The Contemporary City

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14446
Giulia Carabelli

The Divided City and the Grassroots

The (Un)making of Ethnic Divisions in
Mostar
Giulia Carabelli
Max Planck Institute for the Study of Ethnic and Religious Diversity,
Göttingen, Germany

The Contemporary City

ISBN 978-981-10-7777-7 e-ISBN 978-981-10-7778-4
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-7778-4

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Preface
In 2015, Radio Slobodna Evropa (Radio Free Europe) introduced several
teenagers from Mostar as part of a documentary programme (Perspektiva)
discussing how young people understand the ‘division’. When a young man
stated candidly not only that he has never crossed to the eastern side or
visited the Old Bridge, but also that it was possible to determine the ethnicity
of people in Mostar because of their skin colour, the commentary section on
the Radio’s webpage registered different levels of surprise and stupor from
throughout the region. Some thought that the young people speaking were not
representative of Mostar; some blamed their parents for imprinting fear and
hatred into their brains; others refrained from commenting, arguing that (not
being from Mostar) one cannot fully understand the situation. Where is the
truth about Mostar? Which representation is more plausible?
This is a monograph about the city of Mostar, in Bosnia and Herzegovina,
a city that, in the eyes of many, became the epitome of ethnic divisions,
religious violence and nationalist intolerance. It accounts for how processes
of violent partitioning, and counter-processes that attempt to undo existing
divisions, make, remake, and un-make urban divides. This book reflects upon
how approaching the study of deeply divided societies means engaging with
deeply divided narratives that are never settled. Accordingly, the main aim of
this project is to provide a multifaceted and in-depth understanding of the
social, political, and mundane dynamics that keep this city polarised whilst
considering the potential that moments of inter-ethnic collaboration hold in
reimagining Mostar as other than divided.
Nostalgically remembered as one of the most ‘mixed’ cities of
Yugoslavia, Mostar became an ethnically ‘divided city’ in the 1990s when,
following the violent dismantling of the Socialist Federal Republic of
Yugoslavia, it was formally partitioned between antagonistic communities—
Croat and Bosniak—in order to bring hostilities to an end. In 2004, the city’s
administration was forcefully re-united by external actors and, since then,
scholars, peace-makers, and urban practitioners have amply researched the
misfiring of the (imposed) reunification, focusing on the resulting
Kafkaesque bureaucracy, the segregated educational system, and the
contested administration as a means to expose the national and international
failure to re-create a tolerant, safe, and inclusive environment. However, less
attention has been paid to actors, initiatives, and events that actually disrupt
the encompassing logics of this ‘divided city’, which would create the very
possibility for narrating (and imagining) Mostar as more than divided. Based
on participatory research in Mostar, this book aims to challenge and
destabilise the representation of the city as merely a site of ethnic divisions.
Interview extracts, maps, photographs, vignettes, anecdotes, and personal
memories will immerse the reader into the everyday of Mostar, as a means of
exploring the inconsistencies, complexities, and problems arising from living
in a city that validates its citizens solely through ethnicity. Against the
backdrop of normalised practices of ethnic partitioning, the book draws
attention to both ‘planned’ and ‘unplanned’ moments of disruption; it looks at
how supra-ethnic spaces come into existence regardless of identity politics, as
well as delving into the plans, practice, and expectations of organised
grassroots groups that attempt to create more inclusive spaces in which the
future of the city could be reimagined. In doing so, the book reconstructs the
uneven history of re-building Mostar physically, socially, and politically.
Conceptually, the book elaborates on crucial questions about the
relationships between space, culture and social change. Inspired by the work
of Henri Lefebvre, and in dialogue with critical urban theories, the book
explores the becoming and un-becoming of Mostar as an ethnically divided
city. It discusses how space is imagined, designed, and built at the level of
political administration, and the various practices through which the city is
re-appropriated, experienced, and lived through patterns of everyday life,
thus emphasising the conjuncture and disjuncture between the actual, the
planned, and the possible. By investigating not only how the city is
administered, planned, and represented (in political and academic discourses)
but also the ways in which the city is lived and used by its citizens, the book
reveals the emancipatory possibilities that are embedded within (yet
simultaneously suppressed by) quotidian practices of inter-ethnic
cooperation.
Drawing on the emblematic case of Mostar, the book promises to make
significant contributions to three broad fields of study: ethno-nationally
divided cities, urban conflict studies, and the politics of grassroots
movements in the context of socio-cultural segregation. It explores the
discursive emergence of Mostar as an intolerant and hopeless place of
