Collaborative graphic ethnography can generate new ways of identifying, materializing, and documenting political possibility in what otherwise seems like an overdetermined world, and in doing so, offers a model for practicing anthropology differently. We come to these insights through our work in the embattled Bosnian detergent factory “Dita,” located on the outskirts of the post-industrial city of Tuzla, whose workers scored an unprecedented victory when they managed to preserve their factory and restart production despite the threat of bankruptcy and liquidation. In researching and telling the story of their struggle and victory through this innovative format, we build upon the historical popularity of comics in former Yugoslavia, as well as contemporary experimentation with the form among anti-corruption activists in Bosnia-Herzegovina. We explore ethnographic and political affordances of sequential art and the graphic form for an engaged or activist anthropology, including its capacity to visualize and materialize the immaterial and overlooked aspects of politics, mitigate anthropology’s extractivist tendencies, enlist the imagination and participation of readers in directions both hoped for and unanticipated, and engage and animate multiple local and international publics.  

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.

ABSTRACT In this introduction to special issue ‘After Utopia: Leftist Imaginaries and Activist Politics in the Postsocialist World’, we explore the theoretical implications for thinking about activism as a form of historically situated practice in the former socialist world. Building on insights from the papers included in this issue, which draw on ethnographic research in Ukraine, Armenia, Bosnia and along the Balkan refugee route, our introduction considers both the fragility and resilience of leftist imaginaries in the aftermath of lost utopian dreams of socialism and the betrayed promises of post 1989 democratic transformation. We do so in four moves, (i) by offering a reframing of postsocialism as a problem-space of historical and political consciousness; (ii) by interrogating the figure of the activist in its self-conscious and ethnographically embedded guises; (iii) by heeding Sherry Ortner’s call to think beyond ‘dark anthropology’ and finally, (iv) by considering what it might mean to imagine, and model, political alternatives in both activist and scholarly work.

ABSTRACT This paper chronicles the ongoing efforts of several groups of Bosnian activists, artists and academics, to create archives of the often forgotten, and nowadays variously threatened, heritage of political and social life during Yugoslav socialism. Postsocialist archives in other parts of Eastern Europe have typically been motivated by the need to ‘settle accounts’ with communism, understood in this context to be a totalitarian project. By contrast, these ongoing archiving efforts in the postwar and postsocialist Bosnia-Herzegovina, are created in order to recuperate and repurpose the unrealized potentials of Yugoslav socialism, and to use this history to reseed contemporary political imaginaries. I show how these post-Yugoslav activist-archives are working to recover a form of transformational historical subjectivity which seems profoundly necessary in the current political moment, marked by political disenchantment and the devastating effects of the postsocialist transition.

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.

In February 2014, Bosnia-Herzegovina witnessed its largest and most dramatic wave of civic protests since the end of the 1992–1995 war and the signing of Dayton Peace Accords. Confrontations with the police and the destruction of dozens of government buildings subsequently gave way to the formation of plenums – town hall assemblies – where protesters collectively articulated their grievances against the country's corrupt and deeply unpopular political authorities. The plenums emphasized Bosnia's pressing problems of widespread unemployment, rising poverty and corruption, and in so doing sidelined the ossified nationalist rhetoric and identity politics. This article analyzes the main representations of protests, and the sociopolitical and economic pressures that helped usher in this massive public uprising. We demonstrate how protesters sought to break out of the impasses of post-Dayton ethnic politics by actively recuperating and representing alternative visions of participatory politics and popular sovereignty associated with socialist-era imaginaries and embodied in the plenum. We argue that these efforts signal the emergence of a new kind of prefigurative politics that provide alternative practices of political organization, decision-making, and sociability in Bosnia and beyond.

This paper reflects upon the socio-economic legacies of Dayton Peace Accords, and the ways in which these legacies were brought into focus by the 2014 Bosnian Uprising. This wave of protests, which started in February of 2014 in the industrial city of Tuzla but quickly spread all over the country, was the (un)anticipated result of rising popular indignation over high unemployment, economic decline and general sense of futurelessness. Protesters attacked both symbolic and literal centres of power, targeting local political elites whose self-serving behaviours and insolent attitudes helped deepen the post-war political and economic crisis. Combining long-term ethnographic research of post-war grassroots politics with more recent investigations of the effects of post-war deindustrialization, this paper anchors the new politics of indignation in Bosnia in its broader historical context. The 2014 protests, this paper argues, demarkate Dayton Bosnia as a postsocialist space, deeply transformed by ongoing socio-economic restructuring, and changing conceptions of political solidarity, social justice and political action.