In the wake of devastating conflict in Bosnia-Herzegovina, the polarizing effects of everyday ethnic divisions, combined with hardened allegiances to ethnic nationalism and the rigid arrangements imposed in international peace-building agreements, have produced what Azra Hromadžić calls an "empty nation." Hromadžić explores the void created by unresolved tensions between mandated reunification initiatives and the segregation institutionalized by power-sharing democracy, and how these conditions are experienced by youths who have come of age in postconflict Bosnia-Herzegovina. Building on long-term ethnographic research at the first integrated school of Bosnia-Herzegovina, Citizens of an Empty Nation offers a ground-level view of how the processes of reunification play out at the Mostar Gymnasium. Hromadžić details the local effects of the tensions and contradictions inherent in the processes of postwar state-making, shedding light on the larger projects of humanitarian intervention, social cohesion, cross-ethnic negotiations, and citizenship. In this careful ethnography, the Mostar Gymnasium becomes a powerful symbol for the state's simultaneous segregation and integration as the school's shared halls, bathrooms, and computer labs foster dynamic spaces for a rich cross-ethnic citizenship—or else remain empty.
This is a story of hope, but also of peril. It began when our nation’s polarized political class started conscripting everyday citizens into its culture war. From their commanding heights in political parties, media, academia, and government, these partisans have attacked one another for years, but increasingly they’ve convinced everyday Americans to join the fray. Why should we feel such animosity toward our fellow citizens, our neighbors, even our own kin? Because we’ve fallen for the false narrative, eagerly promoted by pundits on the Left and the Right, that citizens who happen to vote Democrat or Republican are enthusiastic supporters of Team Blue or Team Red. Aside from a minority of party activists and partisans, however, most voters are simply trying to choose the lesser of two evils. The real threat to our union isn’t Red vs. Blue America, it’s the quiet collusion within our nation’s political class to take away that most American of freedoms: our right to self-governance. Even as partisans work overtime to divide Americans against one another, they’ve erected a system under which we ordinary citizens don’t have a voice in the decisions that affect our lives. From foreign wars to how local libraries are run, authority no longer resides with We the People, but amongst unaccountable officials. The political class has stolen our birthright and set us at one another’s throats. This is the story of how that happened and what we can do about it. America stands at a precipice, but there’s still time to reclaim authority over our lives and communities.
This book presents narratives of the social use of space in the divided city of Mostar, Bosnia-Herzegovina. Through the narratives of movement in the city, the work demonstrates how residents engage informally with conflict transformation through new movement and use of spaces. This book will appeal across the social sciences, and in particular to students, academics, and researchers in the fields of peace and conflict studies, political sociology, and human geography.
Around the world, border walls and nationalisms are on the rise as people express the desire to "take back" sovereignty. The contributors to this collection use ethnographic research in disputed and exceptional places to study sovereignty claims from the ground up. While it might immediately seem that citizens desire a stronger state, the cases of compromised, contested, or failed sovereignty in this volume point instead to political imaginations beyond the state form. Examples from Spain to Afghanistan and from Western Sahara to Taiwan show how calls to take back control or to bring back order are best understood as longings for sovereign agency. By paying close ethnographic attention to these desires and their consequences, The Everyday Lives of Sovereignty offers a new way to understand why these yearnings have such profound political resonance in a globally interconnected world. Contributors: Panos Achniotis, Jens Bartelson, Joyce Dalsheim, Dace Dzenovska, Sara L. Friedman, Azra Hromadžić, Louisa Lombard, Alice Wilson, and Torunn Wimpelmann.
In recent decades international and regional human rights norms have been increasingly applied to constitutional provisions, revealing significant tensions between primary political arrangements, such as power-sharing institutions, and human rights norms. This book argues that these tensions, generally framed as a peace versus justice dilemma, are built on an individualistic conception of justice that fails to account for the empirical reality in places characterized by ethnically based political exclusion and inequalities. By introducing the concept of 'Collective Equality' as a new theoretical basis for the law of peace, this timely book proposes a new approach for dealing with the tensions between peace-related arrangements and human rights norms. Through principled, pragmatic, and legal reasoning the book develops a new paradigm that captures more accurately what equality and human rights mean and require in the context of ethno-national conflicts, and provides potent guidance for advancing justice and peace in such places.
Tracing the history of refugee settlement in Fargo, North Dakota, from the 1980s to the present day, Race-ing Fargo focuses on the role that gender, religion, and sociality play in everyday interactions between refugees from South Sudan and Bosnia-Herzegovina and the dominant white Euro-American population of the city. Jennifer Erickson outlines the ways in which refugees have impacted this small city over the last thirty years, showing how culture, political economy, and institutional transformations collectively contribute to the racialization of white cities like Fargo in ways that complicate their demographics. Race-ing Fargo shows that race, religion, and decorum prove to be powerful forces determining worthiness and belonging in the city and draws attention to the different roles that state and private sectors played in shaping ideas about race and citizenship on a local level. Through the comparative study of white secular Muslim Bosnians and Black Christian Southern Sudanese, Race-ing Fargo demonstrates how cross-cultural and transnational understandings of race, ethnicity, class, and religion shape daily citizenship practices and belonging.
