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ABSTRACT
In this article I analyze the lived, violent effects of post war and postsocialist transformations through the prism of one urban ruin in Bihać, a city located on the northwestern edge of Bosnia and Herzegovina. The building is Dom penzionera—never completed socialist retirement home. This urban ruin remains eerie, semi-empty and skeleton-like, a shadow and a symbol of the unmaterialized socialist modernity and the perpetually transitioning postwar present. Ethnographic focus on the urban ruin, and not on a ‘place’ or a ‘population,’ is conscious, and it reflects the importance of material objects in the context of regional transformations and global dispossessions. More specifically, I show how over the last 25 years this ruin, instead of its imagined inhabitants—elderly socialist workers who were going to age and die in it peacefully—has been housing multiple uninvited citizens. These inhabitants include disillusioned Bosnian youth and, more recently, refugees and ‘migrants’ from the Middle East, South Asia and North Africa. Highlighting the ruination of the build environment and the ‘wasted lives’ of those who occupy it, provides a powerful critique of the current geopolitical violences, and of confident and arrogant theories of transition in the Balkans and beyond.
Acknowledgement
I would like to thank the editors–Emma Elfversson, Ivan Gusic and Kristine Höglund–for the invitation to contribute to this Special Issue. I am also grateful to Roland Kostić for his insightful comments and suggestions. In addition, I would like to thank all participants at the Spatiality of Violence workshop that took place at the University of Uppsala in March 2019. Furthermore, I am grateful for encouraging and helpful comments by two anonymous reviewers. Spacial ‘thank you’ goes to Heather Michel Riddle, as always.
Notes
1. An earlier and much different version of this article was published in Bosnian in Hromadžić and Čavkić, Relikvije buduće prošlosti: Dom penzionera u Bihaću.
2. In addition to postwar and postsocialist transformations, recent ‘migrant crisis’ has powerfully interwoven postcolonial experiences into the Balkan predicament. While not the main topic of this article, these postcolonial forces will be alluded to in the last part of the article.
3. Scheper-Hughes and Bourgois, Violence in War and Peace, 1.
4. Bauman, Wasted Lives.
5. I put the quotation marks around ‘migrants’ in order to emphasize my discomfort with the separation of these individuals, from the so-called ‘true refugees’ in academia and beyond. I omit the quotation marks in the rest of the article, however, to avoid cumbersome read.
6. In the Bosnian case, scholars often speak of a ‘triple transition’: from war to peace, from socialism to capitalism, and from communism to democracy. While related to the first two, the transition from communism to democracy is not the focus of this article.
7. Blagojević, Knowledge Production at the Semiperiphery.
8. Gordillo, Rubble; Stoler, Imperial Debris.
9. Anand, Hydraulic City.
10. Dzenovska, Emptiness and its Futures; and Hromadžić, Citizens of an Empty Nation.
11. See Smirl, “Not Welcome at the Holiday Inn”.
12. Transitology, broadly conceived, is the study (mostly in political science, international and comparative law and economics) of the process of change from one political regime to another, mainly from authoritarian regimes to democratic ones.
13. See Pelkmans, “The Social Life of Empty Buildings: Imagining the Transition in Post-Soviet Ajaria”; Verdery, The Vanishing Hectare.
14. Freedom House, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Country Profile. https://freedomhouse.org/report/nations-transit/2018/bosnia-and-herzegovina.
15. World Bank, ‘Country Assistance Strategy FY98-FY99,’ 1997.
16. Wold Bank, 1996, p. viii.
17. Trading Economics, https://tradingeconomics.com/bosnia-and-herzegovina/unemployment-rate. The recent decrease in unemployment is not a result of the economic growth, but rather of a massive exodus of young, work-seeking people. Bosnian is the state in Europe that people have been leaving the most. It is estimated that 43.3% of Bosnians live abroad. See https://www.telegraf.rs/english/2600165-bosnia-country-in-europe-people-are-leaving-the-most-43-3-of-bosnia-and-herzegovina-population-left-the-state.
19. See, among others, Creed, Domesticating Revolution; Burawoy and Verdery, Uncertain Transition; Gal, “Gender in the Post-Socialist Transition: The Abortion Debate in Hungary”; Humphrey, Marx Went Away; Humphrey, The Unmaking of Soviet Life; Verdery, The Vanishing Hectare.
20. Burawoy, “Neoclassical Sociology.”
21. See Humphrey, “‘Icebergs,’ Barter, and the Mafia in Provincial Russia.”
22. See Hromadžić, “Where Were They Until Now?”
23. Jašarević, Intimate Debt.
24. In its 2009 report, Transparency International states that through the process of delaying privatisation, and through quasi-sociopolitical electoral rhetoric and the centralisation of power in the hands of several war elites behind ‘the scenes an unhindered plunder of state property takes place’ (Divljak and Martinović, Privatizacija Državnog Kapitala u Bosni i Hercegovini, 34).
