Stef Jansen (University of Sarajevo (Bosnia and Herzegovina)
Abstract
In this talk I propose the concept of border-as-spectre to sharpen our understanding of bordering as a live, open-ended process. When scholars emphasise the contingency of state borders, this usually concerns the past: our critical analysis then questions official narratives of naturalness, necessity and national destiny. I seek to extend that alertness to contingency into the future, i.e. to encounters with non-yet-borders that, one day, may or may not be fully stabilised into state borders. I investigate the conditions in which such not-yet-borders can acquire affective potency, whether in the form of hope or of apprehension. My empirical case focuses on the latter: on encounters with a not-yet-border that is perceived as a threat. It concerns the intra-state boundary between two entities of the supervised state of Bosnia and Herzegovina, as experienced from Sarajevo, a city whose outskirts are demarcated by that boundary. In this talk I reconstruct the brief history of this boundary and trace the escalating Serbian ethnonationalist campaign to harden and ultimately upgrade it into a state border. In that way I propose the border-as-spectre as a heuristic for anthropological reasoning about sharpened, negatively intoned affective attunement to the contingency of state/border assemblages.
Bio
Social anthropologist Stef Jansen is professor at the University of Sarajevo (Bosnia and Herzegovina) and honorary professor at the University of Manchester (UK). His ethnographic studies in the post-Yugoslav states have focused, amongst other things, on questions of home, hope, the state, borders, political subjectivity, social transformations and everyday geopolitics. For more information, see https://stefjansenweb.wordpress.com/