Historicizing Migration in the Region and in Scholarship

Contemporary discourses on emigration in postwar Bosnia must be situated within a much longer trajectory of forced and willing displacements that shaped regional history. Industrialization and urbanization, which peaked in the period following the Second World War, entailed massive movements of workers from rural areas to the newly emerging industrial and mining towns within and outside of the borders of the Yugoslav constitutive republics (Simić Reference Simić1974; Denich Reference Denich1976; Hawrylyshyn Reference Hawrylyshyn1977). During the late socialist period, as living in urban areas became a marker of upward social mobility, young, college-educated professionals routinely left the provinces to seek opportunities in larger towns and capital cities.

International migrations have been similarly ubiquitous throughout the modern history of the region (for overview see Kosiński Reference Kosiński1978) but, in contrast to the internal migration necessitated by urbanization, were for a long time associated in the social imaginary with economic and social hardship, as well as political dissidence. Throughout the 19th century, residents of what would become Yugoslavia, including various parts of today’s Bosnia and Herzegovina, sought work and opportunities in industrial countries of the West (Brunnbauer Reference Brunnbauer2016). After the Second World War, thousands of fascist collaborators and those opposed to the newly consolidated communist regime left Yugoslavia to form a so-called enemy diaspora, which continued to pursue various nationalist political campaigns at a distance (Hockenos Reference Hockenos2003). Then, in the 1960s and 1970s, when early efforts at marketizing the Yugoslav economy lead to the unprecedented—and in theory incongruous—phenomenon of mass unemployment in a planned economy (e.g., Woodward Reference Woodward1995; Primorac and Babić Reference Primorac and Babić1989), temporary and cyclical migrations became an income generating strategy for many Yugoslav households (Baučić Reference Baučić1973; Halpern Reference Halpern, Buechler and Buechler1987). Of particular importance to this period were the guest worker programs in Austria and Germany. The Yugoslav migrant population was a much-needed source of physical labor but was also often racialized, discriminated against, and perceived as a communist threat (Molnar Reference Molnar2019; Shonick Reference Shonick2009; Pavlica Reference Pavlica2005). Emigration during this period was not just motivated by unemployment but also by the search for better opportunities, among both skilled and unskilled laborers (Le Normand Reference Le Normand, Archer, Duda and Stubbs2016). Gender dynamics and familial situations likewise played an important role (see Lorber Reference Lorber, Bischof and Rupnow2017), as did specific political histories and dissenting ideological orientations.

The scale of these guest programs was significant: in 1968, Germany signed an agreement that welcomed half a million of Yugoslav laborers over five years (Shonick Reference Shonick2009). In 1973, during the peak era of the guest workers program, about 180,000 people, or 80% of foreign labor in Austria, came from former Yugoslavia, with about 16.8% coming from Bosnia-Herzegovina. These emigrants mostly worked as unskilled laborers in leather, textile, construction, and tourism industries (Lorber Reference Lorber, Bischof and Rupnow2017). Many of these workers ultimately stayed in their host countries, even though the oil crisis of the 1970s created political pressures for them to be repatriated to their countries of origin (Mihajlović Reference Mihajlović1987).

These processes of exporting labor, most frequently to German-speaking countries, helped constitute the sociological and popular-cultural category of the Gastarbaiter, or a guest worker (Le Normand Reference Le Normand, Archer, Duda and Stubbs2016). Boris Buden and Ivana Dokuzović (Reference Buden and Dokuzović2018) have recently argued for the need to revisit the figure of the guest worker in emerging debates about migration in Europe, which tend to dehistoricize the question of migration and delink it from the historical transformation of labor markets and global capitalism at large. For scholars of post-Yugoslav migrations, this history is of paramount importance, considering that Germany accepted, though in most cases only temporarily, over 320,000 Bosnian refugees during the war and remains one of the most desirable destinations for would-be labor migrants.

The second wave of scholarship on mobility in former Yugoslavia emerged out of the need to understand the effects of wartime campaigns of ethnic cleansing that generated a massive exodus of refugees, most of whom ended up in North America, Scandinavia, Australia, and Western European countries (e.g., Čapo-Zmegač Reference Čapo-Zmegač2011; Halilovich Reference Halilovich2015; Croegaert Reference Croegaert2011). Some scholars have even looked at how the breakup of Yugoslavia opened new opportunities for existing diasporas, generated by earlier waves of emigration from the region, to connect back to the homeland (Winland Reference Winland2002). Eventually, the stabilization of the political situation in Bosnia opened opportunities for fieldwork-based approaches to refugee question, leading to a number of studies chronicling the lived experience of returnees (e.g., Jansen Reference Jansen2006, Reference Jansen2007, Reference Jansen2011; Stefansson Reference Stefansson2006, Reference Stefansson2010; Eastmond Reference Eastmond2006) and the role of international community organizations in enabling this process (Toal and Dahlman Reference Toal and Dahlman2011; Gilbert Reference Gilbert2020; Wagner Reference Wagner2008).

In contrast to the vast scholarship on refugees and return, the contemporary labor migration from the Balkans is only now emerging as a site of ethnographic focus (e.g., Johnson Reference Johnson2019). Since the end of the war, some Bosnia-based scholars and policy analysts have been trying to document patterns of migration, often merging analyses of refugee exodus and return with postwar departures in search of work (e.g., Institute for Social Research 2013; Kačapor-Džihić and Oruč Reference Kačapor-Džihić and Oruč2012; Kadusić and Suljić Reference Kadušić and Suljić2018). The most recent analyses of social effects and perception of emigration in Bosnia have come from journalists, who have been particularly attentive to the problem of government inaction to this phenomenon (e.g., Boračić-Mršo Reference Boračić-Mršo2019; Hadžimusić Reference Hadžimusić2019; Sadiković Reference Sadiković2019; Huseinović Reference Huseinović2019; see Judah Reference Judah2019 for comparative Southeast European perspective).

