH (2011: unsuccessful); Conflict Mitigation and Reconciliation, USAID (2012: unsuccessful). 7.  MDG-F “is an international cooperation mechanism whose aim is to accelerate progress in the Millennium Development Goals worldwide” (MGD website, http://www.mdgfund.org/aboutus). The Fund was established in 2006 thanks to a donation of the Spanish Government. The Millennium Development Goals comprise eight goals to improve the lives of the world’s poorest people. They were set by the UN in 2000 with a target achievement date of 2015. 8. I am aware of the fact that the very concept of public space is contested and various are the possible understandings of what is public. In particular, the discussion about what is/was public and what is/was private becomes of crucial importance when considering the Socialist past of the city. The project understood public space as shared in the sense of being used by the population at large. In this sense, the project looked at how from being a space of encounters, the area became abandoned and neglected also in relation to urban polarisation. 9.  The Archive is available online at http://abartarhiv.blogspot.de. Last accessed October 31, 2017. 10. The title is a quote from the novel The Island of the day Before written by Umberto Eco in 1994. 11. The art intervention in the building and, in particular, the reference to Yugoslavia could be also understood as a way to employ reflective nostalgia as a critical tool. 12. Relevant addresses are www.herojisaneretve.blogger.ba (Blog); https:// www.facebook.com/groups/147730451916207/ (Facebook page); http://partizanskispomenik.oneworldseepartner.org/ (Website of the Association). Last accessed July 27, 2012. 13.  DPU summerLab 2015, Mostar Common Grounds. Summer School developed by Giulia Carabelli and Mela Zuljević in collaboration with the Development Planning Unit at University College London. More information about the project: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/bartlett/ development/programmes/summerlab/2015-series/mostar.

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Perry, Valery. 2015. “Constitutional Reform Processes in Bosnia and Herzegovina: Top–Down Failure, Bottom–Up Potential, Continue Stalemate.” In State-Building and Democratisation in Bosnia Herzegovina, edited by Soeren Keil and Valery Perry, 15–41. Burlington: Ashgate. Pugh, Michael. 2002. “Postwar Political Economy in Bosnia and Herzegovina: The Spoils of Peace.” Global Governance 8 (4): 467–482. http://www.jstor. org/stable/27800359. Quinn, Bernadette. 2005. “Arts Festivals and the City.” Urban Studies 42 (5/6): 927–943. https://doi.org/10.1080/00420980500107250. Robinson, Guy M., and Alma Pobrić. 2006. “Nationalism and Identity in Post-Dayton Accords: Bosnian and Herzegovina.” Tijdschrift voor Economische en Sociale Geografie 97 (3): 237–252. http://dx.doi. org/10.1111/j.1467-9663.2006.00517.x. Sheftel, Anna. 2011. “Monument to the International Community, from the Grateful Citizens of Sarajevo: Dark Humour as Counter-Memory in Postconflict Bosnia-Herzegovina.” Memory Studies 5 (2): 145–164. https://doi. org/10.1177/1750698011415247. Shirky, Clay. 2009. Here Comes Everybody: How Change Happens When People Come Together. London: Penguin Books. Simmons, Cynthia. 2005. “Women Engaged/Engaged Art in Postwar Bosnia: Reconcialiation, Recovery and Civil Society.” The Carl Beck Papers in Russian and East European Studies. Online. https://doi.org/10.5195/cbp.2010.150. Vetters, Larissa. 2007. “The Power of Administrative Categories: Emerging Notions of Citizenship in the Divided City of Mostar.” Ethnopolitics 6 (2): 187–209. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17449050701345009. Zelizer, Craig. 2003. “The Role of Artistic Processes in Peace-Building in Bosnia-Herzegovina.” Peace and Conflict Studies 10 (2): 60–75.

CHAPTER 5

Conclusion

The central concern of this book has been to engage with the urban polarisation of Mostar, particularly in relation to its post-reunification phase (2004), to discuss how the city becomes divided. By attending to the multiple (and conflicting) factors that affect the production (and reproduction) of Mostar as a contested urban environment, the book argues that static representations of this city as polarised obscure much more complex social dynamics. Instead, this book sheds light on processes of contestation and reappropriation of the city to suggest that Mostar is more than its division. This is not just a matter of rectifying existing portrayals of the city, but rather to suggest that a critical engagement with its socio-political complexities (instead of flattening them) could inform new approaches to the study of this (and other) divided cities. In fact, by unsettling the representations of Mostar as simply divided, this book locates the possibility of social change within extant contradictory dynamics and in the existence of counter-spaces where nationalisms have been neutralised. Thus, the book also infers that Mostar is not a city characterised by inertia whereby change (political and social) can only be imposed by external forces. Rather, the possibility of social change emerges from the intensification of the contradictions of the real, which also produce heterotopic spaces in which ethno-national subjectivity and antagonism have been largely challenged and transformed. The concept of social space has been adopted to account for not only the formation of physical infrastructures but also the ways in which social actors encounter, interpret, utilise, and appropriate these spaces. Only © The Author(s) 2018 G. Carabelli, The Divided City and the Grassroots, The Contemporary City, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-7778-4_5

