Re-Thinking Border Politics at the Sarajevo Film Festival: Alternative Imaginaries of Conflict Transformation and Cross-Border Encounters

ABSTRACT

EU peacebuilding efforts in Bosnia-Herzegovina have largely contributed to further cement stark geopolitical imaginaries that, on the one hand, crystallise belonging along exclusionary and fixed notions of ethnonational identity and, on the other, reify civilisational differences between the EU and the post-Yugoslav space. The kaleidoscopic lens of the borderscape opens opportunities to move beyond this impasse by highlighting alternative narratives and sites of border politics that are often overlooked in institutionalised approaches. At the interface between aesthetics, cultural politics and post-conflict transformations, the Sarajevo Film Festival provides a privileged vantage point to explore border negotiations and harness opportunities for conflict transformation through the medium of cinema.

Acknowledgements

I wish to thank Giulia Carabelli, Milena Komarova and Cathal McCall for their feedback on an earlier draft and Gordon Kavanagh for technical support. I also wish to thank the editorial team and the three anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments and productive suggestions. I am indebted to Elma Tataragić and the Youth Initiative for Human Rights activists I met in Sarajevo and Prishtina for their contribution. Any mistakes I have made are my own.

Funding

Research for this paper was made possible by the EUBORDERSCAPES project (FP7-SSH-2011-1-290775), financed by the European Commission.

Notes

^1. Kristine Kotecki, ‘Europeanizing the Balkans at the Sarajevo Film Festival’, Journal of Narrative Theory 44/3 (2014) pp. 344–66.

^2. For an overview of relevant literature on film festivals as complex and multifaceted events, see, for example, Kenneth Turan, Sundance to Sarajevo: Film Festivals and the World They Made (Oakland: University of California Press 2003); Dina Iordanova, The Film Festival Reader, 2013; Marijke de Valck, Film Festivals: From European Geopolitics to Global Cinephilia (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press 2010); Owen Evans, ‘Border Exchanges: The Role of the European Film Festival’, Journal of Contemporary European Studies 15/1 (2007) pp. 23–33; Aida Vallejo and Marìa-Paz Peirano, Film Festivals and Anthropology (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publisher 2017).

^3. Chiara Brambilla, ‘Exploring the Critical Potential of the Borderscapes Concept’, Geopolitics 20/1 (2015) pp. 14–34; Chiara Brambilla et al., Borderscaping: Imaginations and Practices of Border Making (Farham: Ashgate 2015).

^4. Marta Zorko, ‘The Construction of Socio-Spatial Identities alongside the Schengen Border: Bordering and Border-Crossing Processes in the Croatian–Slovenian Borderlands’, in Chiara Brambilla et al. (eds.), Borderscaping: Imaginations and Practices of Border Making (2015) p. 99.

^5. James W. Scott, ‘Bordering, Border Politics and Cross-Border Cooperation in Europe’, in Neighbourhood Policy and the Construction of the European External Borders (New York: Springer 2015) pp. 27–44.

^6. Ibid.

^7. Cathal McCall, The European Union and Peacebuilding: The Cross-Border Dimension (New York: Palgrave/McMillan 2014).

^8. Scott (note 5).

^9. Ibid.; Gabriel Popescu, ‘The Conflicting Logics of Cross-Border Reterritorialization: Geopolitics of Euroregions in Eastern Europe’, Political Geography 27/4 (2008) pp. 41838; Etain Tannam, ‘Cross-Border Co-Operation between Northern Ireland and The Republic of Ireland: Neo-Functionalism Revisited’, The British Journal of Politics & International Relations 8/2 (2006) pp. 256–76; Cathal McCall, ‘European Union Cross-Border Cooperation and Conflict Amelioration’, Space and Polity 17/2 (2013) pp. 197–216.

^10. Scott (note 5) p. 49.

^11. James Wesley Scott and Henk van Houtum, ‘Reflections on EU Territoriality and the “Bordering” of Europe’, Political Geography 28/5 (2009) pp. 271–73.

