Liberty Leading the People: Satire, the Consociational State and Metapolitical Critique in Postwar Bosnia and Herzegovina
Abstract In the winter of 2010, on the two-year anniversary of the first major series of civic protests that followed the end of the Bosnian war, a group of Sarajevan activists put together a curious live sculpture meant as a reenactment—and reinterpretation—of Delacroix’ famous nineteenth-century painting Liberty Leading the People. This public performance represented an ironic play on both the socialist past and the promised democratic, European future. This paper considers how this particular satirical intervention can help us understand the pervasive popular disappointment with the fragmented, internationally managed post-war state, by developing the concept of metapolitical critique.