Monthly Archives: June 2021

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Marjorie Mandelstam Balzer: Siberia, Protest and Politics: Shaman Alexander in Danger

In 2021 a modest long-haired Sakha man named Alexander Gabyshev was arrested at his family compound on the outskirts of Yakutsk in an unprecedented for Sakha Republic (Yakutia) show-of-force featuring nine police cars and over 50 police. For the third time in two years, he was subjected to involuntary psychiatric hospitalization. Some analysts see this medicalized punishment, increasingly common in President Putin’s 4th term, as a return to the politicized use of clinics that had been prevalent against dissidents in the Soviet period. Alexander’s hair was cut, and his dignity demeaned. By April, his health had seriously deteriorated, allegedly through use of debilitating drugs, and his sister feared for his life. A private video of his arrest (possibly filmed by a sympathetic Sakha policeman) shows police overwhelming him in bed as if they were expecting a wild animal; he was forced to the floor bleeding, and handcuffed. Official media claimed he had resisted arrest using a traditional Sakha knife, but this is not evident on the video. By May, a trial in Yakutsk affirmed the legality of his arrest, and a further criminal case was brought against him using the Russian criminal code article 280 against extremism. Appeals are pending, including one accepted by the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg.

What had elicited such official vehemence against an opposition figure who had dared to critique President Putin but whose powers and influence were relatively minor, compared to prominent Russians like Aleksei Naval’ny? How did a localized movement in far-from-Moscow Siberia become well-known across Russia and beyond? 

In his 2018–2019 meteoric rise to national and international attention, Alexander Prokopievich Gabyshev, also called “Shaman Alexander,” “Sasha shaman,” and “Sania,” came to mean many things to many people. For some, he is a potent symbol of protest against a corrupt regime led by a president he calls “a demon.” For others, he has become a coopted tool in some part of the government’s diabolical security system, set to attract followers so that they can be exposed and repressed. Some feel he is a “brave fellow” (molodets), “speaking truth to power” in a refreshingly articulate voice devoid of egotism. Others see him as misguided and psychologically unstable, made “crazy” by a tragic life that includes the death of his beloved wife before they could have children. Some accept him into the Sakha shamanic tradition, arguing his suffering and two–three years spent in the taiga after his wife’s death qualify him as a leader and healer who endured “spirit torture” in order to serve others. Others, including some Sakha and Buryat shamans, reject him as a charlatan whose education as an historian was wasted when he became a welder, street cleaner, and plumber.

These and many other interpretations are debated by my Russian and non-Russian friends with a passion that at minimum reveals he has touched a nerve in Russia’s body politic. It is worth describing how Alexander, born in 1968, describes himself and his mission as a “warrior shaman” before analyzing his significance and his peril.

Alexander’s Movement

Picture Alexander on foot pushing a gurney and surrounded by well-wishers, walking a mountainous highway before being arrested by masked armed police for “extremism” in September 2019. Among over a hundred internet video clips of Alexander’s epic journey from Yakutsk to Ulan-Ude via Chita, is an interview from Shaman on the Move! (June 12, 2019):

I asked, beseeched God, to give me witness and insight….I went into the taiga [after my wife had died of a dreadful disease ten years ago]….It is hard for a Yakut [Sakha person] to live off the land, not regularly eating meat and fish….I came out of the forest a warrior shaman….To the people of Russia, I say “choose for yourself a normal leader,… young, competent”….To the leaders of the regions, I say “take care of your local people and the issues they care about and give them freedom.”…To the people, I say “don’t be afraid of that freedom.” We are endlessly paying, paying out….Will our resources last for our grandchildren? Not at the rate we are going… Give simple people bank credit.. . Let everyone have free education and the chance to choose their careers freely.. . There should not be prisons….But we in Russia [rossiiane] have not achieved this yet, far from it…Our prisons are terrifying….At least make the prisons humane…. For our small businesses, let them flourish before taking taxes from them. Just take taxes from the big, rich businesses….For our agriculture, do not take taxes from people with only a few cows….Take from only the big agro-business enterprises.[1]

In this interview and others, Alexander made clear he is patriotic, a citizen of Russia, who wants to purify its leadership. “Let the world want to be like us in Russia,” he proclaimed, “We need young, free, open leadership.” While he explains that “for a shaman, authority is anathema,” he has praised the relatively young and dynamic head of Sakha Republic: “Aisen [Nikolaev] is a simple person at heart who wants to defend his people, but he is constrained, under the fear of the demon in power [in the Kremlin].” Alexander acknowledges the route he has chosen is difficult, and that many will try to stop him. Indeed he began his “march to Moscow” three separate times, once in 2018 and twice in 2019, including after his arrest when he temporarily slipped away from house arrest in December 2019, was rearrested and fined.

