The privatisation of home and hope: Return, reforms and the foreign intervention in Bosnia-Herzegovina

Dialectical Anthropology

Volumn 30, Issue 3-4, 2006, Pages 177-199

  Jansen, Stef ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF MANCHESTER   (United Kingdom)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 34347209772     PISSN: 03044092     EISSN: 15730786     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1007/s10624-007-9005-x     Document Type: Article

References (72)

1. See e.g. Stef Jansen, "Troubled locations: return, the life course and transformations of 'home' in Bosnia-Herzegovina," Focaal 49 (2007 forthcoming);
2. Stef Jansen, "Remembering with a difference: clashing memories of Bosnian conflict in everyday life," in Bosnia: the new mosaic?, eds. Xavier Bougarel, Ger Duijzings & Elissa Helms (London: Ashgate, 2007);
3. Stef Jansen, "Why do they hate us? Everyday Serbian nationalist knowledge of Muslim hatred," Journal of Mediterranean Studies 13:2 (2003): 215-237. I carried out fifteen months of ethnographic research (2000-2001) amongst displaced and returned Bosnians of various nationalities in North-East Bosnia, in Serbia, in the Netherlands and in Australia (as part of a project developed with Andy Dawson and supported by the Toyota Foundation and the Leverhulme Trust) but also rely on over a decade of ongoing field research in Croatia, Serbia and Kosovo. I thank Dina Haynes, Tim Waters and the anonymous reviewers for very useful constructive criticism.
4. I coined the blanket term Foreign Intervention Agencies to refer to inter-governmental structures such as the Office of the High Representative (OHR), the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), the various armed forces, as well as to major other so-called non-governmental organisations involved in reconstruction, most of which are dependent on the same governments. I focus on the conglomerate of intervening actors under the dominant US/West-European/ Japanese umbrella and leave aside the specific role played by certain others, such as Gulf State governments and religious organisations. While using a monolithic term may fail to convey the variety within and between those organisations, this does reflect representations amongst both Bosnians and representatives of Foreign Intervention Agencies. The latter prefer the even more problematic term 'International Community', as do the mainstream media. Except in more or less formal contexts controlled by precisely those Foreign Intervention Agencies, I have rarely ever heard Bosnians using this term. Instead they equally sweepingly referred to 'stranci' ('the foreigners'), sometimes specifying which state a particular organisation originated from: e.g. 'the Italians', 'the Danes', etc.
5. I use the term 'Bosnian' non-nationally, standing for 'Bosnian-Herzegovinian'.
6. See Stef Jansen, "National numbers in context: maps and stats in representations of the post-Yugoslav wars," Identities: Global Studies and Power and Culture 12:1 (2005): 45-68.
7. Xavier Bougarel, Bosnie: anatomie d'un conflit (Paris: La Découverte, 1996).
8. Following local usage, I use the term DP to refer to the category of Internally Displaced Persons.
9. Sophie Albert, "The return of refugees to Bosnia-Herzegovina: peacebuilding with people," International Peacekeeping 4:3 (1997): 1-23;
10. Richard Black, "Conceptions of 'home' and the political geography of refugee repatriation: between assumption and contested reality in Bosnia-Herzegovina," Applied Geography 22:2 (2002): 123-138;
11. Caroline Phuong, '"Freely to return': reversing ethnic cleansing in Bosnia-Herzegovina," Journal of Refugee Studies 13:2 (2000): 165-183.
12. English-language starting points for a wider discussion on foreign policy making with regard to Bosnia-Herzegovina include Sumantra Bose, Bosnia after Dayton: nationalist partition and international intervention (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2002);
13. Steven Burg & Paul Shoup, The war in Bosnia-Herzegovina: ethnic conflict and international intervention (Armonk: ME Sharpe, 1999);
14. David Campbell, National deconstruction: violence, identity and justice in Bosnia (Minneapolis: Minnesota UP, 1998);
15. David Chandler, Bosnia: faking democracy after Dayton (London: Pluto Press, 1999);
16. Gerald Knaus & Felix Martin, "Travails of the European raj," Journal of Democracy 14:3 (2003): 60-75;
17. Gearóid Ó Tuathail, "Between a holocaust and a quagmire: 'Bosnia' in the US geo-political imagination," in Critical geopolitics (London: Routledge 1996);