It is difficult to give a full statistical picture of the scale of the current emigration in Bosnia; emigration patterns have been difficult to trace since 1992 because of complexities involved in tracking postwar refugee departures and returns (Baldwin-Edwards Reference Baldwin-Edwards2006). Only estimates exist—journalists and policy researchers who are reporting on this problem rely on a combination of sources, including existing state statistics, analyses of various foreign and nongovernmental organizations (NGO), and foreign ministries of migration that keep tabs on the number of arrivals from Bosnia (e.g., Hadžimusić Reference Hadžimusić2019). As a result, their numbers sometimes differ. For example, when Radio Free Europe reported that between 2013 and 2019 about 530,000 people left Bosnia, they arrived to this number by combining data from the Bosnian statistical agency—specifically its research into the size of the workforce and latest census—and reports of a local NGO, the Union for Sustainable Return and Integration (Boračić-Mršo Reference Boračić-Mršo2019; cf., Kajmović Reference Kajmović2019). International organizations such as the World Bank offer other kinds of statistics, for example, by reporting on the massive problem of brain drain, which has resulted in the emigration of 55% of highly skilled Bosnians (World Bank 2019, 63).

Information that concerns patterns of migration in local communities is even more difficult to come by. Ability of municipal governments to document patterns of migration has been compromised by the dynamic nature of wartime and postwar migration and by the fact that those leaving often do not alert the authorities of their departures. Many remain registered at their local addresses in Bosnia as permanent residents; some also remain enrolled in universities or registered with the Bureau of Unemployment. That some labor migrants work outside of Bosnia seasonally and as undocumented workers serves to further disincentivize self-reporting. Among my interlocutors, there are also questions about whether the state authorities want the information about rates of emigration to become fully public, given the fact nationalist authorities are routinely blamed for having made life impossible for Bosnian citizens. Be that as it may, certain alarming statistics are already out there. For example, in October 2019, the government of the Bosniak-Croat Federation announced that, according to its most recent count and as a result of both wartime and postwar displacements, more Bosnian citizens live abroad than remain in Bosnia (Sandić-Hadžihasanović Reference Sandić-Hadžihasanović2019).

This is why ethnographic approaches to this question are so crucial, as they can shine light on the limits of numbers, as well as give more profound insight into social and political effects of this migration. My choice of site, the central Bosnian town of Jajce, is also important, not only because the town’s population has halved since the 1990s and continues to drop but also because my ten-year-long engagement with this research site makes possible a longitudinal perspective on the shifts in experience and thinking (O’Reilly Reference O’Reilly2012). As a deindustrialized and ethically divided town, where both the private and public sectors have been captured by nationalist political parties, Jajce is a productive site for studying how nationalist politics shapes public opinion and attitudes toward emigration. Jajce’s residents live with precisely those systemic problems that are widely understood as causes of this ongoing exodus, including economic decline and persistence of ethnic political divisions.

Given the limitations of statistical reporting and a great level of political and social mistrust in small communities, informal interviews with community members and those that continue living in Jajce are the most effective at deepening understanding of the social effects of emigration on those who stay behind, who are the focus of this research. Although my study was not designed as a longitudinal one from the outset, my regular returns to Jajce and repeated informal interviews with my longstanding ethnographic interlocutors shed light on shifts in public perceptions and the political atmosphere in the town. I have supplemented this ethnographic archive with an analysis of media, policy reports, and social media discussions, which offer a broader picture of labor migrations in Bosnia and their effects on the political climate in the country. Importantly, my ultimate focus is not migrants but showing how emigration shapes public sentiments by producing a sense of emptiness, deepening socio-economic decline and futurelessness.

Theorizing Absence in the Desert of Postsocialism

Tracing the effect of the labor migrations in post-Soviet Latvia, another Eastern European state that has been experiencing a mass exodus, Dace Dzenovska (Reference Dzenovska2018) has proposed that anthropologists take seriously the left-behind emptiness as a palpable and often alarming dimension of the post-1989 global political economy. Suggesting that massive out-migration in Eastern Europe contests the solidity of the national order of things, she has also invited analysists to engage in the “meticulous tracing of relations and practices of emplacement and displacement that ubiquitous national(ist) interpretive frames both co-opt and exceed simultaneously” (Reference Dzenovska2013, 1).

Emptiness is a helpful category for thinking through the growing waves of migration in postwar Bosnia because it captures well how certain spaces become devoid of sustainable economic opportunities and purportedly uninteresting to investors, even while being actively plundered by local political elites. However, in Bosnia, paying attention to how spaces become emptied out also means considering both the specific postsocialist conditions that shaped the postwar economic decline—something that Horvat and Štiks (Reference Horvat and Štiks2015) have characterized as “the desert of postsocialism”—and the localized histories of ethnically motivated expulsion, which remain a part of the reflexive horizon for many Bosnians to this day. Empty factory halls, empty streets devoid of familiar passersby, empty classrooms, and abandoned houses, whether reconstructed or left to rot, stand as material reminders of the lost promise of reconstituted postwar normality, which provided residents of Bosnia with some hope for more than 20 years.

Locally observable forms of emptiness that generate anxieties about the unknown and unknowable future also point to the hidden underbelly of flows that came to characterize 21st century discourses on globalization (Appadurai Reference Appadurai1996). Flows—of people, capital, and ideas—have always had specific directionalities, which meant that certain spaces, configurations, and populations that could not be made mobile would be abandoned. But as I make clear in what follows, these processes do not simply create absences and gaps but also produce new configurations and bring other presences into the foreground. Like ruins and rubble, emptiness and absences are profoundly productive social phenomena, in so far that they mark a difference from the way things were and will be, from the way things are and we imagine they ought to be.

