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When the “People” Leave: On the Limits of Nationalist (Bio)Politics in Postwar Bosnia-Herzegovina

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 November 2020

Larisa Kurtović Open the ORCID record for Larisa Kurtović [Opens in a new window]
Larisa Kurtović*
Affiliation:
School of Sociological and Anthropological Studies, University of Ottawa, Ottawa, Canada
*
*Corresponding author. Email: lkurtovi@uottawa.ca
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Abstract

This article examines the social and political effects produced by the most recent wave of emigration in postwar Bosnia, widely understood to be the result of continued political instability and economic decline that followed the 1992–95 war. Drawing on ethnographic research in a deindustrialized Bosnian town and analysis of popular discourses seeking to make sense of this new wave of departures, I show how the phenomenon of postwar exit impacts those staying behind and inspires new forms of reflection that link past histories of violence to more recent forms of dispossession. The emergence of such forms of historical consciousness reveals that postwar migration is haunted both by the memory of wartime expulsions and ethnic cleansing, as well as by the often-unacknowledged violence of postwar economic restructuring glossed as the postsocialist transition. In asking what happens to nationalist regimes, as well as scholarship on nationalist politics, when the “people” leave, I demonstrate the need to analyze the ongoing out-migration both in terms of Bosnia’s historical specificity and global political-economic dynamics. In so doing, I show how absences created by these departures create new vantage points that bring to light and expose unsettling political configurations left behind by the Bosnian war.

Keywords

Bosnia-Herzegovinanationalist politicslabor migrationemptinessethnic cleansing
Type
Article
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Nationalities Papers , Volume 49 , Issue 5 , September 2021 , pp. 873 - 892
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© The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Association for the Study of Nationalities

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