UC Berkeley

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.