As Bille, Hastrup and Sørensen argue in their introduction to Anthropology of Absence, “absences are cultural, physical and social phenomena that powerfully influence people’s conceptualizations of themselves and the world they engage with” (Reference Bille, Hastrup and Sørensen2010, 4). In other words, like phantom limbs, that which is materially absent nevertheless profoundly affects people’s experience of their world. This is particularly true of postwar Bosnia, where absence remains a historically, politically, and affectively saturated category, capable of eliciting profound social effects. In her ethnography of the search for the missing Srebrenica victims, Sarah Wagner (Reference Wagner2008) has shown how the absences of deceased family members mourned by survivors became a zone of consolidation of new forms of technological and technocratic knowledge exemplified by DNA identification. For the survivors of the Srebrenica genocide, the missing are an active and present force, even (and perhaps especially) under conditions where those that were expelled had managed to return to their prewar homes. What is more, in this particular case, absences appear infinitely capable of generating new questions and dilemmas: for example, identification of partial remains of a victim can simultaneously represent the end of absence as well as an incomplete presence that further highlights the enduring effect of wartime violence (Wagner Reference Wagner2008, 14).

As evident in the case of Srebrenica, efforts to organize various forms of social repair in the wake of war can also generate new kinds of voids. Elizabeth Dunn, drawing on her ethnographic research of IDP camps in post-Soviet Georgia, demonstrates that humanitarian aid intended to mitigate absence of food and necessities functions by paradoxically generating nothingness, as donated items often become reminders of everything that has been lost (Reference Dunn2017, 95). Accordingly, Dunn shows how schemes designed for repair and improvement often have unintended consequences.

This kind of critique of postwar rebuilding closely resonates with Azra Hromadžić’s (Reference Hromadžić2015) argument that the processes of international intervention and postwar reconstruction, which were predicated on ethnic accommodation and consociational models of power sharing, also emptied out the Bosnian state, nation, and citizenship from any meaningful content, creating an empty shell that not only denies local histories of shared life and coexistence but also does not generate any compelling alternatives in its place.Footnote ⁶

This sense of emptiness generated by political restructuring of the postwar state is deepened by the ruination and destitution left behind by the marketization of the local economy, which was likewise supposed to effect repair and jumpstart economic revitalization (cf., Kurtović and Hromadžić Reference Kurtović and Hromadžić2017). This process created new forms of destruction when socialist-era firms and factories were broken up, sold off, and eventually shut down or buried in long bankruptcy proceedings, generating a vast and deserted postindustrial landscape (i.e., Horvat and Štiks Reference Horvat and Štiks2015). The disappearance of large firms in postwar Bosnia is one of the chief reasons why rates of unemployment have remained so high even more than two decades after the end of the war. Hence, the combined effects of the war and the postsocialist transformation make it difficult not to interpret this new wave of migrations as only one in the long chain of events that marked ongoing political and economic decline. This much is brought to the fore and rendered visible in my long-term research site, the ethnically-divided town of Jajce.

The National Order of People and Things

Once well known throughout former Yugoslavia as the founding site of the second socialist Yugoslavia in 1943, Jajce today is an ethnically divided, economically depressed, deindustrialized, and increasingly empty town in the Bosnian heartland. During the socialist era, the nucleus of Jajce’s economy was the local combine (kombinat), centered around a ferrosilicon producing plant Elektrobosna, which was not only the largest employer but also owned a range of other subsidiary companies in and around town. The subsequent processes of privatization devastated Elektrobosna, which was split by the nationalist authorities into three different parts, only one of which is still operational and employs a fraction of its prewar labor force. The demise of Elektrobosna created a devastating blow to Jajce, which had been a quintessential company town.

Deindustrialization compounded the shattering effects of the Bosnian war on the local community and its inhabitants. Between 1992 and 1995, Jajce endured two separate military conquests: first in October 1992, when the forces of the Bosnian Serb army occupied the city, expelling most of the Bosniak (or Bosnian Muslims) and Croat inhabitants, and then again in the fall of 1995, when the Croatian Defense Council (HVO) took control of the town as a part of the larger offensive operation Maestral, which led to the expulsion of most of the local Serbs. In the aftermath of this second military conquest, nationalist Bosnian Croat militaries and paramilitaries held a firm grip on Jajce, disallowing the return of the prewar Bosnian Muslim population. In so doing, they were also challenging the tenuous alliance between Bosnian Muslims and Croats brokered in Washington, D.C., in 1994, over a year prior to the signing of the Dayton Peace Accords that stopped the war. In the early postwar period, after the international community exerted significant pressure on the local Croat nationalist leadership, Bosnian Muslims were gradually allowed to return to their prewar homes (e.g., Toal and Dahlman Reference Toal and Dahlman2011). By the time I arrived to begin my dissertation fieldwork in the fall of 2008, the demographics had shifted, and Jajce municipality had its first Bosniak mayor, who was a member of the Part of Democratic Action ( SDA), founded by the late Alija Izetbegović, the first president of Bosnia-Herzegovina. Despite the fact Bosniaks now controlled the mayoral office, Croat nationalist parties continued to be tremendously important political players and coalition members. Multifaceted forms of power sharing, competition, and cooperation developed in postwar Jajce, characterized by an establishment of an ethnicized clientelist regime that in addition to controlling material resources, such as public institutions, soon-to-be privatized enterprises, and infrastructures, sought to control distribution of public sector jobs, governmental contracts, opportunities, and futures.