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by engaging with social space as an ensemble of relations was it possible to fulfil one of the central goals of this book, namely, to analyse the social production of identities and how they are impacted by (and impact upon) social space. As a way of critically accounting for these processes, this book has reappropriated the theoretical framework used by Henri Lefebvre to investigate the production of (divided) space, particularly with reference to Lefebvre’s core construct, the spatial triad. This framework envisions the production of (social) space as resulting from the dialectical interaction of three moments: representations of space, representational spaces, and spatial practices. From this perspective, I have presented an account of Mostar that reveals how its space—as conceived (representations of space), (representational spaces) lived, and perceived (spatial practice) does not take place in any straightforward manner, as if each moment can be exclusively ascribed to any particular class or group. Rather, as noted in Chapter 1, the spatial triad offers the necessary tools to analytically distinguish the social content of each moment, while at the same time understanding how any class project or strategy is informed by a specific combination of all three. This choice of theoretical approach necessitated a focused examination of the modalities in which everyday life and its constituent practices reconstruct space as a social product. Hence, ethnographic material sheds light on the ongoing rehabilitation of material infrastructures alongside a committed investigation into the everyday life of the city. This was also supported by a critical engagement with more-than representational theories, which consider practices and affects, not just as products of discourses but as constitutive parts of world-making processes (Lorimer 2005). The intellectual challenge has been to disentangle the complex socio-political dynamics that produce (and reproduce) space in Mostar as divided and more-than-divided by accounting for multiple actors, strategies, and practices that inform a more complex account of Mostar. Overall, my findings suggest that Mostar is not an utterly divided city, though it is far from a united and organic entity. Instead, this book argues that engaging with Mostar in its contradictions sheds light on the difficulties of living in the divided city, and on the existence of spaces in which ethno-national logics have been substantially challenged. In framing Mostar as more-than-divided, I have offered a critical engagement with what lies beyond this division: practices and affects that create ambiguity, and which facilitates the emergence of both spontaneous

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rebellions and organised counter-spaces. By accounting for the initiatives designed and developed by Abart, a grassroots platform for art production and urban research, this study has revealed the potential of art and creativity as tools for reclaiming Mostar from nationalist-driven territorial competition. By way of a conclusion, I will offer a critical review of the main points raised by the book. Firstly, I will re-engage with the three moments of space production to discuss how they relate to each other in relation to the production of Mostar. Here, I will point to the contradictions emerging from the production of space by paying attention to the notion of ambiguity and heterotopia as the moments that signal the specificity of contingent aspects of resistance, as opposed to organised political contestation. Secondly, I will reflect on the contributions made by this book in terms of its novel application of Lefebvre’s framework to the analysis of divided cities as well as the contribution of ethnography and participatory observation to the understanding of Mostar’s dynamics. Lastly, I will delineate avenues for future research, and suggest how the material so far collected and analysed could initiate further investigations.

Mostar’s Space Production—A Post Scriptum This section reads as a post scriptum to the previous analyses (Chapters 2–4). On the one hand, to draw conclusions seems to be somewhat inconsistent with the idea of social space as continuous process; it is impossible to simplify the (ongoing) process directed and constituted by contradictory dynamics as a means of proposing a simple argument, or even a new representation of Mostar. Yet conclusions are also crucial—in a very Lefebvrian fashion—to understanding how and why change might be produced at all. Accordingly, this section focuses on the contradictions emerging from the process of space as becoming, which situates both the analytical lines of force constitutive of any process of spatial production, and the social, historical and geographical specificity overlaying this generative process. Representations of Space/Representational Spaces: The Cosmos of Capital and the Nomos of National Identity Lefebvre argues that the moment of the representations of space are dominant in capitalist societies, so much so that the resulting homogeneous/homogenising space appears to contain no contradictions—as if

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the spatial practices and representational spaces it dominates were in fact produced harmoniously. Instead, he reflects on how this abstract space imposes itself violently, and thus silencing its own contradictions, which nevertheless cannot be eliminated fully. Thus, the project of un-doing social space requires a critical engagement with the present in order to create the possibility of a different future beyond the confines of alienated urban life. Chapter 2 assessed the moment of the representations of space in Mostar by discussing the plans to restructure the city after the wars. Here, it became clear that there exist competing visions. The international supervisors (the OHR) drafted a series of guidelines that could restart the city to function according to European standards. Their vision for Mostar, as a reunited city, drew on the abstract category of the European ‘ideal’, which loosely refers to ideals of western cosmopolitan and capitalist practices. Local elites engaged with the imposition of the abstract space by translating it into local political contexts, which produced an important contradiction. In fact, despite welcoming the promise of capital investments (and the integration of Mostar and BiH into the global market), they could only make sense of this abstract space through their own specific representational spaces constructed upon ethno-national sense-making categories. If they all agreed that Mostar could be reunified, at least for the sake of moving toward the road of European integration, they could not agree on the ways in which this might take place, and how the city could function a ‘rational’ political entity, all of which led to the refusal of rectifying the guidelines of the OHR. For instance, the parallel institutions were reformed and reintegrated only on paper, leaving two separate administrators supervising the eastern and western sides of the city. Once this contradiction came to light, the international supervisors reprimanded the local councillors for not being able to make decisions because they were stuck in antagonistic positions depending on their ethno-national differences, but to no avail. The contradictory strategies pursued by international and local elites cannot be reduced to the operation of the representations of space (abstract space), but must be understood as complicated by their coconstitution with representational space (absolute space). As outlined in Chapter 1, while abstract space has come to dominate, absolute space continues to live on beneath the surface. Indeed, as Lefebvre noted on the first instances of proto-capitalist ‘rationalism’: ‘The property principle, by dominating space… put an end to the mere contemplation of

