Social Mobilization Beyond Ethnicity

This book offers an in-depth investigation of the emergence and spread of social mobilizations that transcend ethnicity in societies violently divided along ethno-national lines. Using Bosnia Herzegovina as a case study, the book explores episodes of mobilization which have superseded ethno-nationalist cleavages. Bosnia Herzegovina emerged from the 1992–95 war brutally impoverished and deeply ethnically divided, representing a critical and strategic case for the examination and understanding of the dynamics of mobilization in such divided societies. Despite difficult circumstances for civic-based collective action, social mobilizations in the country have grown in size, number and intensity in recent years. Marked by citizen demand for accountable governance, responsive urbanism, and access to basic human rights, these protests have been driven by economic, social and political problems which cut across religious and ethnic divides. Examining the variation in spatial and social scale of contention, the book investigates movements’ formation, their organizational structures and networking strategies and advances research on divided societies and social movements. This volume will be of interest to scholars and researchers of Southeastern Europe and those examining political dissent, social movements and mobilization in divided societies, as well as practitioners in civil society, grassroots groups and political activists.

Focussing on Sub-Saharan Africa, Dominika Koter analyses why ethnic politics emerge in some ethnically diverse societies, but not in others.

This book is centred upon the concept of ‘ethnonationality,’ investigating how its meanings and functions have changed across political regimes, time, and generations. Piacentini explores two similar yet different realities, Bosnia Herzegovina and Macedonia (now North Macedonia) – both former Yugoslav republics, multiethnic, and currently characterised by consociational arrangements and ethnic politics. This temporal perspective encompasses both the Yugoslav and post-Yugoslav period, empirically exploring two generations living together in the same family, each socialised by different macro-environments and socio-political and economic conditions. The book explores which ideas, rules, and patterns of behaviour related to ethnonationality have been transmitted between the generations. Ethnonationality’s Evolution in Bosnia Herzegovina and Macedonia will be of interest to students and scholars across a range of disciplines, including sociology, politics, and conflict studies.

This book examines the making and breaking of peripheral selves in and from postsocialist Bosnia in an empirically rich self-reflexive account of politico-economic and ideological developments. Through world systems and postcolonial theory, historical and new materialist optics, discursive and affective analytical registers, and various qualitative methodological choices, the author analyzes peripheral subjectivity in connection to global proletarianization, as well as past and present resistance via social and personal movement(s). She refers to past Yugoslav socialist and anticolonial struggles as well as more recent ones, including the social justice and feminist collective, engaging with workers’ and women’s struggles in postwar Bosnia and the Justice for David movement. Finally, she analyzes the lives of new third-wave Bosnian migrants to Germany post-2015, placing them in juxtaposition with non-European migrants in Bosnian reception centers and exposing labor and race, border struggles and market as new variables for studying selves in this particular context. Writing about “situated knowledge” and “politics of location,” the author stresses the importance of strong affective ties within researcher-researched assemblages urging for deeper coalitions and solidarity among various peripheral, power-differentiated communities. This book will be of interest to readers with backgrounds in linguistics, sociology, post-Yugoslav history, cultural studies and anthropology.

This book analyses the process of the recruitment of foreign fighters from the Western Balkans, specifically Bosnia and Herzegovina and Kosovo, to Syria and Iraq from 2012 to 2015. Utilizing in-depth, semi-structured interviews with foreign fighters and their families, as well as a number of relevant stakeholders it answers the question of what were the processes and circumstances leading up to the departure of foreign fighters from Bosnia and Herzegovina and Kosovo and what informed their agency? The author draws on the theories of social movement approaches, more specifically, contentious politics literature and utilizes the specific concepts of triggering mechanisms, which refer to the enabling circumstances that make the radicalization and departure possible, and pleasure in agency, to elaborate on individual motivation. The book also shows how a wider state- fragility within the context of the post-Yugoslav wars and the transitional period that never ended, aided radicalization and how an incomplete process of post-war transition can fuel the process of political and religious radicalization creating a wider enabling web for recruitment. It will be of interest to students and scholars of Southeast European politics and foreign policy, post-war democratic transition, security policy and radicalization more broadly.

This book outlines the main security threats, actors, and processes in the Western Balkans following the dissolution of Yugoslavia. Exploring the state of peace and security in the region it asks if a stable peace is achievable. The comparative framework explores state perspectives – from Serbia, Montenegro, Northern Macedonia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Albania, and Kosovo – alongside military, political-societal, economic, and environmental security concerns. The interplay of international actors is also considered. Academics, scholars, and practitioners who deal with Balkan issues, either as a focus or comparatively, and have interests in security and peace studies will find the volume invaluable along with students of political science, security studies, peace studies, area studies (Eastern European studies and/or Southeast European studies), and international studies in general.

Analyzing informal trading practices and smuggling through the case study of Novi Pazar, this book explores how societies cope when governments no longer assume the responsibility for providing welfare to their citizens. How do economic transnational practices shape one’s sense of belonging in times of crisis/precarity? Specifically, how does the collapse of the Ottoman Empire – and the subsequent migration of the Muslim Slav population to Turkey – relate to the Yugoslav Succession Wars during the 1990s? Using the case study of Novi Pazar, a town in Serbia that straddles the borders of Montenegro, Serbia and Kosovo that became a smuggling hub during the Yugoslav conflict, the book focuses on that informal market economy as a prism through which to analyze the strengthening of existing relations between the émigré community in Turkey and the local Bosniak population in the Sandžak region. Demonstrating the interactive nature of relations between the state and local and émigré communities, this book will be of interest to scholars and students interested in Southeastern Europe or the Yugoslav Succession Wars of the 1990s, as well as social anthropologists who are working on social relations and deviant behavior.