Alexander’s 2021 arrest, described in the opening paragraph, was hastened by his refusal to cooperate with medical personnel as a psychiatric outpatient, and further provoked when he announced he would once again try to reach Moscow, this time on a white horse with a caravan of followers. His video announcement of the new plans, with a photo of him galloping on his white horse carrying an old Sakha warrior’s standard, mentioned that he would begin his Spring renewal journey by visiting the sacred lands of his ancestors in the Viliui (Suntar) territories, “source of my strength.” He encouraged followers to join him, since “truth is with us.”[2] A multiethnic group of followers launched plans to gather sympathizers in a marathon car, van and bus motorcade. Their route was designated to pass through the sacred Altai Mountains region of Southern Siberia. What had begun as a quirky political action on foot acquired the character of a media-savvy pilgrimage.

At moments of peak rhetoric, Alexander often explained that “for freedom you need to struggle.” Into 2021, he hoped to achieve his goal of reaching Red Square to perform his “exorcism ritual.” But his arrests and re-confinement in a psychiatric clinic under punishing “close observation” conditions make that increasingly unlikely, especially given massive crackdowns on all of President Putin’s opponents, including Aleksei Naval’ny and his many supporters. One of Alexander’s most telling early barbs critiqued the “political intelligentsia,” who hold “too many meetings” and do not accomplish enough. He told them: “It is time to stop deceiving us.” Yet he repeated in many interviews that numerous politicians in Russia, across the political spectrum, would be better alternatives than the current occupant of the Kremlin.

Among Alexander’s most controversial actions before he was arrested was a rally and ritual held in Chita in July 2019, on a microphone-equipped stage under the banner “Return the Town and Country to the People.” After watching the soft-spoken and articulate Alexander on the internet for months, I was amazed to see him adopt a more crowd-rousing style, asking hundreds of diverse multiethnic demonstrators to chant, “That is the law” (Eto zakon!) even before he told them what they would be answering in a “call and response” exchange. He bellowed, “give us self-determination,” and the crowd answered, “That is the law.” He cried, “give us freedom to choose our local administrations,” and the crowd answered, “That is the law.” His finale included “Putin has no control over you! Live free!” Only after this rally did I begin to wonder who, if anyone, was coaching him and why. Had he changed in the process of walking, gaining loyal followers, and talking to myriad media? The rally, with crowd estimates from seven hundred to one thousand, had been organized by the local Communist Party opposition. Local Russian Orthodox authorities denounced it and suggested that Alexander was psychologically unwell. Alexander himself simply said, after his arrest, “It is impossible to sit home when a demon is in the Kremlin.”

How and why was Alexander using discourses of demonology? He seemed to be articulating Russian and Sakha beliefs in a society that can be undermined by evil out of control. When he first emerged from the forest, he built a small chapel-memorial in honor of his beloved wife and talked in rhetoric that made connections as much to Russian Orthodoxy as to shamanic tradition. He wore eclectic t-shirts, including one that referenced Cuba and another the petroglyph horse-and-rider seal of the Sakha Republic. Once he began his trek, he wore a particularly striking t-shirt eventually mass-produced for his followers. Called “Arrive and Exorcise,” it was made for him by the Novosibirsk artist Konstantin Eremenko and rendered his face onto an icon-like halo.

Image 1: Shaman Alexander in t-shirt called “Arrive and Exorcise” by K. Eremenko, December 16, 2019. Used with permission by Konstantin Eremenko.

Another popular image depicts Alexander as an angel with wings. He has called himself a “Holy Fool,” correlating his brazen actions and protest ideology directly to a Russian iurodivy tradition that enabled poor, dirty, beggar-like tricksters to speak disrespectful truths to tsars. His appeals to God were ambiguous—purposely referencing the God of Orthodoxy and the Sky Gods of the Turkic Heavens (Tengri) in his speeches. During his trek, and in some of his interviews, he has had paint on his face, a thunderbolt zigzag under his eyes and across the bridge of his nose that he calls a “sign of lightning,” derived from his spiritual awakening after meditation in the forest. He has claimed, as a “warrior shaman,” that he is fated to harness spirit power to heal social ills. While his emphasis has been on social ills that begin with the top leadership, he also has been willing to pray and place healing hands on the head of a Buryat woman complaining of chronic headaches, who afterwards joyously pronounced herself cured.