25. ‘Privatisation’ as such includes ‘the interaction between the state and private business people and/or companies, as exists in cases of any form of public contracting or public procurement’ (Divjak and Martinović, Privatizacija Državnog Kapitala u Bosni i Hercegovini, 8).
26. Harvey, The New Imperialism
27. Mitchel, “Dreamland,’ 28.
28. Embedded networks is the term used by Transparency International to illustrate the ‘interest groups associated with structures of power, which through conflict of interest and by the placing of personal interests above public ones, gain unwarranted benefit, at the expense of citizens’ (Divjak and Martinović, Privatizacija Državnog Kapitala u Bosni i Hercegovini, 33).
29. See Kurtović, “What is a Nationalist?”; Mujanović, “The Baja Class and the Politics of Participation”; Pugh, “Postwar Political Economy in Bosnia and Herzegovina: The Spoils of Peace”; Donais, “The Politics of Privatization in Post-Dayton Bosnia”; and Donais, The Political Economy of Peacebuilding in Post-Dayton Bosnia.
30. Divjak and Martinović, Privatizacija Državnog kapitala u Bosni i Hercegovini, 33.
31. Several paragraphs in this section, slightly altered, have been adopted from Hromadžić ‘Streets, Scum and People: Discourses of (In)Civility in Postwar Bihać, Bosnia and Herzegovina,’ (2018).
32. In her seminal book, Imagining the Balkans, Maria Todorova (1997) argues that Balkanism is not merely a subspecies of Said’s Orientalism. Said describes the ‘western’ creation of the ‘Orient’ as its opposite, against which the West positions itself as superior. Todorova (1997), however, argues that Balkanism evolved independently from Orientalism or, in certain aspects, against or despite it.
33. See Bakić-Hayden, “Nesting Orientalisms”; Jansen, “Who’s Afraid of White Socks?”; Todorova, Imagining the Balkans; Neofotistos, “The Balkans’ Other Within”; Helms, “East and West Kiss: Gender, Orientalism, and Balkanism in Muslim-Majority Bosnia-Herzegovina”; and Stefansson, “Urban Exile”; Živković, 2011, Serbian Dream Book.
34. Stoler, Imperial Debris.
35. Lahusen, “Decay or Endurance?”.
36. Anderson, Imagined Communities.
37. Latour We Have Never Been Modern.
38. Smirl, “Not Welcome at the Holiday Inn,” 32.
39. The phrase ‘future past’ is the construction of Reinhart Koselleck, a historical theorist, who in his famous work Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time explores, among other things, the experiences of the past which impose modernity. He claims that modernity imposes the relocation, or the ‘movement’ of the past and/into the future(s) and produces a world that is moving rapidly towards an unknown future that hides the possibility of utopian fulfillment.
40. Anand, Hydraulic City, 6.
41. Anand, Hydraulic City, 170–3.
42. Ibid., 170–3.
43. See Abourahme, ‘Assembling and Spilling Over,’ 4.
44. see Anand, Hydraulic City.
45. Abourahme, ‘Assembling and Spilling Over’, 4.
46. Federal Bureau of Statistics BiH, Unsko-sanski kanton u brojkama, 11.
47. O’Shea, Bosnia’s Forgotten Battlefield.
48. See note 45 above.
49. Bihać Municipality, Strategija razvoja općine Bihać 2014–2023, 20.
50. Calvino, Invisible Cities, 29.
51. The Bihać Municipality, in its document Strategija razvoja općine Bihać 2014–2023, 20 points to the uneven privatisation of local factories, where Bihać’s breweries and the milk and dairy industries are considered successful, and Žitoprerada, the Bihać meat industry, Polietilenka, BIRA, KrajinaMetal and Kombiteks as unsuccessful. The document contains explanations for individual (non)successes.
52. Hromadžić, “Primjer industrijske proizvodnje u socijalizmu”; Kurtović and Hromadžić, “Cannibal States, Empty Bellies.”
53. The Self-Governing Interest Community (SIZ) is the name for the organs in the system of self-governing socialism of the former SFR Yugoslavia, under whose jurisdiction were culture, sports and other social activities.
54. Interview with a high-level employee, Sarajevo, 9 October 2015.
55. Interview with the former director of a public institution in Bihać, 21 September 2015.
56. For example, our interlocutor recalled that the hotels: Neum and The Sun, in Neum, were built on the same principle. It was agreed that in July and August these hotels were to be used as tourist facilities, while in other months, these places were reserved for retirees who went there due to suffering from rheumatism and some other illnesses. As such, the funding for these hotels was raised via retirement funds. Many such hotels, or healthcare facilities, were made in this way (Interview with a former employee of a public institution in Bihać, 21 September 2015).