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nature, of the Cosmos or of the world, and pointed the way towards the mastery which transforms instead of simply interpreting’ (1991, 253). Hence, the cosmos of capital embodied not merely an ethereal space in which the world was situated, but rather constituted the space of capital through which the world would be moulded in its image: ‘this secularized space was the outcome of the revival of the Logos and the Cosmos, principles which were able to subordinate the “world” with its underground forces’ (ibid., 263). While the logic of universalism (the Logos and Cosmos of capital) unfolded, various underground forces continued to shape the form of this ‘rationalism’. Indeed, as Schmitt pointed out, the birth of European power was underpinned by a constant process of geographical appropriation, the creation of a fragmented nomos in which land and people could find political order. Yet while Schmitt’s understanding of the nomos was relatively empty from socio-political content— it was, after all, merely the expression of the intensification of politics, and the irreparable stand-off between friend-enemy (Shapiro 2008, 41)— every political space was, during the epoch of abstract space, informed by the nomos of ‘nationalism’. Thus, the homogenising, abstract space of quantifiable elements and sovereign statehood was simultaneously formed by the fragmented, specific spaces of nation-states, which helped to ground the commodification of social relations through the absolute space of blood, soil, and language. It is only by appreciating this con­ tradictory fusion of representations/representational spaces (even while the former remains dominant) that we can begin to understand the differentiated strategies between elite actors in Mostar. For European elites, disembedded from their ‘own’ national contexts (within which they surely mobilise a whole host of symbolic, historical, and national formants), arrived in Mostar in order to help the city become integrated into the European (i.e. capitalist) Cosmos. In other words, it was a strategy shot through and through with abstract space. For Mostarian elites, meanwhile, things were not so simple. On the one hand, they engage with the city discursively as united and multi-ethnic (in public speeches and official interviews), which reflects their relative affinity with the idea of becoming a ‘normal’ European city. On the other hand, contending elite groups are only willing to implement the abstract space of a normal city as long as it is on their terms, and for their ‘people’. The idea of the abstract space of the nation-state (or any political space) in which the homogenised field of market relations is ordered and underpinned by the absolute space of a specific people, culture and language ceases to

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make sense in the presence of several competing claims to sovereignty and authority. Called to design a set of spatial practices that could produce Mostar as (re)united, they offered up the pretence of unification whilst finding ways to keep the city functioning as two separate entities. Accordingly, whereas spatial practices might create a sense of cohesion in cities, Mostar’s everyday life responds to the planned production of a segregated environment. In Chapter 2, I discussed how the provision of the electricity depends on ethnic boundaries. In Chapter 3, I looked at how people socialise in the city, which reflects the effect of designed processes of ethnic segregation through the educational system, which then affects practices of befriending people only within ethnic circles. Yet, Chapter 3, in exploring the everydayness of Mostar, also discussed how, despite territorial segregation, people in the city tend to attach or detach from the absolute space of ethnic categories according to contingencies in ways that often prove contradictory and fluid. I discussed how individuals who define themselves according to ethno-nationality reproduce nationalist discourses but I have also presented cases in which their actions are informed by wider and more complex considerations that depend on life contingencies and needs. Relatedly, I discussed the difficulties of living in a deeply divided society generally, and specifically for those who do not wish to identify with an ethno-national group. The Production and Contestation of Scales Clearly, as discussed in Chapter 1, even if Lefebvre focuses on cities as vital sites in which citizenship could be reinvented as independent from the authority of the nation-state, his emphasis was on the production of scales—the global, the national, the urban, and the family as interconnected and relationally produced levels of analysis. Thus, to study how space is produced in Mostar cannot be separated from the macro-scale of the state and micro-scale of personal interactions. Chapter 1 offered an account of how the Dayton Peace Agreements, welcomed for ending the violent conflict, enabled the fixture of ethnic identities to territorial units, creating homogeneously ethnic spaces that needed to be freed from pre-war ethnic mixing, and whose consequences are traceable in internal mass exodus and internally displaced people. Accordingly, the division of Mostar is not just an urban phenomenon resulting from the conflict between Croats and Muslims at the urban scale, but rather the consequence of larger processes of space production,