But not everyone could be absorbed into these new redistributive networks, which were not only based on ethnic belonging but in both ideological and pragmatic orientations (e.g., Kurtović Reference Kurtović, Jansen, Brković and Čelebičić2016). Many people were left outside of these networks, including not only local Serbs (who by and large did not return to postwar Jajce) but also politically unsuitable Bosniaks and Croats, who did not demonstrate loyalty to the powerful nationalist parties. In some cases, those who were nepodobni (incompatible) were fired from their jobs or sent into early retirement to seek survival on meager pensions. By contrast, local administration and adjoining public institutions were populated from the ranks of the existing nationalist parties. In Jajce, local residents knew which political party controlled which nominally public institutions, such as the local cultural center or the local museum commemorating the 1943 founding of Second Yugoslavia. Over time, political parties rotated and exchanged domains that they controlled, providing testimony to the fluidity and complexity of local political relationships. In this way, wartime alliances and conflicts continued to generate new configurations, which in turn created a sense of continuum between the war and postwar period.

Importantly, these complex, ethnically organized power structures have not produced a viable response either to the political disarray and insecurity or to the permanent economic crisis that followed the end of the war, and they have instead reduced questions of redistribution to a new moral economy that weds opportunity to political loyalty (Kurtović and Hromadžić Reference Kurtović and Hromadžić2017). The subsequent pluralization of the political field, meaning the emergence of new nationalist and nonnationalist parties, which are often offshoots of older political structures, has introduced additional competition into this matrix, which was never entirely ethnically determined anyway (e.g., Bougarel, Helms, and Duijzings Reference Bougarel, Helms and Duijzings2007; Jansen Reference Jansen2015; Jansen, Brković, and Čelebičić Reference Jansen, Brković and Čelebičić2016; Jašarević Reference Jašarević2017; Kurtović Reference Kurtović2018).

These new political-economic configurations, which trace back both to war and to the postwar reconstruction effort, are especially visible in a place like Jajce, which is situated within the mixed Central Bosnian canton in the Bosniak-Croat Federation (which along with Republika Srpska is one of Bosnia’s two constitutive entities [entiteti]). Mixed cantons and municipalities render most apparent the forms of party clientelism that have taken root in Bosnia after the war, which rely on specific forms of reciprocity that fuel Bosnia’s ethnic voting blocks and govern the distribution of public sector jobs, government contracts, concessions, and various other resources (Kurtović Reference Kurtović2011, Reference Kurtović, Jansen, Brković and Čelebičić2016; Toal and Dahlman Reference Toal and Dahlman2011).

The hyperpoliticization of these local dynamics went hand in hand with an increasingly limited number of economic opportunities. What this meant, in the end, is that local rates of unemployment remained quite high and that young people, especially, were often prevented from realizing an independent life and livelihood. Remittances from the family living abroad, typically in Scandinavia, Western Europe, and Northern America, where most of the refugees from Jajce ended up, became a crucial source of economic support. Seasonal work and temporary labor migrations to Europe, with or without official documentation and often to those very same destinations where other residents of Jajce had found refuge, were common. For a while, certain residents hoped that a revival of the local tourism industry, once enabled by Jajce’s historical status as the birthplace of the new, socialist Yugoslavia, would provide a vehicle for a viable and more sustainable future. Nearby lakes and rivers, reconstruction of socialist-era tourism infrastructure, and new types of international development funding provided hope that such a development scheme was viable. But profits from such economic activity were sporadic at best and could not substitute for regular wages from permanent and stable jobs.

It is in this context, not that much different from the situation in other small and midsize towns throughout the region, that a new wave of migration has begun. Bosnia already has a sizable diaspora generated, for the most part, through the wartime departures of refugees, which plays an enormous role in the local economy. Many members of the Bosnian diaspora send or bring cash remittances and gifts to their families, in addition to injecting funds into the local economy through real estate investments and their annual visits (e.g., Croegaert Reference Croegaert and Montgomery2018; Halilovich Reference Halilovich2015). Some even dream of returning permanently for their retirement and hope that such a plan would help them stretch their pensions and the savings they made while living and working abroad.Footnote ⁷

As a result of the existence of this war-generated diaspora, the discourse of the postwar authorities on issues of migration has almost exclusively focused on the question of how these long-distance nationals can be conscripted into the national development projects.Footnote ⁸ But the new exodus suggests that the émigrés’ relationships to their homeland are far more varied and uncertain, especially in light of the new waves of migration where those that remained in or returned to Bosnia after the war now search for temporary or permanent employment and opportunities abroad. Bosnian Croats, and others who possess the Croatian passport, are primary candidates for such forms of migration because their travel documents entitle them to work legally anywhere within the EU, where they can earn significantly more money than at home. But even those that only hold Bosnian passports have found moderate success securing work permits in Germany, Austria, and other parts of Western and Northern Europe.

Departures of skilled construction workers and technicians, who have sought opportunities elsewhere, have generated a new national-level discourse about the so-called lack of workers (nema radnika), which stands in paradoxical contrast with the fact that in the last seven years official unemployment rates have hovered around 25%–30% (Sadiković Reference Sadiković2019). These diagnoses about labor scarcity are occasionally invoked as a means of criticizing the presumed lack of work ethic of the new generation of laborers in Bosnia (or, better yet, their unwillingness to self-exploit in the fickle and unrewarding local economy). But other times, these claims are explicitly linked to the impact of new kinds of emigration of the skilled. Backgrounds in medical professions, specialized construction skills, and IT seem to offer a particularly high chance of obtaining a work visa and a job abroad. There are also certain service-sector niches, for example, care for the elderly, temporary work on cruise ships, contracted high-skilled work in the Arab Gulf states, and gigs as military subcontractors in Afghanistan, which is especially popular in the northeastern Bosnian town of Tuzla and its vicinity (Moore Reference Moore2017). There is some evidence that Bosnians who have realized local careers with international development agencies who were hired to help facilitate the reconstruction effort are also taking up new positions abroad in Asia and Africa (Baker Reference Baker2012).