18. Gearóid Ó Tuathail, "Embedding Bosnia-Herzegovina in Euro-Atlantic structures: from Dayton to Brussels," Eurasian Geography and Economics 46:1 (2005), 51-67;
19. Žarko Papić, ed., Policies of international support to South-East European countries: lessons (not) learnt from Bosnia-Herzegovina (Sarajevo: Open Society Institute, 2001).
20. Stef Jansen & Staffan Löfving, eds., Struggles for home: violence, hope and the movement of people (Oxford: Berghahn, forthcoming).
21. See Jansen, "National numbers". Unless otherwise stated, all figures are taken from United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees statistics on www.unhcr.ba. 11 Jansen, "Troubled locations", "Remembering with a difference", "Why do they hate us?". See also Ayaki Ito, "Politicisation of minority return in Bosnia-Herzegovina- the first five years examined," International Journal of Refugee Law 13:1/2 (2001): 98-122;
22. Lisa D'Onofrio, "Welcome Home? Minority Return in South-East Republika Srpska," Sussex Migration Working Paper No. 19 (2004); Sophie Albert, "The Return of Refugees".
23. Jansen, "Troubled locations", "Remembering with a difference", "Why do they hate us?".
24. E.g. Vesna Lukić & Vladimir Nikitović, "Refugees from Bosnia and Herzegovina in Serbia: a study of refugee selectivity," International Migration 42:4 (2004): 102. UNHCR/CRPC, Return, relocation and property rights: a discussion paper (Sarajevo: UNHCR/CRPC, 1997);
25. UNHCR, Survey on DPs in Tuzla Canton from the Podrinje Area (Tuzla: UNHCR, 2003).
26. Charles Philpott, "Though the dog is dead, the pig must be killed: finishing with property restitution to Bosnia-Herzegovina's IDPs and refugees," Journal of Refugee Studies 18:1 (2005): 14.
27. Finn Stepputat, "Repatriation and the politics of space: the case of the Mayan diaspora," Journal of Refugee Studies 7:2/3 (1994): 175-185.
28. E.g. Madawi Al-Rasheed, "The myth of return: Iraqi Arab and Assyrian refugees in London," Journal of Refugee Studies 7:2/3 (1994): 199-219;
29. Roger Zetter, "Reconceptualizing the myth of return: continuity and transition amongst the Greek-Cypriot refugees of 1974," Journal of Refugee Studies 12:1 (1999): 1-22.
30. Muhammad Anwar, The myth of return: Pakistanis in Britain (London: Heinemann, 1979).
31. Zetter, op. cit.: 12.
32. See UNHCR, Returnee monitoring study: minority returnees to Republika Srpska (Sarajevo: UNHCR, 2000);
33. World Bank, Bosnia-Herzegovina: local level institutions and social capital study (Vol. 1) (Washington: World Bank, ECSSD, 2002). Similar priorities seem to be prevalent amongst 'actual' Sarajevo returnees
34. see Anders Stefansson, "Sarajevo suffering: homecoming and the hierarchy of homeland hardship," in Fran Markowitz & Anders Stefansson, eds., Homecomings. Unsettling paths return (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2004): 54-75.
35. Don Kalb "Afterword: globalism and post-socialist prospects," Chris Hann, ed., Postsocialism: ideals, ideologies and local practice (London: Routledge, 2002).
36. E.g. Chris Hann, ed., Postsocialism: ideals, ideologies and practices in Eurasia (London: Routledge, 2002);
37. Roland Paris, At war's end: building peace after civil conflict (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2004);
38. Staffan Löfving, "Liberal emplacement: violence, home, and the transforming space of popular protest in Central America," in Stef Jansen & Staffan Löfving, eds., Struggles for home;
39. David Harvey, Spaces of hope (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2000). For a critique contextualising these processes in East/West and development debates
40. see Elizabeth Dauphinée, "Faith, hope and neoliberalism: mapping economies of violence in the margins of Europe," Dialectical Anthopology 27 (2003): 189-203.
41. Cf. Andrew Gilbert, "The past in parenthesis: (non)post-socialism in post-war Bosnia-Herzegovina," Anthropology Today 22:4 (2006): 14-18.
42. Even many critiques of the Dayton project rely precisely on the neoliberal aversion to politics as a societymaking project, as highlighted by Gearóid Ó Tuathail G. & Carl Dahlman, "The effort to reverse ethnic cleansing in Bosnia-Herzegovina: the limits of returns," Eurasian geography and economics 45:6 (2004): 439-464.
43. Unless otherwise indicated, all figures in this section are taken from the impeccably 'pro-reforms' Economist Intelligence Unit [www.eiu.com].
44. Osloboaenje, "Doktori liječe nezaposlenost" 17 March 2001.