During his trek, on camera and off at evening campsites, Alexander fed the fire spirit pure white milk products, especially kumys (fermented mare’s milk), while offering prayers in the Sakha “white shaman” tradition that he hoped to bring to Red Square for a benevolent ritual not only of exorcism but of forgiveness and blessing. He chanted: “Go, Go, Vladimir Vladimirovich [Putin]. Go of your own free will . . . Only God can judge you. Urui Aikhal!” He expressed pride that some of the Sakha female shamans and elders have blessed his endeavor.

Resonance and Danger

Russian observers, including well-known politicians and eclectic citizens commenting online or on camera, have had wildly divergent reactions to Alexander, sometimes laughing and mocking his naïve, provincial, or perceived weirdo (chudak) persona. But some take him seriously, including the opposition politician Leonid Gozman, President of the All-Russia movement Union of Just Forces. Leonid, admiring Alexander’s bravery, sees significance in how many supporters fed and sheltered him along his nearly two-thousand-kilometer trek before he was arrested. Rather than resenting him for insulting Russia’s wealthy and powerful president, whose survey ratings have plummeted, Alexander’s followers rallied and protected him with a base broader than many opposition politicians have been able to pull together.

As elsewhere in Russia, civic society mobilizers, whether for ecology protests, anti-corruption campaigns or other causes, are becoming savvy at hiding and sharing leadership.  By 2021, Alexander had become one of many imprisoned oppositionists, whose numbers throughout Russia have swelled beyond the prisoners of conscience documented when the great physicist Andrei Sakharov was exiled to Gorky in 1985.[3]

Alexander, despite being subdued beyond recognition after multiple arrests, has affirmed that he was hoping for “neither chaos nor revolution, [since] this is the twenty-first century.” He advocates for his followers an “open world, [of ] peace, freedom and solidarity,” one where all people believing in benevolent “higher forces” can find them. His significance is that he is one of the credible politicized spiritual leaders to emerge from Russia in the post-Soviet period, when in the past twenty years the costs of independent leadership have become increasingly dire, self-sacrifice is increasingly necessary, and multi-leveled community building with horizontal interconnections is increasingly risky.

Whether or not defined as religious or shamanic, the bravery and force of individuals willing to risk everything to change social conditions is awesome, transcending and human wherever we find it. Far from insane, these maverick societal shape-changers, tricksters and healers may represent our best power-diversifying hopes against systems that pull in directions of authoritarian repression. Perhaps once-populist power consolidating leaders like Vladimir Putin, who warily watch their public opinion ratings, are insecure enough to understand the deep systemic weaknesses that oppositionists like Alexander Gabyshev and Alexei Naval’ny expose, using very different styles along a sacred-secular continuum. President Putin’s insecurities magnify the importance of all political opposition, creating vortexes of violence and dangers of martyrdom in the name of stability.

Marjorie Mandelstam Balzer is a Faculty Fellow in the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace and World Affairs at Georgetown University. At Georgetown since 1987, she is co-founder of the Indigenous Studies Working Group https://indigeneity.georgetown.edu and has taught as Research Professor in the School of Foreign Service and anthropology departments. She is editor of the Taylor and Francis translation journal Anthropology and Archeology of Eurasia and is author or editor of six books on Russia and Siberia, including Galvanizing Nostalgia: Indigeneity and Sovereignty in Siberia (Cornell University Press, 2021).

Notes

[1] Many Alexander videos have disappeared from the internet, and others are private access. The series “Shaman idet!” [Shaman on the Move], and “Put’ shamana,” [Shaman’s Path] are especially relevant, e.g., https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1jE71TAqZw, July 22, 2019 (accessed 6/18/2021). Shaman idet! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zPrb_1nWXtE, June 12, 2019 was accessed when released and 3/19/2020. See also “Shaman protiv Putin” [Shaman vs. Putin], https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tfTEtiqDf6U, June 24, 2019 (accessed 7/3/2019); “Pochemu Kremlin ob”iavil voinu Shamanu—Grazhdanskaia oborona” [Why Did the Kremlin Fight the Shaman- Civil Defense] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M7OVy2ROASQ  (accessed 3/15/2020); and Oleg Boldyrev’s BBC interview September 24, 2019, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U0LaLhkKj2g  (accessed 3/15/2020).