^12. A prominent example of this logic is the yearly monitoring exercise documenting developments and gaps in implementing reforms required for EU access. The 2014 document reported Bosnia “at a standstill” in the process. The 2016 document flags some progress, yet it also continuously highlights key challenges in co-operation, coordination and policy harmonisation across entities and levels of governance. Arguably these challenges are enabled and exacerbated precisely by Dayton’s governance regime. See 2014 and 2016 Progress Reports, available at <http://ec.europa.eu/enlargement/pdf/key_documents/2014/20141008-bosnia-and-herzegovina-progress-report_en.pdf>, accessed 12 Oct. 2015, and <https://ec.europa.eu/neighbourhood-enlargement/sites/near/files/pdf/key_documents/2016/20161109_report_bosnia_and_herzegovina.pdf>, accessed 2 Aug. 2017.

^13. Eric Gordy, ‘Dayton’s Annex 4 Constitution at 20: Political Stalemate, Public Dissatisfaction and the Rebirth of Self-Organisation’, Southeast European and Black Sea Studies 15/4 (2015) pp. 611–22.

^14. Ibid.; Andrew Gilbert and Jasmin Mujanović, ‘Dayton at Twenty: Towards New Politics in Bosnia-Herzegovina’, Southeast European and Black Sea Studies 15/4 (2015) pp. 605–610.

^15. Personal interviews with EU officials, Sarajevo, 21 and 27 Aug. 2015.

^16. Personal interviews with EU officials, Sarajevo, 21 and 27 Aug. 2015.

^17. See <http://projects.europa.ba/About>, accessed 6 Nov. 2015.

^18. See <http://ec.europa.eu/enlargement/instruments/funding-by-country/bosnia-herzegovina/index_en.htm>, accessed 17 Oct. 2016.

^19. McCall (note 7); Emma Hutchison and Roland Bleiker, ‘Grief and the Transformation of Emotions after War’, in Linda Åhäll and Thomas Gregory (eds.), Emotions, Politics and War (New York: Routledge 2015).

^20. On the relevance of the everyday in peace/conflict, see, for example: Roger Mac Ginty, ‘Everyday Peace: Bottom-up and Local Agency in Conflict-Affected Societies’, Security Dialogue 45/6 (2014) pp. 548–64; Helen Berents, ‘An Embodied Everyday Peace in the Midst of Violence’, Peacebuilding 3/2 (2015) pp. 1–14. Feminist scholars have long drawn attention to the everyday life in war, these texts are but a few examples: Swati Parashar, ‘Anger, War and Feminist Storytelling’, in Linda Åhäll and Thomas A. Gregory (eds.), Emotions, War and Politics (New York: Routledge 2015); Carol Cohn, Women and Wars: Contested Histories, Uncertain Futures (Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons, 2013); Cynthia Enloe, Maneuvers: The International Politics of Militarizing Women’s Lives (Oakland: University of California Press 2000); On the relevance of bottom-up border-making see also Chris Rumford, ‘Towards a Vernacularized Border Studies: The Case of Citizen Borderwork’, Journal of Borderlands Studies 28/2 (2013) pp. 169–80; Nira Yuval-Davis, ‘A Situated Intersectional Everyday Approach to the Study of Bordering’, Euborder-Scapes Working Paper 2 (2013), available at <http://www.euborderscapes.eu/fileadmin/user_upload/Working_Papers/EUBORDERSCAPES_Working_Paper_2_Yuval-Davis.pdf>.

^21. One of the responses to citizens’ protests saw EU representatives entered lengthy negotiations with the local elite which eventually led to the acceptance of BiH candidacy in September 2016. It remains unclear whether this will enable any meaningful political and social change given that many of Bosnia’s alleged inherent “deficiencies” remain unresolved. Rather than supporting citizens’ demands for political transformation it has been suggested that this new approach will merely see a shift from a state of permanent crisis to that of perpetual candidacy. For an analysis of the protests and international responses see Daniela Lai, ‘Transitional Justice and Its Discontents: Socioeconomic Justice in Bosnia and Herzegovina and the Limits of International Intervention’, Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding 10/3 (2016) pp. 361–81; Cera Murtagh, ‘Civic Mobilization in Divided Societies and the Perils of Political Engagement: Bosnia and Herzegovina’s Protest and Plenum Movement’, Nationalism and Ethnic Politics 22/2 (2016) pp. 149–71.