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which impose the absolute space of ethnic segregation at the national scale, and cascading down to lower levels to shape representational spaces and spatial practices. As Lefebvre explains: there is a sense in which the existence of absolute space is purely mental, and hence imaginary. In another sense, however, it also has a social existence, and hence a specific and powerful ‘reality’. The ‘mental’ is ‘realized’ in a chain of ‘social’ activities because, in the temple, in the city, in monuments and places, the imaginary is transformed into the real. (Lefebvre 1991, 251)

And this is how the contradictory fusions between abstract/absolute spaces—as the project to forge a homogenous state space, on a specifically nationalist basis—transform into the social practice of contending, mutually exclusive nationalist projects that significantly shape the politics of the everyday. As seen in Mostar, the materialisation of ethno-national differences is facilitated by the design of spatial practices that keep the city divided, but it also becomes reality though individual performances and reproduction of ethno-national identities, and through patterns of urban navigation, affective attachments, and selective socialisation practices. The representations of space in Mostar thus contain convergent and divergent elements that are the manifestation of political contestation along different scalar levels. As in Chapter 1, the difference of scale here corresponds to the ‘distance’ with which actors relate to their socio-spatial environment, where the actors most removed from on-the-ground developments (international) will tend further towards representations of space (abstract/distant), while local elites occupy a problematic middle ground between abstract conceptions and more local concerns articulated by representational space. Thus, on the one hand, the HR has never ceased to describe Mostar as a problem: ‘[t]he situation in Mostar is increasingly volatile, with rising tension manifesting itself in escalating rhetoric, including threats to boycott elections, a deadlocked City Council, boycotts of ceremonial events by councillors and one shooting incident’ (OHR 2012). The formal acceptance of unification by local elites is simultaneously rejected at the urban level. They describe the city as one, to avoid confronting the legacy of the war and the resultant urban polarisation; for instance, in the parallel school curricula which is explained as the liberal guarantee of equal rights for ethnic groups.

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The accent is put on the safeguarding of minority rights to obfuscate nationalist discourses, and thus creating, supporting, and reinforcing the need for a separated education system. Paradoxically, the very imposition of a united abstract space became instrumental to preserving the division. In fact, to plan a united city meant—for local administrators—ignoring that the city was divided in the first place, and in need of being reconciled through ad hoc spatial practices: The [functional] State and [‘its’] territory interact in such a way that they can be said to be mutually constitutive. This explains the deceptive activities and image of state officials… They seem to administer, to manage and to organise a natural space. In practice, however, they substitute another space for it, one that is first economic and social, and then political. They believe they are obeying something in their heads – a representation (of the country, etc.). In fact, they are establishing an order – their own. (Lefebvre 2009 [1978], 228)

The Production of Fear In Chapter 2, I reflected on how ethno-national space is imposed, becoming perceived (and accounted for) as ‘normal’ insofar as it safeguards particular values, heritage, and practices, and in the same register justified by elites as a means to guarantee peace and safety. I related the production of fear in the city to the nomos of ethno-national boundaries that produce the ‘other’ as the ultimate enemy. Empirical evidence shows how people from both sides associate the ‘other side’ with danger (Chapter 3) even if they cannot explain why. The fear of the other has become part of local sense-making practices, which goes largely unquestioned. I also connected the production of fear to political projects of domination, and I recalled the numerous times in which local politicians draw on the absence of conflict not as a sign that people in Mostar could live together peacefully, but rather as the effect of their invasive campaigns of securitisation. This has two main consequences. Firstly, political power is created and maintained through regimes of fear (biopolitics), which strip citizens of political power, transforming them into the ‘deserving’ recipients of benevolent elites. Secondly, the materialisation of security strategies means that the city’s public spaces have become controlled, often losing their capacity to act as social connector or catalyst (see Chapters 2 and 3).

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The Contradictions of Everyday Life as the Conditions of Transformation Chapter 3 discussed the micro-politics of everyday life. Here I reflected upon the ways in which representational spaces both reproduce ethnic division, cementing the lines of the divided city, but also subvert divisive dynamics that create spaces of ‘confusion’. I defined these movements that disrupt the rigid logics of national territorialisation as spontaneous rather than planned because these acts do not correspond or provoke the emergence of organised movements against ethno-national territorial sovereignty. Rather, their very spontaneity responds to the inherent ambiguity of contradictory space. I associated this ambiguity with the non-exclusive existence of contradictory political projects (within and outside ethnic subjectivities) in which benefits might be gained from both positions. I discussed this attitude in relation to empirical evidence that shows how decision-making processes involve tactical thinking (as a survival strategy) rather than all-encompassing ideologies and political orientations. Here again, it is possible to trace the contradictions and tensions between the scale of the state (where ethno-national categories are institutionalised and normalised), the scale of the city (where these same categories are embraced or refused according to political projects of segregation) or unity, and the scale of the individual who chooses to perform ethno-national identities according to contingent need. Stasis (The Civil War), Immobility, and Ambiguity Aristotle explains that antagonism (opposed to agonism, which is the cypher of democracy), occurs when citizens lose their capacity to negotiate their political identity. The city becomes immobile (stasis) and the citizens mindlessly reproduce those pre-arranged practices that are required to perform their identity (see Chapter 1). In Chapter 3, I discussed how the perception of Mostar as an immobile city in which change cannot happen became part of many narrative registers. At the international level, the OHR often circulate calls or warnings to the administration of Mostar’s councillors to stop keeping the city hostage of their political antagonisms (Chapter 2). At the local level, the planning institute, for instance, argues that the city’s stalemate depends on the difficulties attracting sponsors (locally and globally) whose capital could revamp the city’s infrastructures and expand governance capacity (Chapter 2).