[2] Alexander described plans for the aborted 2021 journey: youtube.com/watch?v=YK0LlFAjx3E (accessed 1/15/2021).  See also https://meduza.io/en/news/2021/01/12/yakut-shaman-alexander-gabyshev-announces-new-cross-country-campaign-on-horseback (accessed 6/4/2021).

[3] This Soviet and post-Soviet imprisonment comparison comes from brave opposition politician Vladimir Kara-Murza, himself poisoned twice, in a human rights review for the Kennan Institute, Woodrow Wilson Center, https://www.wilsoncenter.org/event/heightened-political-repression-russia-conversation-vladimir-kara-murza (accessed 6/18/2021).  

Cite as: Balzer, Marjorie Mandelstam. 2021. “Siberia, Protest and Politics: Shaman Alexander in Danger.” FocaalBlog, 21 June. https://www.focaalblog.com/2021/06/21/marjorie-mandelstam-balzer-siberia-protest-and-politics-shaman-alexander-in-danger/.

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Paul Stubbs: Liminal Temporalities of Hope in Bosnia-Herzegovina

A man at a microphone speaking to a crowded room.
Image 1: Shows Tuzla Plenum, 2014 (Photograph by Tamara Opačić from H-Alter, 17 February 2014, http://h-alter.org/vijesti/plenum-je-uvijek-korak-ispred, Used with permission).

The space where I live and work is described and prescribed by its past, by what it no longer is: post-Yugoslav, post-socialist, post-conflict, some even claim post-colonial. This world is rarely framed in terms of what it is or what it might become. Stef Jansen in his ethnography of residents in a block of flats in Sarajevo wrote of „yearnings in the Dayton meantime“ (Jensen, 2015), capturing a liminal space framed by a craving for the possibility of hope and the seeming impossibility of ‘returning to normal’ within the dystopian governance arrangements in Bosnia-Herzegovina deriving from the Dayton Peace Agreement of December 1995. In focusing on Bosnia-Herzegovina here, I reflect on the temporalities of (failed) external political engineering, the proliferation of (failed) projects and the performative practices of everyday life, refusing a deterministic narrative of the absence of hope without talking up the possibilities of repoliticisation.

The governance arrangements that have been in place in Bosnia-Herzegovina since Dayton, drawn up by a team of young United States lawyers, are at the centre of the problem. Somewhat successful as a peace agreement, albeit one that more or less froze the status quo and allowed the main ethno-nationalist political parties that had fuelled the conflict to continue business as usual, it makes governance of the state almost impossible. A recurring Bosnian joke is that everyone considers the constitution laid down in the agreement as unworkable but, of course, no one can agree on what to replace it with. Bosnia-Herzegovina is a sovereign federal state, with a three-person Presidency and a rotating President, based on what is referred to as “the ethnic key” with members elected from Serbian-Orthodox, Bosniak-Muslim and Croatian-Catholic constituencies. It remains a kind of semi-protectorate with many powers vested in the Office of the High Representative, merged in 2009 with the EU Representative’s office. It has a Central Bank that is carefully regulated and there are a small number of symbolic Ministries and agencies at Federal level albeit with very little power. Most power is vested in the two entities Republika Srpska and the Federation of Bosnia-Herzegovina – there is also an autonomous Brčko District (total population 93,000) with its own foreign administrator as the parties could not agree which entity the town should belong to. The Federation of Bosnia-Herzegovina is itself divided into ten Cantons each of which has a Cantonal Governor and a full cabinet of Ministers. If we just take health and social policy as one example, there is no Federal Law, there are entity laws, and each Canton also passes its own Law. Furthermore, financing is a municipal responsibility so that rights can vary from one small part of the country to another. This means there are some 140 Ministries across the country, each with a Minister, a deputy, a couple of Assistants, a large staff, many advisors, and a large number of official cars.

Bosnia-Herzegovina remains something of a ‘crowded playground’ in which we find a proliferation of diverse actors – Sarajevo was often referred to as ‘acronym city’ as all manner of international organisations, NGOs, think tanks, agencies, consultants (‘insultants’ in local parlance) and policy entrepreneurs had a presence there (Stubbs, 2015). Indeed, as post-conflict aid money dwindled, the Sarajevo central office would usually be the last to close, existing on scraps from the donor table. Sometimes, as what became euphemistically known as an ‘exit strategy’, an international NGO would create its own FrankeNGO, a local spin-off, with no certainty as to what kind of monster might emerge. The distortions of an immediate post-conflict economy could be observed at both a macro-level (estimates of donor aid making up 15% of total GDP were being sprayed around a while ago) and at the micro-level. You would be significantly better off as, say, a university professor if you could retreat to your weekend house full-time and rent your inner-city apartment to an NGO for an office or a flat for its staff. You could also make ends meet by receiving honoraria from all manner of agencies for writing reports, even those of questionable quality and originality. Still, today, the crowded playground is populated and dominated by all manner of flexians, in Janine Wedel’s terms (Wedel, 2009), blurring boundaries between the public and the private, the national and the international, the state and the non-state, and more. In crowded flex land, it is the army of intermediaries, brokers, translators (literal and metaphorical), operating in the cracks and interstices of governance, and almost completely non-transparent, that possess the real power.