^22. Aida Hozic, “The Origins of Postconflict”, in Chip Gagnon and Keith Brown (eds.), Post-Conflict Studies: An Interdisciplinary Approach (New York: Routledge 2014).

^23. For analysis of Europeanisation and cross-border co-operation that draw on the borderscape concept, see McCall, The European Union and Peacebuilding; Cathal McCall and Xabier Itçaina, ‘Secondary Foreign Policy Activities in Third Sector Cross-Border Cooperation as Conflict Transformation in the European Union: The Cases of the Basque and Irish Borderscapes’, Regional & Federal Studies 27/3 (2017) pp. 261–81.

^24. See, for example: Nick Vaughan-Williams, Border Politics: The Limits of Sovereign Power (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press 2009); Rumford (note 20); Anke Strüver, Stories of the ‘Boring Border’: The Dutch-German Borderscape in People’s Minds (Münster: LIT Verlag 2005); Anne-Laure Amilhat Szary et al., ‘The Evolving Concept of Borders State of the Debate Report I’, 2012, available at <http://www.euborderscapes.eu/fileadmin/user_upload/EUBORDERSCAPES_State_of_Debate_Report_1.pdf>; Thomas M. Wilson, A Companion to Border Studies (Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons 2015); Corey Johnson et al., ‘Interventions on Rethinking “the Border” in Border Studies’, Political Geography 30/2 (2011) pp. 61–9; Noel Parker and Nick Vaughan-Williams, ‘Critical Border Studies: Broadening and Deepening the ‘Lines in the Sand’ Agenda’, Geopolitics 17/4 (2012) pp. 727–33.

^25. Prem Kumar Rajaram and Carl Grundy-Warr, Borderscapes: Hidden Geographies and Politics at Territory’s Edge (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 2007) pp. ix–xl.

^26. Ibid.; Brambilla (note 3); Chiara Brambilla et al., Borderscaping: Imaginations and Practices of Border Making (Farnham: Ashgate 2015).

^27. Brambilla (note 3) p. 25.

^28. For a discussion of international intervention in BiH, see David Campbell, National Deconstruction: Violence, Identity, and Justice in Bosnia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 1998); For an analysis of Dayton’s ethnopoltics see Dejan Guzina, ‘Dilemmas of Nation-Building and Citizenship in Dayton Bosnia’, National Identities 9/3 (2007) pp. 217–34; Maria-Adriana Deiana, ‘Citizenship as (Not) Belonging? Contesting the Replication of Gendered and Ethnicised Exclusions in Post-Dayton Bosnia-Herzegovina’, in Beyond Citizenship? (New York: Springer 2013) pp. 184–210.

^29. See Dayton Peace Agreement full text, available at <http://www.nato.int/ifor/gfa/gfa-home.htm>, accessed 10 May 2016.

^30. ‘The Serbian Referendum in Bosnia and Herzegovina’, EurActiv.com, 30 Sep. 2016, available at <https://www.euractiv.com/section/enlargement/opinion/the-serbian-referendum-in-bosnia-and-herzegovina/>.

^31. Danijela Majstorović, Zoran Vučkovac, and Anđela Pepić, ‘From Dayton to Brussels via Tuzla: Post-2014 Economic Restructuring as Europeanization Discourse/Practice in Bosnia and Herzegovina’, Southeast European and Black Sea Studies 15/4 (2015) pp. 661–82; Gordy, ‘Dayton’s Annex 4 Constitution at 20’.

^32. Damir Arsenijević, Unbribable Bosnia and Herzegovina: The Fight for the Commons (Baden-Baden: Nomos Verlagsgesellschaft 2015); Radmila Gorup, After Yugoslavia: The Cultural Spaces of a Vanished Land (Redwood City: Stanford University Press 2013).