The book Challenging the Representation of Ethnically Divided Cities: Perspectives from Mostar questions the existing overrepresentation of Mostar as an ethnically ‘divided city’. While acknowledging the existence of internal borders, the chapters in this book assert that they are not solid nor fixed and, by exploring how they become material or immaterial, the book offers a deeper understanding of the city’s complex dynamics. Accordingly, the chapters in this book are attentive to how ethnic divides materialise or lose importance because of socio-political contingencies. Events, groups and spaces that promote reconciliation from the bottom-up are examined, not necessarily to assess their success and failures but rather to look at how they create networks, gain trust and form platforms that generate novel understandings of ethnic loyalties and party memberships. Further, and drawing both on the empirical data and theoretical reflections, this volume contributes to broader debates about ‘divided cities’ by suggesting the need to engage with these cities in their complexities rather than reducing them to their ethno-national divisions. The book engages with socio-political and economic complexities in order to shed light on how ethnic conflicts and resulting spatial partitioning are often just the surface of much more complex dynamics that are far less easy to disentangle and represent. The chapters in this book were originally published in Space and Polity.
This book engages with the relationship between ruins, dilapidation, and abandonment and cultural events performed within such spaces. Following the author’s fieldwork in the UK, Bosnia Herzegovina, Poland, Germany, Greece, and Sicily, chapters describe, investigate, and reflect upon live performance events which have taken place in sites of decay and abandonment. The book’s main focus is upon modern economic ruins and ruins of warfare. Each chapter provides several case studies based upon the author’s own site visits and interviews with actors, directors, producers, curators, writers, and other artists. The book contextualises these events within the wider framework of Ruin Studies and provides brief summaries of how we might understand the ruin in terms of time, politics, culture, and atmospheres. The book is particularly preoccupied with artists’ reasons and motivations for placing performance events in ruined spaces and how these work dramaturgically.
Alena Ledeneva invites you on a voyage of discovery, to explore society’s open secrets, unwritten rules and know-how practices. Broadly defined as ‘ways of getting things done’, these invisible yet powerful informal practices tend to escape articulation in official discourse. They include emotion-driven exchanges of gifts or favours and tributes for services, interest-driven know-how (from informal welfare to informal employment and entrepreneurship), identity-driven practices of solidarity, and power-driven forms of co-optation and control. The paradox, or not, of the invisibility of these informal practices is their ubiquity. Expertly practised by insiders but often hidden from outsiders, informal practices are, as this book shows, deeply rooted all over the world, yet underestimated in policy. Entries from the five continents presented in this volume are samples of the truly global and ever-growing collection, made possible by a remarkable collaboration of over 200 scholars across disciplines and area studies. By mapping the grey zones, blurred boundaries, types of ambivalence and contexts of complexity, this book creates the first Global Map of Informality. The accompanying database is searchable by region, keyword or type of practice, so do explore what works, how, where and why! Praise for The Global Encyclopaedia of Informality ‘The Global Encyclopaedia of Informality represents the beginning of a new era in informality studies. With its wealth of information, diversity, scope, theoretical innovation and artistic skill, this collection touches on all the aspects of social and cultural complexity that need to be integrated into policy thinking.’ Predrag Cveti?anin, Centre for Empirical Cultural Studies of South-East Europe, Belgrade, Serbia ‘This is a monumental achievement – an indispensable reference for anyone in the social sciences interested in informality.’ Martin Holbraad, Professor of Social Anthropology, UCL, and editor-in-chief of Social Analysis ‘This impressive work helps us understand our complex times by showing how power develops through informal practices, mobilizing emotional, cognitive and relational mechanisms in strategies of survival, but also of camouflage and governance.’ Donatella della Porta, Director of Centre of Social Movements Studies, Scuola normale superiore, Firenze, Italy ‘An impressive, informative, and intriguing collection. With evident passion and patience, the team of 250 researchers insightfully portrays the multiplicity of informal and often invisible expressions of human interdependence.’ Subi Rangan, Professor of Strategy and Management, INSEAD, Fontainebleau, France ‘This compendium of terms used in different cultures to express aspects of informal economy provides a unique supplement to studies of a major (yet understated by academic economics) social issue. It will be of key significance for in-depth teaching of sociology, economics and history.’ Teodor Shanin, OBE Professor and President of the Moscow School of Social and Economic Sciences ‘Modern states have sought to curb, control and subdue informality. The entries in the Global Encyclopaedia demonstrate the endurance of informality over such efforts. More recently, the rise and political success of anti-establishment movements in so many parts of the world is a wide-ranging challenge and delegitimisation of national and transnational formal institutions of governance. Understanding the perceived shortcomings of formal institutions and the appeal of anti-establishment movements must at least in part be informed by a study of informality and its networks. This Encyclopaedia is essential reading if we wish to understand and engage with these challenges of our age.’ Fredrik Galtung, Chairman, Integrity Action
This interdisciplinary book analyses different contexts where security concerns have an impact on institutional or everyday practices and routines in the lives of ordinary people. Creating a dialogue between the fields of International Relations, Peace and Conflict Studies, Sociolinguistics, Education and Anthropology, this book addresses core themes associated with conflict and security – peacebuilding, refugee settlement, nationalism, surveillance and sousveillance – and examines them as they manifest in everyday spaces and practices. Seven empirical studies are presented that bring ethnographic and/or close-up interactional lenses to practices of security in schools, refugee centres, care homes, city streets and roadsides. Drawing on fieldwork and data from Cyprus, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Sweden, Germany and the US, the chapters explore what notions of suspicion, peace, conflict and threat mean and how they are manifested in people’s lived experiences. This book will be of much interest to students of Critical Security Studies, Anthropology, Sociology, Sociolinguistics and International Relations in general.