division and the impact this narrative has on the everyday life of the city, the
understandings of what the city can and cannot become, and the very
possibility of subverting such ethnic divisions. It then contrasts the globalised
production of Mostar as a place of ethnic hatred with the practice of local
initiatives that make visible moments of cooperation, solidarity, and
consensus building among supposedly antagonistic actors, which thus
challenges the very representation of Mostar as perennially divided.
This book discusses critically the limits of mainstream representations of
Mostar as simply a site of ethnic hatred, and in turn excavate the struggles
and expectations of activists and citizens who feel misrepresented by the
labels of ethnic rivalries, and who attest for the existence of counter-
movements that rarely become visible through academic or policy circles.
What lessons can be learnt from these grassroots attempts to change the
status quo? How can we write about ‘divided cities’ in a more complex
fashion that situates the struggle for social change in a more visible light?
How do we explore the everyday life of a divided city in such a way as to lay
bare the materialisation of its potentials and to become a motor of social
change? These are the ambitious questions that the book aims to answer.
In offering novel explorations on divided cities, which critically engages
with urban spaces of resistance in order to account for the activities of those
who are already producing change, this book will be of interest to scholars,
students, and urban practitioners studying ethnically divided cities
worldwide. It will appeal to urban researchers interested in Lefebvrian
studies, and peacekeepers working in deeply segregated environments.
This book is largely based on the research conducted for my doctoral
project within the framework of the Conflict in Cities and the Contested State
project funded by the Economic and Social Research Council of the UK
(RES-060-25-00150). I am also grateful to Queen’s University Belfast who
awarded me a DEL scholarship to complete this project in the School of
Sociology, Social Policy and Social Work. Some of the material presented in
the book was produced and gathered through my collaboration with Abart, a
platform for urban research and art production, which I also thank for
allowing the publication of maps that were designed as part of the
(Re)collecting Mostar project.
I cannot but thank all those who contributed—in various ways—to the
development of my research and book project. I am very grateful to my
supervisor, Liam O’Down and various colleagues at Queen’s University
Belfast—especially Martina McKnight, Milena Komarova, and Katy
Hayward for their feedback on early versions of my doctoral work. For the
many thought-provoking conversations around Queen’s library, I am grateful
to Conor Browne, Delyth Edwards, Monika Halkort, Maylis Konnecke, and
Merita Zeković. I am indebted to my research partners in Mostar and
Sarajevo, many of whom became dear friends: Belma Arnautović, Đenan
Bemen, Kristina Ćorić, Vlado Ćorić, Marina Đapić, Senada Demirović
Habibija, Srđan Gavrilović, Katie Hampton, Goran Karano​vić, Đenita
Kuštrić, Narcis Mehmedbašić, Muky, Claudia and Stefania Mu​resu​, and
Giulia Pischianz. For the generous and continuous support, I thank Anja
Bogojević, Amila Puzić, and Mela Žuljević, the brilliant women who
founded Abart in Mostar. For many inspiring conversations and for
encouraging the writing of this book, I thank Aline Cateux​, Gruia Badescu,
Camila Cociña, Paola Dalla Vecchia, Aleksandra Djurasovic, Neil Galway,
Liz​a Griffin, ​Zsofia Lorand, Dawn Lyon, Catalina Ortiz, Diana Pedone,
Giada Pieri, Renata Summa, and Margherita Vezzosi. Special gratitude goes
to my family, Marilena Goracci, Alberto and Francesco Carabelli and Alba
Foglia for supporting and encouraging my academic aspirations and to my
colleagues at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Ethnic and Religious
Diversity, Jeremy Walton, Annika Kirbis, Miloš Jovanović, Piro Rexhepi,
and Marina Cziesielsky.
For the continuous support, advice, and for all the happy memories
related to the research and writing of this book, I am forever grateful to Maria
Andreana Deiana and Rowan Lubbock.
Giulia Carabelli
Göttingen, Germany
Abbreviations
BiH Bosnia and Herzegovina ( Bosna i Hercegovina )
DPA Dayton Peace Agreements
ECF European Cultural Fund
EU European Union
EUAM European Union Administration of Mostar
EUFOR European Union Force
FBiH Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina
HDZ Croatian Democratic Union ( Hrvatska Demokratska Zajednica )
HR High Representative
HVO Croatian National Defence ( Hrvatsko Vijeće Obrane )
ICG International Crisis Group
JNA Yugoslav People’s Army ( Jugoslavenska narodna armija )
MDG-F Millennium Development Goals Fund
NGO Non-Governmental Organisation
OHR Office of the High Representative
OKC Youth Cultural Centre ( Omladinski Kulturni Centar )
OSCE Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe
RS Republika Srpska
SABNOR Council of antifascists and fighters of the popular liberation war
( Savez antifašista i boraca Narodnooslobodilačkog rata )
SDA Party of Social Action ( Stranka demokratske akcije )
SDP Party of Democratic Action ( Socijaldemokratska Partija )
SFRY Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia
UN United Nations
UNESCO United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural
Organisation
Contents
1 Introduction