^33. Selma Tobudić, ‘Plenums and Protests: A Remembering’, in Damir Arsenijević, Unbribable Bosnia and Herzegovina: The Fight for the Commons (Baden-Baden: Nomos Verlagsgesellschaft 2015) pp. 156–57.

^34. Luiza Bialasiewicz, ed., Europe in the World: EU Geopolitics and the Making of European Space, Critical Geopolitics (Farnham: Ashgate 2011).

^35. Useful here is the work that interrogates European integration as a multifarious process of governmentality. In this sense, “Peace through EU governance” can be read as one of the complex often incoherent and contingent techniques of governmentalization. These undergird a specific geopolitical, social, cultural and economic vision for and material demarcation of Europe as framed by the EU. Operating at different levels (e.g. state-building, civil society, cultural co-operation, cross-border-co-operation), through different actors (e.g. EU delegation in BiH and EU commission) and with different registers/themes, these assemblages ultimately work to legitimise the idea of Europe as a political project and international peace actor, make (potential) European citizens and ultimately uphold it as a model and space of democracy, progress and normality. See Jens Henrik Haahr and William Walters, Governing Europe: Discourse, Governmentality and European Integration (New York: Routledge 2004).

^36. Stef Jansen, Yearnings in the Meantime: ‘Normal Lives’ and the State in a Sarajevo Apartment Complex (New York: Berghahn Books 2015).

^37. My research in BiH suggests ways in which various local/international institutions and local/international actors normalise, reproduce, but also experience and constantly negotiate the ‘road into the EU’. For many I have encountered during my fieldwork, European integration represents the possibility to conduct a normal life versus being ‘stuck’ in the post-Dayton impasse. In one occasion, I asked a local EU official if they could express a personal view on what, if any, could be the value of investing in the project of EU integration. The response poignantly stated: ‘European integration is the way of living normal’. During my ethnographic fieldwork in Sarajevo in 2010 and 2015, friends, activists and other research participants I interviewed often expressed similar aspirations to a transition to normality and out of the never-ending post-conflict trajectory.

^38. Johan Schimanski and Stephen Wolfe, ‘Cultural Production and Negotiation of Borders: Introduction to the Dossier’, Journal of Borderlands Studies 25/1 (2010) pp. 38–49; Chiara Brambilla, ‘Navigating the Euro/African Border and Migration Nexus Through the Borderscapes Lens: Insights from the LampedusaInFestival’, in Borderscaping: Imaginations and Practices of Border Making (Farnham: Ashgate 2015) p. 111; Michael J. Shapiro, ‘HBO’s Two Frontiers: Deadwood and The Wire’, Geopolitics 20/1 (2015) pp. 193–213; Elena Dell’Agnese and Anne-Laure Amilhat Szary, ‘Borderscapes: From Border Landscapes to Border Aesthetics’, Geopolitics 20/1 (2015) pp. 4–13.

^39. Johan Schimanski, ‘Border Aesthetics and Cultural Distancing in the Norwegian-Russian Borderscape’, Geopolitics 20/1 (2015) pp. 35–55.

^40. Schimanski and Wolfe (note 38); Brambilla (note 38); Shapiro (note 38); Dell’Agnese and Amilhat Szary (note 38).

^41. Brambilla (note 3); Brambilla (note 38).

^42. Dell’Agnese and Amilhat Szary (note 38); Alan Ingram, ‘Art, Geopolitics and Metapolitics at Tate Galleries London’, Geopolitics 22/3 (2017) pp. 719–39.

^43. Brambilla (note 38); Roland Bleiker, ‘In Search of Thinking Space: Reflections on the Aesthetic Turn in International Political Theory’, Millennium 20 (2017) p. 0305829816684262.