45. Peter Andreas, "The clandestine political economy of war and peace in Bosnia," International Studies Quarterly 48:1 (2004): 29-51;
46. Michael Pugh, "Post-war political economy in Bosnia-Herzegovina: the spoils of peace," Global Governance 8:4 (2002): 467-482;
47. Michael Pugh, Neil Cooper & Jonathan Goodhand, War economies in a regional context: challenges of transformation (Boulder: Lynn Riener, 2004);
48. CarlUlrik Schierup, ed., Scramble for tlte Balkans: nationalism, globalism and the political economy of reconstruction (Basingstoke: MacMillan, 1999).
49. Michael Lokshin & Thomas A. Mroz, Gender and Poverty: a life cycle approach to the analysis of the differences in gender outcomes (World Bank Policy Research Working Paper No. 3151, 2003).
50. In 2000, average monthly pensions were under USD 90 (Federation) and under USD 60 (RS). Even in the richer Federation, half of all pensioners received less than USD 75 (Oslobodenje, "Penzija ni pola plaće", 30 October 2000). Due to extremely irregular payments of wages and benefits, the term 'monthly' should not be taken literally here.
51. Marcelo Bisogno & Alberto Chong, "On the determinants of inequality in BosniaHerzegovina," Economies of Transition 10:2 (2002): 311-337;
52. "Poverty and inequality in Bosnia-Herzegovina after the civil war," World Development 30:1 (2002): 61-75.
53. UNHCR, Extremely vulnerable individuals (Sarajevo: UNHCR, 1999); Daunting prospects. Minority women: obstacles to their return and integration. (Sarajevo: UNHCR, 2000).
54. World Bank, A social assessment of Bosnia-Herzegovina (Washington: World Bank, ECSSD, 1999);
55. Bosnia-Herzegovina poverty assessment (Vol. II): data on poverty (Washington: World Bank, 2003).
56. Economist Intelligence Unit, Country Profiles/ Reports Bosnia-Herzegovina (London: The Economist, 2002/2003/2004).
57. Cf. Kalb, "Afterword", 320. Note that in Yugoslavia, in 1991, 20% of all flats, particularly in the cities, were socially owned and allocated with long term, inheritable leases ['stanarsko pravo', 'right to residence'], usually organised through the workplace.
58. Jansen, "Troubled locations"; Stef Jansen, Antinacionalizam: etnografija otpora u Zagrebu i Beogradu (Beograd: XX Vek, 2005);
59. Stef Jansen, "Who's afraid of white socks? Towards a critical understanding of post-Yugoslav urban self-perceptions," Ethnologia Balkanica 9 (2005), 151-167.
60. Judith Owens-Manley & Reed Coughlan, "Adaptation of refugees during cross-cultural transitions: Bosnian refugees in Upstate New York," Levitt Report, Hamilton University (2000);
61. H. Russell Searight, "Bosnian immigrants' perceptions of the US health care system: a qualitative interview study" Journal of Immigrant Health 5:2 (2002): 87-93.
62. From the entity Ministries of Health's 1999 Health Expenditures and Perceptions Surveys [both available on www.wordbank.org].
63. Paul Stubbs, "'Social sector' or the diminution of social policy? Regulating welfare regimes in contemporary Bosnia-Herzegovina," In Žarko Papić, ed., Policies of international support to South-East European countries: lessons (not) learnt from Bosnia and Herzegovina (Sarajevo: Open Society Institute, 2001): 95-107;
64. Paul Stubbs, "Globalisation, memory and welfare regimes in transition: towards an anthropology of transnational policy transfers," International Journal of Social Welfare 11 (2002): 321-330.
65. See Jansen, "Troubled locations"; Stef Jansen "The violence of memories: local narratives of the past after ethnic cleansing in Croatia," Rethinking History 6:1 (2002): 77-93;
66. Stef Jansen, "The (dis)comfort of conformism: post-war nationalism and coping with powerlessness in Croatian villages," in Ton Otto, Henrik Thrane & Helle Vandkilde, eds., Warfare and society (Aarhus: Aarhus UP, 2006).
67. See Lukić & Nikitović, op. cit.
68. I use the term 'modernisation' here not as a normative social theoretical paradigm but as an emic term for a future-oriented sense of improvement and progress (cf. Jansen, "Who's afraid"; Antinacionalizam).
69. Cf. Marta Bruno, "Playing the co-operation game: strategies around international aid in post-socialist Russia," in Sue Bridger & Frances Pine, eds., Surviving post-socialism (London: Routledge, 1998): 170-187;
70. Paul Stubbs, "NGO work with forced migrants in Croatia: lineages of a global middle class?," International Peace-keeping 4:4 (1997): 50-60.
71. BHT Dnevnik (evening TV news), 09 February 2001; Vedrana Seksan, "Ostati ovdje?," BH Dani 19 January 2001.
72. UNDP, Early warning, quarterly report (Sarajevo, Jan-Mar 2004): 54.