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Citizens associate immobility with the lack of political progress since the reunification of the city (the fact that, for instance, there have not been elections since 2008). I have also described the sense of stagnancy by attending to the everydayness of Mostar, reflecting the widespread sense that nothing ever changes. I recalled my time in Mostar to illustrate how the repetitive rhythms of the city create an atmosphere of stillness that is aggravated by the uncertainty of the future (significantly determined by the precarious economy and high unemployment rates). Thus, planning the future becomes a constraint, so much so that many dream of escaping Mostar to relocate to a more ‘normal’ environment (Chapter 3). Accordingly, I discussed how, despite the fact I could register oppositional movements to the making and practice of ethno-nationalisms, these could not be considered counter-movements as such, but products of the atmosphere of ambiguity. I drew on Berlant’s work to discuss how the fluidity of the everyday depends on experiencing situations of hardship that require citizens to be inventive, alert, and ready to navigate such complexities, which often does not translate into the desire for change. Rather, it promotes small and never definitive moves as a survival strategy because change may well exacerbate an already fragile situation. Taken together, the three moments produce space in Mostar as ambiguous, where contradictions are blunted, producing an atmosphere of uncertainty and confusion. This also creates the possibility for individuals not to choose one political project over others. Thus, while citizens do counter the absoluteness of ethno-national spaces, they do not necessarily do so as part of an organised or intentional political programme. In other words, even if differences are produced in the everyday, these are minimal differences, which do not contain maximal differences necessary for the production of revolutionary paths. Surely, because of historical contingencies (the existence of BiH as a specific state formation based on consociational arrangements), the production of space as ethno-nationally divided is currently overpowering the formation of counter-spaces, which nevertheless remain visible both as spontaneous and organised. Heterotopias and the Subversion of Abstract/Absolute Space Drawing on the analyses in Chapters 2 and 3, Chapter 4 focused on heterotopias in Mostar. These are spaces that accentuate existing contradictions to produce a completely different space that contains revolutionary potentials. I accounted for the artistic and research practice of Abart,

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a grassroots platform, to illustrate the motives, strategies, and challenges of those who have already taken the leap and decided to create spaces that could accommodate citizens who do not comply with ethnonational systems of power. Abart, as a platform, produced space in Mostar that refused to become ethno-nationalised. Of course, it is always possible to identify people’s ethnic background, yet ethno-national memberships was not assumed as a making-sense category. In this way, Abart (and the OKC Abrašević) are actors in Mostar who are already producing a heterotopic space in which the absolute category of ethno-national space is countered and refused. By drawing on the work of Nicole Loraux and Giorgio Agamben, I attempt to explain the radical rejection of ethno-national spacing as an act of amnesty. Loraux wrote extensively about the concept of stasis (the civil war) in ancient Athens, which ‘unsettles established models, as well as their assuring certitudes’ (Loraux 2002, 24–25). It pushes families, friends, and neighbours one against the other, paralysing the polis. Following Aristotle, she explains how the solution to stasis is amnesty, which depends on the agreement that the memories of the conflict shall be rejected: ‘The question of memory in Athens takes the form of a prescription and an oath. A rejected memory, but still a memory’ (ibid., 146). As noted by Agamben (2015), stasis is not about a new beginning (a revolution), but a reform. According to Aristotle, not to engage with stasis (civil war) is politically unacceptable so that amnesty (to forget about the civil war) becomes a political duty (see also Agamben 2015, 1–33; Loraux 2002, 145–171). Amnesty does not mean to erase the memory of the conflict, but rather to avoid making a bad use of that memory (Agamben 2015, 28–29). Amnesty in Athens is not the invitation to forget the past, but rather the invitation not to use memories to do further damage to the polis. This is because stasis cannot be forgotten or erased—it needs to remain in the city, but it should not be mobilised to provoke resentment. Thus: By swearing not to recall previous misfortunes, the Athenian citizen affirms that he renounces vengeance; to place himself under the double authority of the city that decrees and of the gods who punish, he also asserts that he will maintain control over himself as a subject. (Loraux 2002, 158)

The attitude embraced by groups such as Abart, which refuse to engage with ethnic politics, could be explained along these lines. Whereas the

