Bosnian Fluxes: Belonging, Caring, and Reckoning in a Post-Cold War Semiperiphery

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David Henig Jaroslav Klepal

Bosnian Fluxes

Belonging, Caring, and Reckoning in a Post-Cold War Semiperiphery

David Henig, Jaroslav Klepal, Ondřej Žíla

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English

Routledge
11 August 2025

Peace studies & conflict resolution; Ethnic studies; Public opinion & polls

Series: Southeast European Studies

This volume offers unique conceptual and empirical insights into ordinary lives in the violent aftermath of the Cold War. Considering Bosnia and Herzegovina as a comprehensive coordinate of larger social, political, and economic fluxes, it demonstrates why the widely used tropes of stuckedness, immobility, and frozenness associated with post-Cold War semiperipheries need to be understood in the context of excessive upheavals that mobilise or suspend modes of belonging, care, and reckoning. Bringing together emerging and leading scholars from across the social sciences with long-term research experience in Bosnia and Herzegovina, along with scholars who have been documenting similar processes in other parts of the world, this volume develops new analytical heuristics and interventions into global post-Cold War studies. It will be of particular interest to researchers and students of Anthropology, Sociology, Human Geography, Contemporary History, and Area Studies along with those studying the history, politics, economy, and culture of semiperipheries.

Edited by: David Henig, Jaroslav Klepal, Ondřej Žíla
Imprint: Routledge
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions: Height: 234mm, Width: 156mm,
Weight: 453g
ISBN: 9781032818993
ISBN 10: 1032818999
Series: Southeast European Studies
Pages: 204
Publication Date: 11 August 2025
Audience: College/higher education , Professional and scholarly , Primary , Undergraduate
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Forthcoming

List of contributors Lists of figures Foreword: The post-Cold War at last Heonik Kwon Acknowledgements Toward an anthropology of fluxes in the post-Cold War world: An introduction David Henig, Jaroslav Klepal, and Ondřej Žíla PART I – THE SLIPPERY GROUNDS OF BELONGING 1. Dynamic ores: An underground perspective on the Balkans Sabrina Perić 2. Nostalgia in flux: Remembering Yugoslavia amid ethnic and economic precarities Jelena Golubović 3. Generation Dayton: Youth, social engagement, and neoliberal subjectivities in Republika Srpska Michele Bianchi Part I commentary: ‘In exile in our own country’: Aporetic belonging in a de facto state Rebecca Bryant PART II – CARE ON THE MOVE 4. Care, control, and covid: Pandemic responses and the ‘migrant crisis’ in the Bihać region Elissa Helms 5. Seeing like a social worker: On social protection, improvisation, and veze in Bihać Azra Hromadžić 6. Worker experiments in humanitarian politics Andrew Gilbert Part II commentary: Politics and care’s descriptive aim Clara Han PART III – NUMBERS IN FLUX 7. Numbers, emigration, and care in Bosnia and Herzegovina Stef Jansen 8. Body politics: The identification of the missing and the persistence of denial Admir Jugo and Sarah Wagner Part III commentary: Numbers in flux: Visible and invisible, present and absent Bjørn Enge Bertelsen Index

David Henig is an Associate Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Utrecht University and Editor-in-Chief of the journal History and Anthropology. He is the author of numerous articles on Islam, charitable economies and the ethics of giving, and postsocialism in Southeast Europe. More recently, he has been writing on war ecologies in the Anthropocene. He is the author of Remaking Muslim Lives: Everyday Islam in Postwar Bosnia and Herzegovina, and he co-edited Economies of Favour after Socialism, and Where is the Good in the World? Ethical Life between Social Theory and Philosophy. Jaroslav Klepal is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Anthropology, Faculty of Humanities, Charles University. He obtained his PhD in Anthropology from Charles University. In his dissertation based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in Bosnia and Herzegovina he explored the enactments of posttraumatic stress disorder and reconsidered the approaches to this subject in medical anthropology. His researches on war veterans, the ontological politics of trauma, and medical technologies have resulted in book chapters and articles that were published in journals such as Medical Anthropology, Science as Culture, or Southeast European and Black Sea Studies. Ondřej Žíla is an Assistant Professor at the Institute of International Studies, Charles University. He received his PhD in Modern World History from Charles University. His research focuses on the consequences of the transition from war to peace in the countries of the former Yugoslavia. On the basis of his long-term fieldwork in Bosnia and Herzegovina, he published a monograph titled ‘You Are My Only Homeland.’ Ethno-demographic changes in Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1945–2013 (in Czech) and he has also published numerous articles in journals such as the Political Geography, Nations and Nationalism, Journal of Refugee Studies, Nationalities Papers, and East European Politics and Society.

Reviews for Bosnian Fluxes: Belonging, Caring, and Reckoning in a Post-Cold War Semiperiphery

""Bosnian Fluxes challenges the static analytical frameworks of postsocialist, postcolonial, and postconflict that commonly preordain imaginations of possible life since the Cold War. Instead, the editors foreground multiplicities of kinetic agitation, or flux, as being at the heart of perpetual becoming. A stellar line-up of contributors showcase how categories of belonging, caring, and reckoning have porous membranes where socio-political relationships are in flux, sedimenting and solidifying in places while vibrantly fizzing toward novel connections in others. Bosnia and Herzegovina is the spatio-temporal coordinate from which to launch a wide-ranging analysis of how fluxes of people, environments, technologies, institutions, and politics traverse the post-Cold War world. As such, this volume will appeal far beyond its regional grounding, weaving as it does a rich tapestry of ethnography and theory that will appeal to scholars of political anthropology and nation-building, social theory, and humanitarian policy."" - Daniel M. Knight, University of St Andrews, author of Vertiginous Life: An Anthropology of Time and the Unforeseen. ""Unlike many works that resort to “crisis” or “deadlock” to explain postwar Bosnia and Herzegovina, this wide-ranging collection of essays shifts our attention to the underlying social currents that make up everyday life in this place. By exploring a variety of interrelated subjects, from the economies of care-giving to the politics of identifying missing persons, this volume makes a major contribution to a better understanding not only of Bosnia and Herzegovina, but also of global connections that shape our post-Cold War world."" - Edin Hajdarpasic, Professor of History, Loyola University Chicago, author of Whose Bosnia? Nationalism and Political Imagination in the Balkans, 1840–1914.