Bosnia's mobile bodies: an everyday geopolitics of labour and migration

Keywords: feminist geopolitics, body, extractivism, bosnia, bosnia and herzegovina, southeast europe
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Sunday
Session Start / End Time: 2/27/2022 11:20 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/27/2022 12:40 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 65

Abstract

'The return of geopolitics' portends dangerous consequences for Bosnia and Herzegovina, where ongoing disputes between the country's guarantors of peace have scaffolded government gridlock and enabled the rise of cynical political actors. The malign, or positive depending on one's perspective, influence of China and especially Russia in Bosnian affairs is one of many stories in this new geopolitical landscape, and predictable issues such as election security, disinformation, and other forms of interference with Euro-Atlantic integration have dominated the discourse (Mujanovic, 2019; Panagiotou, 2021). But on the ground in Sarajevo, the subjects of geopolitics experience them rather differently. Rather than understand themselves as the victims of malign political influences or a hotspot for potential future conflict, young Bosnians and Herzegovinians increasingly understand their geopolitical fate in and through their own bodily movements, and in particular the possibilities for migration to more economically prosperous parts of Europe. In this paper, I explore the ways in which migration is understood as a fundamentally geopolitical action, particularly as a response to the violent indifference of the Bosnian state and EUrope's extractive relationship with the country. I make the case for a geopolitics of Europe's margins that takes account of the body and grounded experience, and in doing so demonstrate how the return of Cold War narratives and "big man" geopolitics may obscure longstanding processes of geopolitical coercion and extraction.