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memories of the conflict cannot (and should not) be erased, these groups have enacted amnesty and its implicit rule that memory shall not be used to damage the city. On the contrary, pre-war memories are recollected to create new bonds (bridges) between the city prior and after stasis. This is not to erase the conflict (to pretend it did not happen), but to reinforce the notion that the future could still be in continuity with the past rather than in absolute opposition with it. Accordingly, the practice of remembering becomes a creative tool, which could produce difference in the city. The notion of difference is, for Lefebvre, crucial in understanding the possibility of social emancipation and urban change: Repetitions generate difference, but not all differences are equivalent. … Under the reign of historical time, differences induced within a given mode of production coexist at first with produced differences promoting the demise of that mode. A difference of the latter kind is not only produced – it is also productive. (Lefebvre 1991, 372)

Lefebvre is pointing to how the production of space, characterised by a dialectical movement, tends toward the homogenisation of space, yet the contradictions existing in society result in the concomitant production of differences, which might incubate revolutionary paths. In order to apprehend such revolutionary possibilities, Lefebvre assigns to creativity the political power to imagine (and then produce) a (completely different) space, which also entails leaving spaces of ambiguity in order to produce counter-spaces: ‘Contradictions are creative. They give rise to problems and this to a set of possibilities and to the need to find a solution and therefore to the need to make a choice’ (Lefebvre 2008, 209). Crucially, these creative spaces are characterised by a state of pleasure and joy, An architecture of pleasure and joy, of community in the use of the gifts of the earth, has yet to be invented. When one asks what agencies have informed social demands and commands, the answer is much more likely to be commerce and exchange, or power, or productive labour, or renunciation and death, than enjoyment and rest (in the sense of non-work). (Lefebvre 1991, 379–380)

Here Lefebvre refers to the production of heterotopia as the space in which individuals could regain power over their bodies and experience

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pure pleasure in a harmonious relationship with the earth and nature. In Chapter 3, I discussed Lefebvre’s association of emancipatory spaces with joy along with Hardt’s reading of Spinoza whereby political action depends on the experience of joy (as the capacity to act). In Chapter 4, I reflected on Abart’s projects highlighting their capacities to produce spaces of excitement and joy, which lead to experiencing Mostar as a completely different space. I associate these interventions to Abart’s political project of creating other (radically) different spaces for those who refuse ethno-national politics. In this way, using site-specific art interventions forms a foundation for reappropriating the city to make new memories and attach new experiences to the urban environment. Indeed, Abart’s and other groups’ projects remain confined to specific (and liminal) spaces in Mostar such as the OKC Abrašević, but as Lefebvre suggests, In the end the invention of a space of enjoyment necessarily implies going through a phase of elitism. This elite of today avoid or reject quantitative models of consumption and homogenizing trends. …Whatever the outcome of the elitist quest for community, however, … the production of a new space… can never be brought about by any particular social group; it must of necessity result from relationships between groups – between classes or fractions or classes – on a world scale. (Lefebvre 1991, 380)

Mostar Is More-Than-Divided Throughout the book, I have mobilised the notion of Mostar as more-than-divided to account for what exceeds the facts of the division. The concept was shaped by readings within non- (and more-than-) representational theories even though this book’s theoretical framework was largely inspired by Lefebvre’s theory of space production rather than nonor more-than- representational theories. Yet, there are ways in which the two theoretical frameworks speak to and enrich each other. Thrift argues that: non-representational theory arises from the simple (one might say almost commonplace) observation that we cannot exact a representation of the world from the world because we are slap bang in the middle of it. We think about processes of meaning-making as occurring within action, context and interactions rather than solely the representational dimensions of discourse and structures of symbolic orders. (Thrift 1999, 296)

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Thus more-than-representational theories pay attention to the everyday as the vantage point to observe how practices and routines shape life without becoming the product (or performance) of discourses (Lorimer 2005, 84). Lefebvre also engages with the everyday as the site in which the balance between the three moments of space production is reached or threatened. This is because through (spatial and temporal) practices, abstracted notions of space are accommodated, refashioned, or rejected by space users (the urban dwellers). I borrow the idea to look at what exists beyond narrative and visual representations to challenge the normalisation of Mostar as a divided city. I do so by bringing attention to experiences, affects, and practices that both prove and challenge the division as an all-encompassing entity. To attend to Mostar in this way does not negate the entrenched division, nor does it devalue its representation. Rather, it uses the representation of Mostar as divided and reunited as generative to contrasting spatial practices in the city, which are traceable in the everyday. But also, and by attending to affect and affective understandings of agency, this book wishes to posit the question of how radical political projects such as Abart hold the potential to affect the present and the future of the divided city by offering the possibility to experience alternative ways of being in the city that depart from the absolute space of ethno-nationalism.