Several friends, who own midsize firms in Sarajevo, complained to me in the summer of 2018 that they are finding it very hard to hire Bosnian craftsmen, most of whom opt to seek better-paid jobs in neighboring Croatia and Slovenia. Occasionally, these shifts fuel conspiracy theories. For example, in the summer of 2018, I heard several times that the arrival of migrants and refugees fleeing war and insecurity in the Middle East and North Africa was not an accident—and that these new populations were here to take the jobs of those Bosnians now leaving. These kinds of speculations so far remain unsubstantiated, but they reflect the growing consciousness among certain echelons of society that Bosnia is a part of a much more global reconfiguration of capital and labor.

The phenomenon of postwar labor migration has become so significant socially and culturally that it has led to the enormous popularity of German language courses, new bus lines connecting various Bosnian and German towns, shortage of medical staff, and a variety of jokes that circulate over social media, including a self-proclaimed “Movement for Departure” (Pokret za Odlazak), whose motto is “To Live and Not Survive” (Živjeti, a ne preživljavati). And in places like Jajce, still haunted by the memories of wartime expulsions of the ethnic Other, such departures also generated new kinds of historical reckoning and political reflection.

Staying Behind: Witnessing Emigration as Social Ruination

On a stuffy summer day in 2017, I took my usual three-and-a-half-hour bus route to Jajce from my headquarters in the Bosnian capital, Sarajevo. Since completing my dissertation research in 2009, my occasional visits have grown shorter and rarer but are always filled with intense and welcome reunions. Each time I come, my obligatory stop is for my friends and long-term ethnographic interlocutors, Lejla and Amir,Footnote ⁹ a married couple in their early forties. After a period of wartime refuge during the 1992–1995 Bosnian war, Amir and Lejla returned to their hometown and founded a NGO, which they subsequently kept afloat through creative income generating strategies that made them largely autonomous in the ethnically divided and highly politicized context of postwar Jajce. They owned their own apartment through family inheritance and lived a decent, modest, and relatively comfortable life with their two children.

Yet, that day I caught them contemplating what was once unimaginable: leaving Jajce forever. Amir was clearly more reluctant to go—not only did he have previous experience as a refugee in Germany that made him less likely to romanticize emigration, but he was also a tremendous local patriot. He felt that departure would mean giving up on Bosnia, on his hometown, and on the kinds of politics and future-building he was interested in supporting. But Lejla, who had also been refugeed in the past, was now questioning all those commitments. As we drank Nescafe from plastic cups in their office, she moved down the list of families who had left Jajce in the last few years. She paused to explain that the couple who were their very best friends had left with their entire family just a few months ago. Amir added that there seemed to now be an entirely new dimension to this last wave of migration: that even people with municipal and public sector jobs—coveted in the local context because of their security and exceptional benefits—were now leaving Jajce and moving their entire families to Germany and Sweden. He emphasized this was no longer the temporary migration of the unemployed but that “people were leaving never to come back again.” As Amir was talking, Lejla was growing more and more upset. With tears in her eyes, her body shaking, she looked at me and uttered, “With whom are we staying behind?” (“S kim ostaješ?”)

Her rhetorical question, teary eyes, and heartfelt, long embrace at the end of my visit communicated a simple truth that emigration and the ongoing emptying out of Jajce are not only noticed but experienced viscerally by the people who stay behind. A growing number of departures of friends, family members, and neighbors invite existential crises that are now generating new kinds of self-understanding and new forms of critical assessment of the current political moment. Sometimes these complaints take the form of a simple introjection that one no longer has “anyone to drink coffee with” or that one no longer encounters friends or acquaintances while walking around on the streets (on coffee and sociality, see Helms Reference Helms2010 and Stefansson Reference Stefansson2010). Of course, such comments index the perceived emptiness of streets and towns and lament the absence of habitual, expected, and desired relationships and forms of sociality that ought to be, or perhaps would be there had the entire country not experienced catastrophe.

But Lejla’s own words seemed more foreboding, for she spoke not only of the emptiness but the eerie feeling she had while staying behind. Although Lejla’s concerns about the transformation and erosion of her social surroundings were not at all nationalist in nature, her remarks recalled to my memory the ways in which some residents of postwar Bosnia justified their own decisions to leave communities in which they (no longer) formed the ethnic majority, either during or after the war, because these communities had now become unrecognizable. It was the haunted character of Lejla’s postwar observation that first prompted me to think about the emptiness generated by more recent waves of migration in Bosnia along with an all-too-recent history of wartime population expulsions, which are eerily referred to as ethnic cleansing. Just like ongoing processes which provoke departures of young and able-bodied, processes of expulsion that characterized the war rarely left behind mere desolation but frequently, raised new questions about those that stayed behind or those that came to replace the expelled. Postwar emptiness also demands reckoning with new uncomfortable presences—not only the ghosts and the dead that the war left behind but corrupted subjectivities, political turncoats, those who were uhljebljeni (hooked up to the public purse) or somehow otherwise inadequate and disappointing as social companions.

Lejla’s distraught assessment of the tearing down of reliable forms of sociality pointed to the fact that it was not just the absence of those close to her, friends and family, that was now becoming a problem—one that was especially acutely felt in a post-socialist context where people understood themselves as bundles of social relations (Dunn Reference Dunn2004; Brković Reference Brković2017). One was left behind surrounded by people who could not, or were not willing to offer, forms of social support and companionship that made life joyful and worth living.