Central to failed futures is ‘the project’ as an organizational form; a managerial-bureaucratic process; a funding modality and a practice of governmentality. ‘Projectification’ is a peculiar assemblage of repertoires, processes and practices, drawing together material, human, and non-human resources, calculative logics, consisting of temporalised stages that, whilst highly contingent, serve to technocratise and depoliticise the lifeworld and, in mundane ways, reproduce the everyday techniques of neoliberalism (Scott, 2021). Projects operate at variegated speeds across multiple sites and scales. They also come in waves or clusters: in Bosnia-Herzegovina the first wave of ‘stand-alone’ projects was notable for their sheer arbitrary diversity, short time scales, and rapid shifts from one theme or target group to another.  The second wave were ‘pilot projects’ – as I was told in the late 1990s “Bosnia has many pilots but no aeroplanes”. ‘Pilots’ were meant to have the potential to be ‘scaled up’ and become sustainable; that is to become long-term or permanent features of the governance landscape. In a third wave, more explicit systemic reform was prioritised, through ‘projects of strategic support’, aiding Ministries and agencies to plan, implement and evaluate reforms, and introduce new laws and regulations. Such projects were brought closer to centres of policy making whilst also keeping a distance through sub-contracting arrangements, a range of ‘implementing partners’ and, not unusually, the creation of new parallel agencies, often with a chameleon-like character, to ‘drive reform’ and ‘bypass’ those likely to stand in the way of ‘progress’. A number of donors invested a great deal in agencies that, often, became empty shells, literally and figuratively.

Bosnia-Herzegovina is marked by the absence of the kind of statecraft that provides what Jansen refers to as ‘grids’, institutional frameworks that calibrate and order individual, household and community concerns, providing a modicum of basic orientation in terms of what to expect from the authorities. The state, along with the family, is ‘semi-absent’, with state practices highly uneven, often indifferent, or else over-punitive (Hromadžić, 2015). A study of mothers of children with disabilities points to the erratic, ambiguous, fraught, provisional, contingent, unpredictable, even ‘mysterious’ nature of care services. Surviving, for anyone reliant on state support, is a constant struggle to gain access to the right people who, if you are lucky, if all the pieces fall into place, might offer help that is as far away from a structured, system-based, ‘right’ as it is possible to get (Brković, 2017). One conceptual entry point here is the ‘semi-periphery’, a deeply contradictory space, promoting ‘rapid modernization’ in conditions of deindustrialization, desecularisation, repatriarchalisation and anti-intellectualism (Blagojević, 2009). Reforms are simultaneously accepted and opposed, imitated and rejected, in thin, degridded, structural conditions.

Quite deliberately, I want to end this essay in two alternative ways. In one, the longing for normalcy breeds a kind of passivity, a resignation if you wish, an erosion of the capacity to aspire and, at best, an ironic dismissal of the absurdity of governing practices. The phrase bit će bolje can often be heard uttered by South Slavic speakers but it means the exact opposite of its literal translation – ‘things will get better’. This is captured in a quote from Ivo Andrić’s novel Na Drini ćuprija (The Bridge on the Drina), published in 1945, describing local responses to attempts by the Austro-Hungarian Empire to modernise the town of Višegrad in the late 19th century:

“The newcomers were never at peace; they allowed no one else to be at peace. It seemed that they were resolved with their impalpable but ever more noticeable web of laws, regulations and orders to embrace all forms of life … and to change and alter everything … Old ideas and old values clashed with the new ones, merged with them or existed side by side, as if waiting to see which would outlive which. … The people resisted every innovation but did not go to extremes, for to most of them life was always more important and more urgent than the forms by which they lived.” (Andrić, 1995: 135)   

Nebojša Šaviha Valha (2013) discusses the phenomena of raja, referring to one’s interlocking circles of trusted friends, often based around an activity (coffee raja, skiing raja, hiking raja, …), where one can be oneself and practice zajebancia, enjoying oneself in an uninhibited way. For Šaviha-Valha, raja is seen by many Sarajevans, and Bosnians more generally, as that which was held onto against all odds during the conflict and subsequently becomes a kind of auto-ironic way of both critiquing the absurdities of the political elite but, in the end, resting on that critique and settling for raja as quotidian survival.      