The Ethnography of Everyday Life The choice of conducting a year-long ethnography gave me the privilege of becoming part of the city’s narratives and, as such, gaining a vantage point over (seemingly) detached observers. Certainly, the process of settling in was not easy and it took me time to find my way through the fieldwork. Yet, by living the everyday of the city, I could understand its rhythms and, crucially to this project, its atmospheres. Further, to reflexively engage with the very difficulties of the fieldwork (to become an individual rather than one of the foreigners) illuminated processes of identity-formation and showed how the other is always a dialogical construction, rather than ontologically existing a priori. To work with a local grassroots organisation proved useful in many ways and, I believe, it should be recommended to those approaching the study of this geopolitical area. In fact, my foreignness provoked resistance and it could have greatly affected the results of this project (I may not have been able to gather information about the everyday in the ways that

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I did). On the contrary, to develop professional and personal relationships with Abart’s members facilitated and supported my exploration of the quotidian as well as neutralising my presence as the other in the eyes of people to whom I was introduced. To work within Abart also meant that my engagement with heterotopias became more concrete as I participated in the creation of its (counter)space. Further, my position as a researcher for (Re)collecting Mostar meant that I could access (and produce) novel bodies of evidence; for instance, designing two small surveys presented in Chapter 2 investigating cultural production became crucial to conceptualising the infrastructures of socialisation. It also allowed me to access interviewees conducted within the process. I am aware of the criticism from those who believe that a researcher should maintain an appropriate distance from her case study in order to observe with a greater level of impartiality. Yet, I do not believe that being impartial exists at all. I think there are ways to exercise criticality to control the selection and analysis of data. And, in this respect, to engage with a reflexive account of my fieldwork and the findings proved consistent with the idea of highlighting the limits of the researcher vis-à-vis the unfolding of the fieldwork. More importantly, I believe that academic research should engage the reality outside academia in order to contribute, with the knowledge produced, to the improvement of what has been studied. This could take the form of policy documents, but could also become an engagement with art production, as it was in my case. As such, this project (the account of Abart’s initiatives) is another way to support ongoing struggles to obtain a more equal system of representation, in both academia and political life generally.

References Agamben, Giorgio. 2015. Stasis: La Guerra civile come paradigma politico. Homo Sacer. Volume 2. Torino: Bollati Boringhieri. Lefebvre, Henri. 1991. The Production of Space. Maiden, Oxford and Victoria: Blackwell. ———. 2008. Critique of Everyday Life. Volume 2. Foundations for a Sociology of the Everyday. London and New York: Verso. Lefebvre, Henri. 2009 [1978]. “Space and the State.” In State, Space, World: Selected Essays, edited by Neil Brenner and Stuart Elden [Gerald Moore, Neil Brenner and Stuart Elden], 223–253. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press.

186  G. Carabelli Loraux, Nicole. 2002. The Divided City: On Memory and Forgetting in Ancient Athens. New York: Zone Books. Lorimer, Hayden. 2005. “Cultural Geography: The Busyness of Being ‘Morethan-Representational’.” Progress in Human Geography 29 (1): 83–94. https://doi.org/10.1191/0309132505ph531pr. OHR. 2012. “41st Report of the High Representative for Implementation of the Peace Agreement on Bosnia and Herzegovina to the Secretary-General of the United Nations.” Accessed October 27, 2017. http://www.ohr. int/?p=32771. Shapiro, Kam. 2008. Carl Schmitt and the Intensification of Politics. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield. Thrift, Nigel. 1999. “Steps to an Ecology of Place.” In Human Geography Today, edited by Doreen Massey, John Allen, and Phil Sarre, 295–321, Cambridge: Polity Press.

Index

A Abart, 32, 83, 85, 129, 133, 134, 136, 143, 154, 158, 159, 162, 173, 181, 183–185 Abrašević, 130, 131, 153, 158 Absolute space, 18, 175 Abstract space, 14, 18, 71, 174, 175 Activists, 33 Affective agency, 161 Agamben, Giorgio, 57, 181 Alienation, 25 Ambiguity, 107, 179 Amnesty, 181 Anđelić-Galić, Gordana, 149 Antagonism, 25 Anti-nationalist practices, 6 Archive of the City of Mostar, 145, 155, 160 Aristotle, 24, 181 Atmosphere of immobility, 106 Autogestion, 156

B Berlant, 110, 111, 114 Biopolitics, 178 Borders, 49 Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) seceded from Yugoslavia, 8, 10, 41, 45, 47, 66, 124 Bulevar, 1, 45, 86, 90, 93, 94, 147 C Change, idea of, 24 Citizen(s) of Mostar, 57, 59, 68 Citizenship, 26 City as a single entity, 54 City park, 91 Civil society, 124, 126, 128 Coffee, 102 Commission for Reforming the City of Mostar, 60 Complexities, 11 Consociational (power-sharing) system, 48, 67, 107

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018 G. Carabelli, The Divided City and the Grassroots, The Contemporary City, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-7778-4

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188  Index Constitutional law, 27 Constitutional reform(s), 48, 127 Contemporary BiH, 27 Contradictions, 24 Cosmos, 175 Creativity, 110, 113, 182 Croatian language, 103 Cultural programmes, 161 D Dark humour, 142 Dayton, 50 Dayton Peace Agreements, 47, 176 Desire, 114 Dialectical reading of social space, 15 Difference, 100, 102, 114, 182 Diffuse unemployment, 69 Divided city(ies), 1, 7, 11, 13, 14, 62, 184 E East Mostar, 46 Educational system, 176 Electoral constituency(ies), 55, 61 Electoral system, 54, 69 Electricity, 65 Elite interviews, 28 Ethnically divided societies, 9 Ethnic politics, 163 Ethnocracy, 49 Ethnographic accounts, 10 Ethnographic project, 28 Ethnography, 32, 184 Ethno-national, 21 Ethno-national categories, 50, 107, 108 Ethno-national identities, 4 Ethno-nationalism, 8, 20 Ethno-national membership, 70

