Conjuring “the people”: The 2013 Babylution protests and desire for political transformation in postwar Bosnia-Herzegovina
In June 2013, a breakdown in the routine functioning of state bureaucracy sparked the largest and up to that point most signifi cant wave of protests in postwar Bosnia-Herzegovina, named the Bosnian Babylution. Th e protest centered on the plight of newborn babies who, because of this particular administrative problem, could no longer be issued key documents, even to travel outside the country for life-saving medical care. Th ese events exposed the profound nature of the representational crisis gripping this postwar, postsocialist, and postintervention state that has emerged at the intersection of ethnic hyper-representation and the lived experience of the collapse of biopolitical care. Yet, as this analysis shows, this crisis has also helped unleash new forms of political desire for revolutionary rupture and reconstitution of the postwar political.