For my alternative ending, it is worth noting that as of 8 June 2021, Bosnia-Herzegovina had the third highest rate of COVID deaths per million population in the world, behind only Peru and Hungary. The first wave of the pandemic was marked by a corruption scandal in which a fruit-processing company with close links to political leaders secured a lucrative contract to import ventilators from China that proved to be deficient. Today’s Bosnia-Herzegovina is also policing the border with the EU and is a major holding centre for refugees and asylum seekers held in appalling conditions, many of whom have been violently pushed back by Croatian and Bosnian authorities. Localised acts of solidarity with the asylum seekers do still occur but not on the scale of responses along the so-called ‘Balkan route’ in 2015, when a kind of inter-generational geopolitics of solidarity saw grassroots activities offering practical and political support to migrants from Libya, Syria and elsewhere.

These actions followed on from protests in February 2013, termed bebalucija when, after a law on personal identification numbers was declared unconstitutional, politicians from the major nationalist parties failed to reach agreement on a new law meaning that new-born babies could not obtain a passport nor a health insurance number. In a sense, it was precisely the absurdity of an impasse over personal IDs that triggered the anger of the protesters, reaching a crescendo when a three-month old child died in June 2013 because she was not allowed to enter neighbouring Serbia for treatment. Later, several days of rioting began in the industrial city of Tuzla in February 2014 when workers from several factories who had lost their jobs clashed with police outside the Cantonal Government building. The unrest spread to many other towns and cities, mainly in the Federation and, although widely reported to have ‘run out of steam’ they remain important for the experiment of direct democracy through plenums that lives on today across the post-Yugoslav space. I will not try to formulate some principles regarding the relationship between the everyday and the political in terms of which ending is more likely. As Stuart Hall remarked (Hall, 2007: 279), such things are always “open to the play of contingency”.

Paul Stubbs is a UK-born sociologist who has lived and worked in the post-Yugoslav space since 1993. He is Senior Research Fellow in the Institute of Economics, Zagreb and a former Co-President of the Association for the Anthropology of Policy of the American Anthropological Association. His edited book on Socialist Yugoslavia and the Non-Aligned Movement is due to be published in 2022.

References

Andrić, Ivo. 1995. The Bridge Over the Drina. London: Harvill.

Blagojević, Marina. 2009. Knowledge Production at the Semi-Periphery: A Gender Perspective, Belgrade: Institute for Criminological and Sociological Research.

Brković, Čarna. 2017. Managing Ambiguity: How Clientlism, Citizenship and Power Shape Personhood in Bosnia and Herzegovina, New York: Berghahn Books.

Hall, Stuart. 2007. “Epilogue: through the prism of fan intellectual life,” in Brian Meeks and Stuart Hall (eds.) Culture, Politics, Race and Diaspora: the thought of Stuart Hall, London: Laerence & Wushart: 269-291.

Hromadžić, Azra. 2015. “Loving Labor: Work, Care and Entrepreneurial Citizenship in a Bosnian Town,” in Stef Jansen et al. eds. Negotiating Social Relations in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Farnham: Ashgate.

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

Scott, David. 2021. (Dis)assembling Development: Organizing Swedish Development Aid through Projectification, Doctoral Thesis, Karlstad University, Sweden, https://www.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:1509382/FULLTEXT02.pdf

Stubbs, Paul. 2015. “Performing Reform in South East Europe: consultancy, translation and flexible agency”, in John Clarke et al Making Policy Move: Towards a Politics of Translation and Assemblage, Bristol: Policy Press: 65-94.

Šaviha Valha, Nebojša. 2013. Raja: Ironijski aspekt svakodnevne komunikacije u Bosni i Herzegovini i raja kao strategija života. Zagreb: Jesenski i Turk.

Wedel, Janine. 2009. Shadow Elite, New York: Basic Books.

Cite as: Stubbs, Paul.  2021. “Liminal Temporalities of Hope in Bosnia-Herzegovina.” FocaalBlog, 17 June. https://www.focaalblog.com/2021/06/17/paul-stubbs-liminal-temporalities-of-hope-in-bosnia-herzegovina/.