Ethno-national quotas, 105 Ethno-national space, 178 EUAM. See European Union Administration of Mostar (EUAM) European city, 20, 56 European integration, 174 European powers, 18 European Union Administration of Mostar (EUAM), 51 Everyday, 99, 106 Everyday life, 10, 83, 172 Everydayness, 12, 101, 176 F False stories from Mostar’s history, 136 Federation of BiH, The, 48 Festival, 140–142 Festival of Art in Divided Cities, 134, 136, 141 Flat affect, 111 Foucault, 67 Frustration, 33 Fundraising, 143 G Grassroots activism, 123 Grassroots initiatives, 163 Grassroots organisation, 83, 184 H Habsburg heritage, 44 Hardt, Michael, 112 Heterogeneity, 91 Heterogeneous city, 153 Heterotopia(s), 156, 180, 182, 185 Heterotopic spaces, 124, 171

Index

HIT, 146 Homogeneity, 51 Homogenisation of space, 182 Homogenous, 70 Humour, 25 I Imagination, 110, 113 Immobile city, 163 Immobility, 2, 25, 111, 179 Individualna Radna Akcija 1, 148 Inertia, 3, 171 Infrastructures of socialisation, 85 International organisations, 94 Internationals, 2 J Jouissance, 114 Joyful atmosphere, 147 Joyful euphoria, 154 K Katić, Božidar, 146 Komunalno, 65 Korso, 88 L Larger protests of 2013 and 2014, 127 Lateral agency, 111 Lefebvre, Henri, 11, 13, 14, 17, 18, 42, 84, 123, 172, 182, 183 M Marx, Karl, 18 Maximal differences, 180 Memorial, 152

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Millennium Development Goals Fund (MDG-F), 143 Minimal differences, 180 More-than-representational theories, 184 Mostar as more-than-divided, 183 Multinational system, 62 N Nationalisms, 29 Nationalist narratives, 104 Neo-colonialist logic, 57 Networks of solidarities, 128 New administrative headquarter, 93 Nomos, 175 Non-sectarian groups, 10 North Camp, 63 O Office of the High Representative (OHR), 41, 52 OKC Abrašević (Youth Cultural Centre Abrašević), 129, 181 Old Bridge, 43, 44, 104 Orenčuk, Boris, 148 Ottoman history, 43 P Partisan Memorial, 149, 150 Pastoral power, 67 Peace Agreements, 48 Permanent crisis, 112 Permanent partition, 9 Pleasure and joy, 182 Political impasse, 62 Political reductionism, 56 Political struggle, 26 Position of immobility, 109

190  Index Post-war city, 2 Post-war infrastructures, 91 Practices of socialisation in pre-war Mostar, 86 Pre-war, 90 Privatisation of public spaces, 160 Produce change, 156 Production of space, 22, 25, 182 Promenade Lenin, 88 Public space, 153 Q Quotidian practices, 116 R Radna Akcija, 150 Reappropriating space, 161 Reductionism, 33, 50 (Re)collecting Mostar, 85, 143, 144, 185 Reflective nostalgia, 131, 158 Remembering in a post-conflict city, 90 Representational space(s), 16, 19, 21, 100, 116 Representations, 12 Representations of Mostar as divided, 30 Representations of space, 15, 19, 21, 173 Republika Srpska, 48 Resistance, 115 Resistance spatially, 155 Restructuring of the education system, 47 Revolutionary tool, art as the, 123 Rhythm(s), 106, 116, 159 Right to the city, 13, 26

S Sarcasm, 112, 142, 160 Scales, 26, 176 School curricula, 177 Secure past, 95 Sejdić-Finci case, 48 Site-specific art works, 159 Site-specific intervention(s), 146, 153 Social change, 22, 110, 114 Socialisation, 91 Social life, 90 Social safety, 67 Social space, 171 Space as a productive process, 23 Space as becoming, 22 Space as process, 14 Space is always political, 24 Spaces of fear, 95 Spanish Square, 89, 146 Spatial discomfort, 98 Spatial practice(s), 16, 21, 47, 84, 116, 176 Spatial triad, 15, 172 Special Commission for reforming the City of Mostar, 52 Spinoza, 112, 114 Spontaneity, 107 Stasis, 179, 181, 182 State, 178 Survival strategy, 111 T Territory, 178 To cross to the other side, 98 Trans-ethnic narod, 108 Two schools under one roof, 94 Two water providers, 64

Index

U Unpopular areas, 98 UN Urbanism research, 1 Urban, the, 26, 176 Urbicid (urbicide), 46, 91 W West Mostar, 46 Widespread corruption, 69

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Y Young/younger people, 93, 98 Youth Cultural Centre Abrašević, 66 Yugonostalgia, 132 Yugoslavia, 44