Alex Jeffrey

The Improvised State: Sovereignty, Performance and Agency in Dayton Bosnia ☆

Description: Over the past 15 years, Bosnia and Herzegovina has served as a laboratory of techniques to re–establish state sovereignty and promote democracy. The post–conflict intervention in Bosnia has justifiably received great interest from political theorists and scholars of international relations who have explored the limitations of the institutions and policies of international intervention. This book begins from an alternative premise: rather than examining institutions or charting limitations, Jeffrey argues for a focus on the performance of state sovereignty in Bosnia as it has been practiced by a range of actors both within and beyond the Bosnian state. In focusing on the state as a process, he argues that Bosnian sovereignty is best understood as a series of improvisations that have attempted to produce and reproduce a stable and unified state. Based on four periods of residential fieldwork in Bosnia, The Improvised State advances state theory through an illumination of the fragile and contingent nature of sovereignty in contemporary Bosnia and its grounding in the everyday lives of the Bosnian citizen.

Contesting Europe: The Politics of Bosnian Integration into European Structures:

This paper explores what is meant by ‘being European’ in contemporary Bosnia. Over the past two decades, Western politicians have justified interventions in Bosnia through recourse to an Orientalist binary between a rational and progressive ‘Europe’, and an irrational and retrogressive ‘Balkans’. Current efforts to incorporate Bosnia into European structures reproduce this imaginary, in this instance though replacing space with time, suggesting that Bosnia needs to move from a ‘Balkan’ past to a ‘European’ future. In this paper I explore the political effects of such imaginaries through two levels of analysis. In the first, I critically examine the ongoing implications of the geopolitical framing of Bosnia as Europes ‘Other’. In the second, I explore how nationalist politicians have deployed European rhetoric in order to stake claims to resources and establish respect. I conclude by arguing that a sovereignty paradox underpins both ‘geopolitical’ and ‘nationalist’ European rubrics in Bosnia: while idealising forms of solidarity based on broad social and cultural affiliations, such discourses simultaneously seek to promote the state as the primary territorialisation of political life.

The politics of ‘democratization’: Lessons from Bosnia and Iraq

ABSTRACT Since the end of the Cold War, the suspension of state sovereignty as a means of encouraging democracy has become a common policy instrument for hegemonic state actors. Deploying discourses of democratization, such interventions have promoted a singular narrative of state building, combining neo-liberal economic norms with a vocabulary of democratic participation. Drawing on the central comparison between Bosnia and Herzegovina and Iraq, this paper argues that such technical narrations of intervention depoliticize both the planning and execution of democratization initiatives. This argument is made at two levels of analysis. At the policy level, the geopolitical contexts of intervention in Bosnia and Iraq are used to illustrate the normative nature of declarations of state competence. At the agency level, I examine processes of democratic reconstruction following conflict. In the cases of both Bosnia and Iraq, international administrations have equated the development of civil society with ‘democratization.’ Using detailed empirical evidence from Brčko District, Bosnia, the paper explores how these surrogate state agencies have used legal instruments to shape the conduct and institutions of civil society. Consequently, the examples of Bosnia and Iraq highlight the fraught moral and political questions prompted by contemporary practices of state building.

The Hybrid Legal Geographies of a War Crimes Court

This article explores the implications of understanding war crime trials as hybrid legal spaces. Drawing on twelve months of residential fieldwork in the Court of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Sarajevo, it examines the circulation of evidence, the choreography of the courtroom, and the nature and possibilities for legal observation. Analyzing hybrid legal geographies foregrounds the material and embodied nature of trials, illuminating the forms of comportment, categorization, and exclusion through which law establishes its legitimacy. Rather than emphasizing separation and distance, the lens of hybridity illuminates the multiple ways in which war crimes trials are grounded in the social and political context of present-day Bosnia and Herzegovina. Consequently, this analysis traces the disjuncture between the imagined geographies of legal jurisdiction and the material and embodied spaces of trial practices. In conclusion, we argue that the establishment of the Court of Bosnia and Herzegovina illustrates the tensions that emerge when an institution of trial justice is used to strengthen the coherence of a postconflict state.

Learning citizenship : civility, civil society, and the possibilities of citizenship.

Learning citizenship in post-conflict settings involves the development of new forms and relationships of solidarity that link individuals and the collective in ways that are not associated with previous conflicts or divisions. In this chapter, we describe learning as a socio-temporal process through understandings of relationships and new ways of being are developed and sedimented through habits and customs. Learning, in this sense, does not refer to teaching through formal or informal education, but rather refers to a process by which perceptions and relationships are changed. Our concern in this chapter is with the ways in which young people learn new forms of citizenship, as manifested in the relationships between individuals and collectivities. Efforts to promote, or to teach, citizenship often emphasize particular forms of behavior and active participation in civil society; these behaviors are associated with civility. But in learning citizenship, normative expectations of civility and relationships in civil society are often reworked, questioned, disrupted, and challenged. As these questions and challenges are thereby raised, we can glimpse the kinds of solidarities that youth might imagine, yearn for, and seek to stabilize or to change.