^44. Michael J. Shapiro, Cinematic Geopolitics, 1st edition (New York: Routledge 2008); Maria Rovisco, ‘Towards a Cosmopolitan Cinema: Understanding the Connection Between Borders, Mobility and Cosmopolitanism in the Fiction Film’, Mobilities 8/1 (2013) pp. 148–65; Ana Cristina Mendes and John Sundholm, ‘Walls and Fortresses: Borderscapes and the Cinematic Imaginary’, Transnational Cinemas 6/2 (2015) pp. 117–22.

^45. Rumford (note 20).

^46. Dina Iordanova, The Cinema of the Balkans (New York: Wallflower Press 2006) p. 9.

^47. Aida A. Hozic, ‘Between “National” and “Transnational”: Film Diffusion as World Politics’, International Studies Review 16/2 (2014) pp. 229–39.

^48. Mirza Redzič, ‘Made in War (Boomed in Peace): The Sarajevo Film Festival’, available at <http://www.narratives.eu/s/Made-in-war-boomed-in-peace-SFF-pxtz.pdf>, accessed 13 May 2016.

^49. Kotecki (note 1).

^50. Hozic (note 47); Sandra Ponzanesi and Verena Berger, ‘Introduction: Genres and Tropes in Postcolonial Cinema(s) in Europe’, Transnational Cinemas 7/2 (2016) pp. 111–17; Dina Iordanova, Cinema at the Periphery (Detroit: Wayne State University Press 2010); Lydia Papadimitriou and Jeffrey Ruoff, ‘Film Festivals: Origins and Trajectories’, New Review of Film and Television Studies 14/1 (2016) pp. 1–4.

^51. After all the focus on national cinema has been a central element of the festival since organisers began to show documentaries in the midst of the siege. Personal interview with SFF Elma Tataragić, Sarajevo 18 Aug. 2015.

^52. Kotecki (note 1); I. SFF Elma Tataragić points out that local government’s funding is rather limited, accounting for around 15% of the Festival’s overall budget. Personal interview with SFF Elma Tataragić, Sarajevo 18 Aug. 2015.

^53. See <http://www.sff.ba/en/page/about-the-festival>.

^54. Interview with Elma Tataragić, Sarajevo, 18 Aug. 2015.

^55. Iordanova (note 46).

^56. Interview with Rada Sesic and Martichka Bozhilova, Heads of Docu Rough Cut Boutique programme, reproduced in CityLink Industry Days -Where art meets Business, 19–22 Aug. 2015. The brochure was included in the welcome pack for accredited guests.

^57. Kotecki (note 1).

^58. Iordanova (note 46).

^59. Rumford (note 38).

^60. It is often through conflict films that the respective post-Yugoslav industries can enter international cinematic production networks, even though this might contribute to reify troubling stereotypes that satisfy the Western gaze, see also Kotecki (note 1); Iordanova (note 46).

^61. Shine Choi and Maria-Adriana Deiana, ‘Questioning the International: (Un)making Bosnian and Korean Conflicts, Cinematically’, Trans-Humanities Journal 10/1 (2017) pp. 5–30.

^62. There is a rich repertoire of independent local films that provide critical/artistic reflections on the war. See, for example, cinematic productions from and about Bosnia-Herzegovina such as Ademir Kenović’s The Perfe Circle, Jasmila Zbanic’s Grbavica, Pjer Zajlic’s Gori Vatra and Aida Begic’s Snijeg. Full listings and film synopsis for the various editions of the Festival are available at http://www.sff.ba/en/page/about-the-festival, accessed 13 May 2016.

^63. Personal interview with Timohir Popovic, YIfHRBiH, Sarajevo, 25 Aug. 2015.

^64. Mac Ginty (note 20).

^65. Author’s participant observation, Sarajevo, 16–22 Aug. 2015.

^66. Author’s participant observation and personal communications with Docu Corner attendees, Sarajevo, 16–22 Aug. 2015.

^67. Hutchison and Bleiker (note 19) p. 210.

^68. Jansen (note 36).

^69. I am grateful to Giulia Carabelli for suggesting this term as an interesting and fluid category of identity at the festival.

Additional information

Funding

Research for this paper was made possible by the EUBORDERSCAPES project (FP7-SSH-2011-1-290775), financed by the European Commission.