The existence of such presences revealed by emptiness dovetails with insights generated by a growing literature on the forms of desolation and ruination that characterize late capitalism. Much of this work highlights the deserted and derelict landscapes produced by the passage of time, broken promises of modernity and uneven flows of capital, people, and opportunity (e.g., Dawdy Reference Dawdy2010; Edensor Reference Edensor2005; Ssorin-Chaikov Reference Ssorin-Chaikov2016; Driessen Reference Driessen2018). The work that explicitly takes up ruination in postwar and postsocialist contexts casts ruins as melancholic objects that simultaneously render visible both absences and presences, futures lost and found (e.g., Navaro-Yashin Reference Navaro-Yashin2012; Schwenkel Reference Schwenkel2013; Gordillo Reference Gordillo2014; Stoler Reference Stoler2013; Tsing Reference Tsing2015). Lejla was similarly struck not just by the absences but by the remaining presences.

This is significant because there is plenty of evidence that in postwar Bosnia emptiness does not necessarily only take the form of ruination.Footnote ¹⁰ Ruins coexist with brand new shining homes, even in areas that have previously faced tremendous wartime violence and vicious expulsions. Immaculate new PVC windows and white fences—fragments of a new postwar home construction aesthetic popular among locals and diaspora alike—do not preclude the possibility that homes that feature them are themselves empty, reconstructed out of hope or spite rather than necessity, inhabited only sporadically or perhaps in retirement that is yet to come. Paradoxically, reconstructed homes may obscure the ruined webs of sociality that are supposed to populate and give life to such spaces.

These forms of haunted materiality bear direct witness to the infamous violence that marked the massive campaigns of ethnic cleansing which contributed to the expulsion of two million Bosnians from their prewar homes and utter destruction of entire communities. This meant that one in two residents of Bosnia-Herzegovina were refugees during this period. Not all refugees were forced out by military and paramilitary forces; some left their homes in search of safety and stability.

As a result of these expulsions, and long before these new waves of labor migration became widespread, Jajce had felt empty. Even after some of its exiled residents had returned, the town never regained its prewar numbers: by the mid-2000s, Jajce’s population was only half of what it was before the war. When I first started spending time here in the mid-2000s, I quickly noticed a large number of uninhabited apartments and empty houses, not to mention those that were left half-reconstructed with “for sale” signs on their facades. These empty, abandoned spaces contain an eerie doubleness, not unlike the remaining social relationships that come to the fore amidst mass departures of other people. These empty-but-not-empty houses simultaneously serve as reminders that nothing is as it should be, that life trajectories and community dynamics have been permanently unsettled, and that what was put back together is a strange Frankensteinian monster, a form of life that is not only a pale shadow of the past but is a very testament of the impossibility of normal futures.

These are widely shared, often infectious forms of affect that haunt those that have stayed behind. A friend of mine in Sarajevo, with a stable job and comfortable life but whose many friends and family members have already left the country for good, tells me that her entire life right now feels like a prelude to leaving Bosnia all together, even though she is not, by any means, actively working on emigrating elsewhere. Ever since the last major wave of mobilizations in 2014 led to disappointed widely held hopes of a major transformation, discussions of the “terrible political situation” (grozna politička situacija) have become a standard aspect of my correspondences with friends and long-term interlocutors, nearly all of whom actively fantasize and speak about their own inevitable defection.

The new wave of acted-upon and planned departures amplify the sense that futures are both suspended and permanently lost, especially since these new forms of migration also coincide with catastrophic demographic trends. For years now, the number of deaths has surpassed the number of live births by a coefficient of -1.50.Footnote ¹¹ High levels of economic insecurity, perceived political instability, and inability to realize conventional forms of independence associated with adulthood, such as stable employment and separate housing, have led to low birth rates (e.g., Jansen and Helms Reference Jansen, Helms, Eifler and Seifert2009). This crisis of social reproduction symbolizes the country’s uncertain future.

25-year-old Ana, who I met the next summer at Ataturk Airport in Istanbul while waiting for my Sarajevo bound flight, sees such forms of migration both as a response to this futurelessness and as essentially a form of expulsion, meant to shatter any illusions that the end of the war would also mean a restitution of a certain kind of normalcy and of predictable life trajectories (e.g., Pedersen Reference Pedersen and Charbonnier2016). In Ana’s case, such a trajectory would have included getting a decent job after finishing college and obtaining her master’s degree in political science. Instead, she now cleans hotel rooms in a midsize German town. “They kicked us out (otjerali su nas) in peacetime,” she said to me, “after they failed to do so during the war.” The “they” in this context refers to the new political elites—irrespective of their ethnic and political affiliation—whose drive toward dispossession of many in the name of the few indicates that this bloody and infamous war has indeed had its winners (e.g., Sassen Reference Sassen2014). I hear similar sentiments expressed at my new research site, the postindustrial city of Tuzla, where workers that were expelled from their crumbling factories explicitly link their more recent postwar experiences to wartime concentration camps, and they describe themselves as having been reduced to an animal-like state.

Even those that have not been ejected from postwar economies sense that this new world is bad news. Another friend in Jajce, gainfully employed in a public sector job, tells me, “How can I feel content with my life, when so many around me are not content with theirs?” In doing so, she suggests that futures are not merely made on account of solid salaries and permanent work contracts but also sustainable forms of sociality that make life livable. The war and the subsequent post-socialist transition have endangered these social bonds, not only by reshuffling populations and communities (and in so doing making many previously mixed communities ethnically homogenous, or, as in the case of Jajce, ethnically segregated) but also by introducing new class formations and distinctions—a process often referred to in the local languages as raslojavanje. Literally translated as splintering or being parsed out in layers, the term raslojavanje implies a form of social rupture whereby what was once whole has become fragmented.Footnote ¹² Spectacular accumulations of wealth amidst rising poverty in and of themselves testify that something is deeply wrong—in place of marking impressive individual achievement, they point to the entropy of social fabric.