2 Imagining, Planning, and Building Mostar After the War

3 The Everyday Life of Mostar

4 Grassroots Movements and the Production of (Other) Space(s)

5 Conclusion

Index
List of Figures
Fig. 4.1 Demis Sinancević (2009)

Fig. 4.2 Aluminium plaque left at the Piramida Shopping Centre

Fig. 4.3 Božidar Katić, OpSjene.ver.1.0 — When people should be walking

upside down with their legs lifted up in the air , Spanish Square, March 2011

Fig. 4.4 Boris Orenčuk— Individualna Radna Akcija 1 —Bulevar, June 2011

Fig. 4.5 Boris Orenčuk— Individualna Radna Akcija 1 —Bulevar, June 2011

Fig. 4.6 Gordana Anđelić-Galić— Ovo nje moj mir ( This is not my peace ).
Partisan Memorial/Cemetery, September 2011
List of Maps and Picture
Map 3.1 Pre-war socialisation practices

Map 3.2 Post-war socialisation practices

Map 3.3 Pre-war spaces of fear

Map 3.4 Post-war spaces of fear

Picture 3.1 Spanish Square before renewal. February 2010

© The Author(s) 2018
Giulia Carabelli, The Divided City and the Grassroots, The Contemporary City,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-7778-4_1

1. Introduction
Giulia Carabelli1
(1) Max Planck Institute for the Study of Ethnic and Religious Diversity,
Göttingen, Germany

