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ABSTRACT
Framed by historical materialism, this study of labour in post-conflict settings contends that the Balkan peace has been disfigured by a political economy of precarity. Former Yugoslav territories experienced chronic unemployment and precarity, moulded by distinctive cultures and identities, though labour had already been pummelled by the impacts of global integration before violent conflict. Peace meant reordering of pre-war and wartime political economies, which failed to stimulate officially audited employment in order to privilege private capital accumulation. Whilst workers have exerted agency to cope with and resist this, the exercise of labour rights shrank markedly.
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to the numerous discussants in and from Southeast Europe, plus Florian Kühn, Mandy Turner, Jasmin Ramović, Paul Stubbs and workshop participants ‘Economies of Peace’, Centre for Conflict Studies, Philipps University Marburg, 21 April 2017, and ‘Translating Policy in the Semi-periphery’, Graduate School Southeast European Studies, Regensburg, 4–6 May 2017. None are responsible for the outcome.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. For BiH peacebuilding was essentially leveraged through the US–Bosniak and US–Kosovar wartime alliances. David Lipton, Under Secretary of the US Treasury, and the WBG insisted on the free market disposition that entered the US-drafted Dayton Constitution (Woodward Citation2017, 190, Holbrooke Citation1999, 34–5).
2. Poverty has multiple causes such as ecological disaster, cost of living increases and removal of entitlements.
3. Interview with Zlatko Hurtić, Economic Adviser to the Prime Minster, Sarajevo, 4 June 2006. WB country partnership framework, FY16-20 and discussion at the World Bank, Sarajevo, 28 April 2016. Ironically the manager of a successful home-grown pre-war SME in Travnik, visited in 2011, said that it was more useful to spend time on marketing than applying for a foreign grant that entailed onerous bureaucracy.
4. Interviews with USAID (Jim Hope), Skenderija, 14 July 1997; Josip Polić, EBRD, 16 September 1999, Sarajevo.
5. Author’s survey, July–Sept. 2005. Dataset (N = 92 employees) lodged at UK Data Archive, University of Essex, no. 5630 (ESRC 223–25-0071).
6. Discussions with Prof. F. Čaušević, Sarajevo, 7 September 2009 and EKOForum presentation and tour, 21 June 2014 (see http://ekoforumzenica.ba/).
7. Interview with Zlatko Hurtić (n.3 above) and academics in Ljubljana, Sarajevo and Prishtina, June 2014.
8. Discussion with union leader, seminar on the SME sector, Banja Luka, 4 December 2002.
9. Few strikes occurred in the climate of wartime ultranationalism. Tudjman’s regime brutally suppressed a strike by employees of the moderate newspaper, Slobodna Dalmacija in 1993, and police brutality continued into the peace (Ivandić and Livada Citation2015).
10. Discussion with Svjetlana Nedimović, Sarajevo, 28 April 2016.
11. The ILO (Citation2006) defined decent work as productive employment for a fair income with security in the workplace, equal opportunities, social protection for families, better prospects for personal development and social integration.
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Notes on contributors
Michael Pugh
Michael Pugh is Emeritus Professor, University of Bradford. He has served as Honorary Professor, School of International Relations, University of St Andrews and Visiting Professor, Centre for Conflict Analysis and Management, Radboud University Nijmegen. He was Leverhulme Emeritus Fellow (2011–12). He has written extensively on peace and conflict and is the co-editor with Neil Cooper and Mandy Turner of Whose Peace? Critical Perspectives on the Political Economy of Peacebuilding (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). His latest publications are Liberal Internationalism: The Quest for Peace in Interwar Britain, London: Palgrave/Macmillan, 2012; ‘Corporate Peace: Crisis in Economic Peacebuilding’, in Tobias Debiel, Thomas Held and Ulrich Schneckener (eds), Rethinking Paradigms and Practices of Peacebuilding, London: Routledge, 2015; ‘Lineages of Aggressive Peace’, in Florian P. Kühn and Mandy Turner (eds), The Tyranny of Peace, London Routledge, 2015; ‘Oligarchy and Economic Legacy in Bosnia and Herzegovina’, Peacebuilding, 2017; he was editor of the journal, International Peacekeeping for 20 years and remains editor of the Cass book series on Peacekeeping.