Author(s): Kurtovic, Larisa | Advisor(s): Yurchak, Alexei | Abstract: This dissertation is an ethnography of contemporary Bosnia-Herzegovina that examines the central conundrum of the country's postwar life: the seeming contradiction between the high levels of political dissatisfaction among its citizens and the absence, perhaps even the impossibility, of a mass mobilization that could usher in meaningful change. Through an anthropological investigation of everyday politics, community dynamics and grassroots activism, this thesis look at how the terms of the Dayton Peace Agreement, which stopped the war but deferred crucial political questions, created a political impasse while turning the future into an urgent political problem.This impasse, marked by contradictory hopes of a great violent transformation and what has come to be known as the "problem of political apathy," produces unique configurations of the political field to which this dissertation is dedicated. In order to understand how a flowering of unconventional political interventions becomes possible alongside a systematic disengagement from political affairs, one must attend not only to the structural conditions that have produced this sense of suspension, but also consider the effect of thick histories on the political imagination and contemporary dispositions and sensibilities. The bloody Bosnian war, which took place between 1992-1995 within a decade-long dismantling of Yugoslavia, has undoubtedly left a dramatic impact on collective consciousness. But so have too the often-sidelined decades of socialism, which helped shape norms and attitudes about the place of politics in public life.This dissertation gives attention to the intersections of the postwar projects of social reengineering, and the forms of political action and thinking inherited from socialism. It argues that political subjectivity cannot be understood except in specific historic and socio-cultural coordinates, and demonstrates that certain kinds of orientations that are often seen as "apathetic", "illiberal" and "pathological" are in fact ethical, active and responsible. The skepticism with which many Bosnians approach political participation today is the product of acute awareness of limits of transformative capacity of all political action. Politics of Impasse is based on over two years of ethnographic fieldwork in Sarajevo, Bosnia's capital, as well as the town of Jajce, the famed birthplace of socialist Yugoslavia, and finally, the regional center of Banja Luka.

This short piece offers an ethnographic analysis of political dynamics in a small, divided town in central Bosnia [i] , while [s1] also reflecting on some recurrent assumptions about the nature of nationalist politics and belonging in the Balkans.  When it comes to this country, researchers and political reformists face a serious conundrum: despite 16 years of internationally sponsored reconciliation and rebuilding purportedly aimed at creating a unified state, the country's voters continue to give their preference to rival nationalist parties. Subsequently, many analyses suggest that Bosnian Croats, Serbs and Bosniaks (Muslims) remain convinced of the saliency of nationalism, its categories and the forms of political organization it offers.  The conclusion that seems to follow is that because the majority of country’s citizens choose nationalists as their “legitimate” representatives, they are themselves nationalists.  Even some anthropologists, such as Hayden (2007), argue that electoral numbers in the region reflect the “true” native's point of view—that of a nationalist—which may make us uncomfortable but will also give access to some kind of a "real" that must be a starting point for both analysis and political intervention. On the other hand, international “humanitarians” and liberal reformists in Bosnia will make abundant use of the same conundrum to insist that nationalism is a form of false consciousness that can be eradicated through education, increase in political literacy, and confrontation with cold, hard facts (about corruption, inefficiency, poverty, etc.) I want to complicate this view of nationalism as a “matter of conviction” by narrating the story of Zlata [ii] , a young woman in town who was rumored, despite her repeated rebuttals, to be a member of a nationalist party. In the course of this move, I turn towards the processes whereby people come to enact, reproduce and make real nationalist frameworks irrespective of their values or intentions.  In my analysis, the very figure of the nationalist becomes a theoretical, ethical and political problem rather than an empirical reality. [iii] [i] Throughout this text, I will use Bosnia-Herzegovina and Bosnia interchangeably. [ii] The names of informants and other identifying markers have been changed to protect confidentiality. [iii] The same kind of a claim could be made for the figure out the “antinationalist.” In that sense, I fold mine into Stef Jansen’s argument (2005) that nationalism as well as antinationalism form sets of discursive practices that become enacted by but also remain unevenly available to different people.