57. The Municipal Assembly of Bihać agreed to finance the following tasks: development of urban documentation, awarding location in a certain area (without compensation for building land), taking over the obligation to pay the contribution for building shelters, costs of investor participation in the construction of building land and taking over the obligation to pay the fee for converting agricultural land into construction land.
58. Interview, Bihać, 18 September 2015.
59. Krajina, “Šta mislite o izgradnji Doma penzionera u Bihaću.”
60. Krajina, “Napokon je krenulo.”
61. The fact that the retirement home began to be built before getting legal approval was explained by some of the interviewees by the fact that at that time Izgradnja (the construction company from Bihać) was ‘sick’ (Krajina, “Napokon Je Krenulo, Bihać, Str. 6”), and that there was not much work for it to do. For Izgradnja to be maintained and somewhat pulled out of its crisis, the Municipality assigned it to be a contractor, so that its workers could work and earn a living.
62. Interview with the former President of the Pensioners’ Association, 18 September 2015.
63. Kudić project, Procjena Građevinske Vrijednosti Projekta “Dom Penzionera” u Bihaću.
64. Archer et al., Social Inequalities and Discontent in Yugoslav Socialism.
65. Woodward, The Balkan Tragedy.
66. Archer, “Paid for by the workers, occupied by the bureaucrats’: Housing Inequalities in 1980s Belgrade”.
67. Stubbs, “Globalization, Memory and Welfare Regimes in Transition: Towards an Anthropology of Transnational Policy Transfers”; Stubbs and Maglajlić, “Negotiating the Transnational Politics of Social Work in Post-conflict and Transition Context.”
68. See Gilbert, “The past in parenthesis.”
69. These cranes were removed in July 2006, after more than 20 years of standing next to the unfinished building and after two decades of warning the public of the dangers of demolition, as well as their rugged aesthetics. The process of removal was slowed down due to negotiations of who, after the war, was responsible for their removal and who should bear the costs of the process (Krajina, “Izgradnju Čeka 14 Godina, Str. 12”).
70. Divjak and Martinović, Privatizacija Državnog Kapitala u Bosni i Hercegovini, 7.
71. Službeni list RBiH, br. 33/1994.
72. See note 54 above.
73. Divjak and Martinović, Privatizacija Državnog Kapitala u Bosni i Hercegovini, 17.
74. See Divjak and Martinović, ibid.
75. Interview with the former president of the Pensioners’ Association, Bihać, 18 September 2015.
76. Ibid.
77. Ibid.
78. Ibid.
79. Interview with the director of the UIO of Una-Sana Canton, Bihać, 16 September 2015.
80. Interview with a high-ranking employee of the PIO Sarajevo, Sarajevo, 10 September 2015.
81. Interview with the former President of the Pensioners’ Association, Bihać, 18 September 2015.
82. Interview with the former president of the Pensioners’ Association, Bihać, 18 September 2015.
83. Assistant Inspector in the Bihać MUP, Bihać, 29 September 2015.
84. See Greenberg, “There’s Nothing Anyone Can Do About It”; Greenberg, “On the Road to Normal; Hromadžić, “Only When the Spider Web Becomes Too Heavy”; Kurtović, “What is a Nationalist?”
85. Čelebičić, Waiting is Hoping.
86. Hromadžić, Citizens of an Empty Nation.
87. See note 82 above.
88. See Buzimljani.ba, “Bihać”; abc.ba, “Bihać.”
89. See note 4 above.
92. Sassen, Expulsions.
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Azra Hromadžić
Azra Hromadžić is Associate Professor and O’Hanley Faculty Scholar in the Department of Anthropology at Syracuse University. She has research interests in the anthropology of international policy in the context of state-making in postwar Bosnia and Herzegovina. Her book, Citizens of an Empty Nation: Youth and State-making in Postwar Bosnia and Herzegovina (University of Pennsylvania Press), is an ethnographic investigation of the internationally directed postwar intervention policies in Bosnia and Herzegovina and the response of local people, especially youth, to these policy efforts. The book was translated into Serbian in 2017 (Samo Bosne nema: Mladi i građenje države u posleratnoj Bosni i Hercegovini. Beograd: Biblioteka XX Vek). Several years ago, Hromadžić initiated a new project that ethnographically researches aging, care and social services in the context of postwar and postsocialist Bosnia and Herzegovina. She co- edited (with Monika Palmberger) a volume titled Care Across Distance: Ethnographic Explorations of Aging and Migration which was published with Berghahn Books in 2018. In 2017 she began a new research project on water/river politics, pedagogies and infrastructure in Bosnia-Herzegovina.