Normalizing democracy and human rights: discipline, resistance and carceralization in Croatia's Euro-Atlantic integration

Abstract

This paper explores the mechanisms of governance put in place by international organizations in the process of the pacification and Europeanization of Croatia, and the local administrations' strategies of resistance. In Croatia, international organizations enacted processes of subjectification organized around idioms of democracy and human rights, and deployed disciplinary and governmental methods for monitoring, transforming and steering the state's behaviour. These practices also inscribed spaces of resistance that have been used by different local governmental constituencies to accommodate, contest or hijack international agendas. This paper provides insights on how international regimes of practices in the post-Cold War era operate through isomorphic but decentralized normalizing processes. In doing so, it traces out the interaction between these regimes and local actors. Relying on governmentality theories, this paper also provides empirical support for conceptualizations of power as the structure of human interactions, and of resistance as strategic transformative action. Critiques of governmentality, inspired by Agamben, conceptualized power as domination, and resistance as total rejection of its inscriptions. The case of Croatia shows that international normalizing regimes of practices do not produce totalizing effects of domination, but regimes of carceralization that are always met with resistance. International regimes elicit the proliferation and intensification of mechanisms for monitoring, assessing and steering behaviour. However, the effect of these regimes is not the obliteration of political life. Instead, normalization opens spaces for continuously renovated modalities of resistance. Finally, this paper questions romanticized representations of 'resistance' as a path to 'liberation'. The political effects of power and resistance are ambiguous, and need to be explored in their contingent interactions.