These ubiquitous testimonials show that the ongoing shrinking of the population due to both migration and negative demographic trends arrives as a kind of a déjà vu, which bolsters the feeling that the future—and perhaps the social itself—has been permanently lost, emptied out, and evacuated. In the eyes of my interlocutors, this newest wave of labor migration is merely another form of forcible population removal of the undesirable. Alarmist public discourses take many forms, from talk of so-called white plague, a term used to bemoan low birth rates, to new forms of ethnic minoritization. Perhaps the most illustrative is the example from the other half of Bosnia, Republika Srpska, where Bosnian Serb politicians score cheap political points by sounding alarms over the arrival of Arabs, both the wealthy investors who are purchasing holiday real estate near green areas, rivers, and streams as well as recently arrived, destitute migrants and refugees en route to the EU. These leaders also invoke the language of ethnic cleansing, promising that they will not be replaced. And they are not alone in doing this—similar sentiments are often invoked in the territories of the Bosniak-Croat Federation. Even there, in areas predominantly inhabited by Bosniaks who might be expected to demonstrate solidarity with fellow Muslims, the increasing presence of foreign migrants often leads to acute and disheartening antagonisms.Footnote ¹³

The newly emerged Balkan Refugee Route proves, once again, that Bosnia is caught up in global flows of capital and people, which exceed its own historic specificity and exceptionalism, to which the local population is profoundly attached. Many Bosnians feel like they have already paid their dues to history and that their recent suffering ought to be a ticket for the resumption of a normal life. Stef Jansen (Reference Jansen2015) frames this experience of dislocation in time as a postwar meantime—a perceived temporary period of adjustment, a transition of sorts to something better to come. But Bosnians are by no means alone in believing they have been forcefully thrown out of the predictable historical trajectories; it turns out that longing for normalcy is a common genre of political complaint throughout Eastern Europe (Fehervary Reference Fehervary2009; Greenberg Reference Greenberg2011; Dzenovska Reference Dzenovska2014) and even beyond (e.g., Vigh Reference Vigh2008; Roitman Reference Roitman2014).

Nevertheless, even if these desires for normality are common throughout the region, Bosnia has a number of specific, unique problems. Many of those problems are tied to its actual political configuration. A country the size of the US state of Kentucky boasts an impressive governance structure that involves not only an entire echelon of international representatives and agencies but also a multilayered administrative apparatus populated by legions of ethno-national representatives, spanning 4, sometimes 5 levels of government, 2 entities, 1 administrative district, 10 cantons, 13 parliaments, and some 160 ministries. In what remains, I want to look at the actual state policies of this peculiar political structure, particularly those nominally focused on youth as the embodiment of the future. My focus is the failed 2017 campaign to open an ethnically exclusive school in the shrinking town of Jajce. These efforts demonstrate that ethno-nationalist logics at the heart of the Dayton state are structural, entrenched, and deeply resilient. However, they also reveal that such practices, predicated on expulsion and dispossession, which Saskia Sassen (Reference Sassen2014) has characterized as “savage sorting”— have clear material limits.

When Nationalists Seek to Make Futures

Considering nationalists’ obsessions with the question of reproduction, one would expect that the ongoing demographic crisis in Bosnia would have prompted a vast array of pronatalist policies and state-sponsored incentives for young families. But the picture that emerges is a rather astonishing one, and the divided, deindustrialized Jajce is perhaps a most illuminating case study of the limits of nationalist (bio)politics. For more than a year preceding my 2017 summertime visit, Jajce was in the news for trying to open an ethnically exclusive, Bosnian Muslim gymnasium. This plan encountered significant resistance from Jajce’s high schoolers who, in contrast to young residents of Mostar who are the focus of Hromadžić’s Reference Hromadžić2015 ethnography, attend an integrated gymnasium that uses a Croatian curriculum but accommodates Bosnian Muslim students through separate language, religion, and history courses.

Officials in the Ministry of Education claimed that this initiative was a result of a demand made by a concerned group of Bosniak parents and a petition signed by 500 people (Šavija-Valha Reference Šavija-Valha2019, 17). However, subsequent investigations by journalists revealed that most of the students and their parents in Jajce had never heard of, let alone seen, such a petition and that no one knew exactly who had communicated with the representatives of the educational ministry (Tikveša Reference Tikveša2016). According to the research conducted by the Nansen Center for Dialogue in Sarajevo, high schoolers contested this project despite the fact their own parents seemed too afraid to challenge nationalist authorities for fear they might lose their jobs (Šavija-Valha Reference Šavija-Valha2019, 17–18). The report’s findings resonate with my own ethnographic insights and shed light on the fact young residents of Jajce, who have grown up in this ethnically divided environment, nevertheless notice its contradictions. They also see the relative level of ethnic integration in their high schools as a positive thing, something that makes Jajce unique among central Bosnia’s ethnically mixed towns.

The protests of Jajce’s students drew much attention from many anti-nationalist citizens of postwar Bosnia-Herzegovina, including intellectuals, journalists, and pop stars, for whom ethnically segregated classrooms represent not only a terrible fruit of the Bosnian war but also a transparent effort of nationalist parties to ensure their political future by, quite literally, capturing the hearts and minds of the young. Although the scheme was ultimately abandoned, due to pressures from the students and the international community, the entire episode offered residents of Jajce and Bosnia at large a lesson about the very character of the political and social logics embedded in the postwar state.

