Cannibal states, empty bellies: Protest, history and political imagination in post-Dayton Bosnia

Abstract

In February 2014, Bosnia-Herzegovina witnessed its largest and most dramatic wave of civic protests since the end of the 1992–1995 war and the signing of Dayton Peace Accords. Confrontations with the police and the destruction of dozens of government buildings subsequently gave way to the formation of plenums – town hall assemblies – where protesters collectively articulated their grievances against the country's corrupt and deeply unpopular political authorities. The plenums emphasized Bosnia's pressing problems of widespread unemployment, rising poverty and corruption, and in so doing sidelined the ossified nationalist rhetoric and identity politics. This article analyzes the main representations of protests, and the sociopolitical and economic pressures that helped usher in this massive public uprising. We demonstrate how protesters sought to break out of the impasses of post-Dayton ethnic politics by actively recuperating and representing alternative visions of participatory politics and popular sovereignty associated with socialist-era imaginaries and embodied in the plenum. We argue that these efforts signal the emergence of a new kind of prefigurative politics that provide alternative practices of political organization, decision-making, and sociability in Bosnia and beyond.

Interpellating the state

“…In recent years, there has emerged a new image of the “cannibal state” ( država koja jede svoje ljude ; Kurtović and Hromadžić ), which more forcefully indexes the problem of state capture by nationalist parties and its tremendous social and moral costs. What's more, 10 years after the anti‐Branković campaign, activists are beginning to feel this state on their own skin with increasing frequency.…”

“…Although my own involvement with this group began after the 2008 mass demonstrations ended, I spent two years following the organization's work, both as a resident anthropologist and an active member, and I continue to write about its various projects (e.g., Kurtović ; Kurtović and Hromadžić ). Over time, activist strategies went from playful and provocative to openly hostile, such as during the 2014 February uprisings, in which protesters set various government buildings on fire throughout the country.…”

‘Sistem te laže!’: the anti‐ruling class mobilisation of high school students in Bosnia and Herzegovina

“…Citizens united against a common enemy that they felt was not capable of ruling the country. This korumpani sistem [‘corrupt system’] was the corrupt ruling class of ‘parties that compose the structure of government, the NGOs which work for these parties, and the international organisations which through their actions support the status quo ’ (Kurtović and Hromadžić : 285). The same common enemy had been singled out during the protests in Jajce and Travnik.…”

“…Due to their prevalence of personal interests over the future of Bosnians, the ruling class of politicians had deliberately maintained the ethnic segregation in education. Citizens' distrust in immoral politics has been present in Yugoslav and Bosnian society for a long time (Touquet : 398), but it was usually paired with strong feelings of disempowerment and the basic need for survival in a corruption‐dominated system (Kurtović and Hromadžić : 269). The protests that happened in quick succession across the country were the first major signs that active political mobilisation against this system could take place and could make an impact.…”

After Utopia: Leftist imaginaries and activist politics in the postsocialist world

“…As a group of collaborators, we follow activists seeking to imagine and enact alternative futures in the aftermath of state socialist projects. We are interested in the broader theoretical implications of thinking about political work and imagination as historical artefactsnot only as situated and contextually boundbut really as always providing a certain kind of relationship to historical narratives, modes of emplotment and horizons of expectations (Scott 2004;Bonilla 2015;Kurtović and Hromadžić 2017). As this collection of essays makes clear, there is nothing straightforward about this relationship between history and political action; this relationship is profoundly contingent, and to understand it, one has to also develop a more sophisticated theory of history and historicity itself.…”