Justice incomplete: Radovan Karadžić, the ICTY, and the spaces of international law

The arrest of Radovan Karadžić in July 2008 and his transfer to the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) has brought international judicial instruments under renewed scrutiny. In particular, the active pursuit of indicted war criminals across the international borders of the former Yugoslavia has challenged the primacy of the state as the locus of judicial authority. Using the arrest of Radovan Karadžić as a starting point, this paper evaluates the emergence of the ICTY and its contribution to peace building in the former Yugoslavia. It suggests that the ICTY is challenging existing international interventions within Bosnia—in particular, the 1995 Dayton Peace Agreement—whilst simultaneously producing new judicial spaces and encounters. The paper calls for an understanding of international justice not as an abstract condition or outcome, but as a process that is incomplete and situated in space.

The politics of NGO registration in international protectorates: the cases of Bosnia and Iraq

Following international interventions in Bosnia-Herzegovina(1) and Iraq, non-governmental organisations (NGOs) have played a central role in delivering humanitarian relief, encouraging participation in new systems of government, and advocating on behalf of marginalised groups. Although intervening agencies have framed such autonomous organisations as unquestionably virtuous, scholars have increasingly questioned the agency of NGOs, pointing to the constraining effects of funding and regulatory mechanisms. This paper contributes to this body of work by offering a detailed examination of legislation requiring NGOs to register with nascent state institutions. Drawing on case study material from Bosnia and Iraq, it argues that NGO registration should not be dismissed as a technical or legal matter, but that it should be embraced as a significant political practice embedded in relations of power. Registration legislation has increased the transparency of NGO funding origins and institutional practices, yet it has simultaneously acted as a barrier to smaller organisations and led to the transmission of international objectives through civil society entities.

The „Transitional Citizen“: Civil Society, Political Agency and Hopes for Transitional Justice in Bosnia-Herzegovina

Over the past 5 years there has been a concerted effort by the newly-established Court of Bosnia–Herzegovina to build its legitimacy within local communities through processes of public outreach and civil society capacity building. Although particular understandings of the “transitional citizen” are implied within such activities they have, to date, been left under explored in the literature on transitional justice and Bosnia–Herzegovina. However, the way in which political subjectivity is understood and is shaped at times of transition is fundamentally important for understanding how transitional justice is practiced. Thus this chapter will address a significant yet underexplored aspect of transitional justice: that of its citizen. We know from transitional justice scholars amongst others that the fostering of civic virtues, trust and behaviours are seen as vital for supporting transition towards democracy in post-war societies (de Greiff, 2008). This is the anticipated political community in reference to which reconciliation is enacted and over which it is assumed a consensus can and will develop. We suggest that there is a need to examine in detail this dynamic, both theoretically and empirically. This chapter draws on qualitative fieldwork undertaken by the three authors in both independent and collaborative projects between 2009 and 2011 in BiH to examine the type/s of citizen and political subjectivity that have emerged through processes of public outreach and civil society capacity building. This argument challenges a vision of the transitional citizen as a passive recipient of new legal or political programmes and illustrates the emergence of alternative understandings of justice and democracy through public outreach programmes.

Connecting lectures to current affairs: the “letters to newspapers” assignment

This paper presents the experiences of teaching political geography, in a level 2 BA course, with the use of an innovative assignment – the letters to newspapers assignment. We provide here the aims, rationale and a detailed outline of the assignment. We also discuss student feedback from 67 questionnaires and 2 focus groups. Our findings suggest that the assignment was instrumental in (a) enabling the students to see concepts in action, that is to link abstract ideas with real-world issues and (b) initiating a move away from passive learning towards supporting students to actively and critically reflect upon their relationship with the world.

This Space Is Occupied!: The Politics of Occupy Wall Street’s Expeditionary Architecture and De-gentrifying Urbanism

On their first day, Occupy Wall Street (OWS) demonstrators marched past a group of individuals, dressed up and drinking champagne, gathered on the balcony of the Merchant’s Exchange building at 55 Wall Street. Footage shows the celebrants adjacent to, but securely removed from the street, mockingly toasting the protesters, photographing them, chanting “pay your share.”1 This widely disseminated video provided a convenient visualization of the Occupy Movement’s assertions: a privileged 1%, safely elevated from the tumult of the 99% struggling below, engaging in activities completely discordant with the circumstances surrounding them. But the event also illustrates how the built environment frames and mediates social interactions, how space can be inscribed with political significance and structure social interaction. Through architectural intervention—a private space elevated above the public street—antithetical activities each retained their integrity. The building operated as a “technology of separation.”2 Spatial politics underpin the Occupy Movement and have shaped its unfolding. By locating itself in an urban context contingent on a unique confluence of architectural, political, and economic factors, OWS engaged with the complex forces that produce and inscribe space, that engender, shape, and circumscribe the polis.