When I arrived in Jajce in the summer of 2017, I was eager to hear what Amir, who closely follows local politics, made of the whole situation. He confirmed my original suspicions that the Bosniak gymnasium was nothing but a concerted effort to establish another public institution which would need to hire government employees—typically, members of various political parties to whom patrons owed favors. Amir was still very angry about this entire debacle and very proud of the high schoolers who staged the protests. Students were, once again, proving what most residents of Jajce already knew: that the town was in actuality divided politically and ideologically, rather than ethnically. But Amir's sense of pride was also bittersweet, for he also told me that the students in the core group of those who were protesting were themselves preparing to do what most young residents of Jajce were already doing: go to Germany for work. Amir feared that with their departure the student movement would lose momentum.

The whole scandal also hit close to home: his daughter was about to start high school herself, and last he heard at that time there were only 13 high school students registered in her generation, even though she had chosen the once extremely popular vocational tourism high school. This experience of a shrinking generational cohort was one shared by many students across the board. Some small towns in Bosnia are reporting only having about twenty first graders in the entire municipality (e.g., Kaminić Reference Kaminić2017; Veselinović Reference Veselinović2018). Clearly, the nationalist project to open new ethnically defined schools stood in sharp and bitter contrast with the social reality of Jajce and many other small and midsize Bosnian towns, and even some neighborhoods in large cities where the size of elementary school classes has been dramatically shrinking. There were simply no children there to be divided anymore. Their parents and sometimes they themselves were leaving Bosnia en masse to seek fortunes elsewhere.Footnote ¹⁴

It was in this gap between the demographic realities and ethno-nationalist policies that the question of what happens when the people leave must once again be posed. The irony, in this case, is that the chief motivation for opening a new, ethnically defined high school was job creation. Finding a reason to found yet another ostensibly public institution that would generate more public-sector jobs, which could, in theory, secure a certain number of futures, presents a practical and imaginative limit of the ethno-nationalist configuration that have emerged in the desert of postwar, and postsocialist, transition (Horvat and Štiks Reference Horvat and Štiks2015).

The averted nationalist ploy also makes Lejla’s earlier question, “With whom are we staying behind?” even more powerful and resonant. She had not only been wondering how one was to live in the absence of habitual forms of sociality but also implicitly asking who these people were that felt at home in this screwed-up setting and how their enduring and formative presence in the community would affect her family, and all other families that wanted their children to have normal lives.

While Lejla’s questions and implicit critique of governing structures have their place, it is important to recognize that these ambiguous figures of presence, which come into focus amid this ongoing exodus, are also a product rather than the cause of ongoing structural transformations, and that the ongoing demographic breakdown will inevitably place their livelihoods in jeopardy. Amir’s earlier remarks, that even people with public sector jobs are leaving, testifies to the widespread recognition of the fragility of this sector of the economy. This aspect of the emigration phenomenon also suggests that individual decisions to leave reflect a broadly shared desire to escape the hyper-politicized, and increasingly unsustainable, realities of towns like Jajce, instead of those decisions being linked to the matter of one’s loyalty to postwar political authorities, as Hirschman-inspired scholars would have it.

Of course, not everyone wants to or can leave Bosnia. It is not just those who benefit from the new regime that have a stake in staying. Those who are caretakers, or too old, without family abroad or viable emigration prospects must stay behind. What’s more, other people may indeed arrive and become a part of the fabric of the new social world, including those from far away, who have arrived in Bosnia, hoping to get to the EU, who might ultimately not have another choice but to stay. How the dominant nationalist projects will shape their destinies remains to be seen.

On the Fragility and Resilience of Ethno-Nationalist Configurations

This article has examined the forms of public affect and historical consciousness arising in response to the ongoing departures of people from postwar Bosnia-Herzegovina, emerging not among those who are migrating but those who are staying behind. My focus has been on the small, deindustrialized, and ethnically divided town in central Bosnia where I have been conducting research for over ten years. In charting out the various laments and forms of historical reflection generated by the ongoing emptying out of its nationals—Bosnian Muslims, Croats, and Serbs—this analysis has interrogated both the limits and the resilience of ethno-nationalist configurations that have dominated political life in this part of the world for nearly 30 years.

When it comes to labor migration in particular, I have demonstrated the different ways in which this ongoing wave of departures is not only representative of regional trends but folds into the not-so-distant history of ethnically motivated expulsions, and, in fact, once again demonstrates that normal life trajectories were never recuperated in the aftermath of war (e.g., Jansen Reference Jansen2015; Brković Reference Brković2017).

This new reality of what Ringel has termed “shrinkage” also brings into relief the dissonance between material realities and ethno-governmental schemes, particularly in the long run. The basic scarcity of jobs and opportunities shows limits of both postwar development schemes and clientelist models of redistribution which have been used as a tool of political pacification. Increasing numbers of people were left outside of those redistributive circles, becoming a kind of a surplus population of interest to no one. Those deemed to be surplus, particularly the young, among whom rates of unemployment reach 60%, are now the majority of those who are leaving. With them leave the grounds for social reproduction, wages that help fund pensions and social security benefits, and cash payments to former combatants and victims of war, that is, the grounds upon which the now 25-year-old Dayton state stands. To work, ethnically based clientelism, at least in theory, needs people. The irony is that the bloody years of war, fought presumably over territory and identity, combined with more than two decades of postwar stalemate, have produced a country in which many of its own nationals neither want to nor are able to live. The hyper-representation of ethnic groups, which is at the core of the postwar Bosnian state, has meant little in the context in which that state has failed to secure its own grounds of social reproduction. What remains to be seen is what post-Dayton Bosnia will look like under conditions of mass departure and below replacement fertility rates. To echo Dace Dzenovska (Reference Dzenovska2018) once again, the crucial question in decades to come will be, “How is this emptiness to be governed and what is its future?”