Giulia Carabelli
Email: carabelli@mmg.mpg.de

Since the end of the wars following the dissolution of the Socialist Federal
Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRY), Mostar has become known as a divided city
. After the wars, the two largest ethno-national communities, the Croat-
Catholic and the Bosniak-Muslim, have resettled in two separate parts (the
east and west sides) divided by a four-lane street, the Bulevar . Deeply
divided societies such as Mostar are described as places where ‘ethnic
identity is strongly felt, behaviour based on ethnicity is normatively
sanctioned, and ethnicity is often accompanied by hostility toward outgroups’
(Horowitz 1985, 7 quoted in Nagle 2016, 19–20). In such environments,
‘strong ethnic allegiances infiltrate practically all sectors of political and
social life, imparting a pervasive quality to conflict between groups’
(Kaufmann 1996, 137). Much has been written about Mostar as a divided city
—a place of conflict, segregation, and ethno-nationalisms. This book
proposes to re-engage with the analysis of Mostar by considering practices
and discourses that challenge these entrenched divisions.
I visited Mostar for the first time in 2005 with the UN Urbanism research
project team. 1 Although the war had officially ended a decade prior to my
visit, the conflict was far from settled. I was taken by how the process of
urban reconstruction had injected the violence of the conflict into
architectural projects, filling the landscape with religious symbols mobilised
as signs of irreconcilable difference between the two warring sides. At the
same time, illegal constructions mushrooming throughout the city spoke
loudly of the absence of coordination and monitoring at a centralised level. If
the war had been about destroying the materiality of the city, the post-war
scenario was still characterised by a fierce struggle over space. The (largely
unregulated) process of rebuilding the city inscribed the new understandings
of identity and belonging into the city’s landscape while reappropriating
territories with the aim of creating (more) space for one community at the
expense of the others. While Mostar was largely in ruin, many international
organisations still had offices in the central, ‘neutral’ zone. The multiple
fractures characterising the post-war city —the ethno-national divisions, the
frustration of/at the international organisations, the corruption, the
uncertainty, the war traumas—created a palpable sense of crisis that
translated into two opposite attitudes; the international community’s
hypermobility and the local community’s immobility. The foreign officials I
met at that time were always busy, and all the appointments with them were
scheduled for breakfast or lunch time in one of the two hotels close to the
central zone, Ero and Bristol. The internationals were constantly moving
from one meeting to another with an urgency one might expect in the face of
a looming crisis. As Coles writes (2007, 85–115), an important part of their
job was also to remain visible, which explains their permanent state of
hypermobility. Local politicians blamed the ‘internationals’ for anything that
did not work and the international officials blamed the local elites for
irresponsibility and procrastination. The persistent crisis created a pervasive
sense of political immobility . Interviewing members of civil society, one
could feel the tensions produced by the unresolved conflict but also a sense of
diffidence, uncertainty, and secrecy that made it difficult to decide, plan, or
even try to move from the protection of the not-saying, not-doing, and not-
sharing. Not only was the process of making decisions concerning the
collective good rendered impossible; to simply have an opinion, in Mostar,
became almost equally problematic. Attempting to access information from
the Catholic and Muslim communities, I faced the stark reality of a conflict
that was far from settled. There was reticence in commenting on how the city
was being rebuilt because this could have been manipulated. Or, as I was
often reminded, the information disclosed to me must have been kept
confidential and never reproduced. Aleksander Stuler, an urban planner who
worked for UN Habitat until 2007, reflecting on his experience poignantly
summarised, ‘Mostar was a very specific case that required attention at many
different levels; a delicate status quo characterised by inertia, where a mixed
reaction to any move could be expected’ (Bittner et al. 2010, 162). Inertia
explains well the atmosphere I felt then in Mostar, the sense that doing
nothing was safer because it ensured that nothing could get worse. And yet,
this inertia translated into the understanding that change could still happen, if
only by an external force. In fact, the international organisations that
intervened to monitor the process of reconciliation and post-war
reconstruction had been busy drafting protocols and guidelines suggesting the
possibility for the two major communities at war to reconcile. But these were
often rejected by local leaders, articulating lingering animosities. That is how,
in 2004, the city had been reunified; after long unproductive talks and
negotiations, an international imposition determined that it was time to move
on and to reinstitute a unified city council even though there was little
agreement on how the city would be managed.
When I returned to Mostar in December 2009, to conduct research for my
doctoral project, 2 the city was dealing with the legacy of that imposition. The
sense of crisis was persistent. There were far fewer international officials and
organisations because the majority had left to attend to other conflicts and
wars. Those who remained had become even more uncertain about the
possibility for a different future. It was cold, grey, and rainy; walking around
the empty streets of Mostar I had the clear impression of being in a ghost
town. At the time of my arrival, the city had been without an administration
for over a year, with all reconstruction projects halted in the absence of an
approved budget. Internationally authored statements, urging the local
politicians to find a solution to the persistent crisis, testified to the growing
global frustration and anger at the lack of progress in Mostar. If, with the
ceasefire, Mostar became the laboratory for peace-building practices, after
more than a decade it provided evidence for their failure. And the sense of
living in a failed city had become part and parcel of its everyday life. Many
times, confronted with the complicated bureaucratic system or the
impossibility of accessing services, I heard people commenting that only here
could this happen, the frustrated reminder of the impossibility of shaking
away the permanent crisis. Yet, living in Mostar for one year—until
November 2010—gave me the opportunity to explore the city differently. I
discovered the existence of grassroots organisations resisting ethno-national
divisions that created pockets of unity in the divided city. By participating in
the rhythms of everyday life, I became more and more aware of the
difficulties involved in unravelling and making sense of ethno-national
memberships, loyalties, and belongings, and the complex way such
categories fused with spatial claims to power, sovereignty, and justice. In
other words, living in Mostar made me realise that the representation of the
city as the contested territory among two groups that live separately without
engaging with each other is only one aspect of a much more complex story,
which also needs to be told.
In 1983, Manuel Castells published The City and the Grassroots where he
writes,

Urban history is a well-established discipline. … Yet there is a great

unknown in the historical record: citizens. We have, of course,
descriptions of people’s lives, analysis of their culture, studies of their
participation in the political conflicts that have characterized a particular
city. But we know very little about people’s efforts to alter the course of
urban evolution. There is some implicit assumption that technology,
nature, economy, culture and power come together to form the city
which is then imposed to its dwellers as given. To be sure, this had been
the general case. … [But] it is in our view that … citizens have created
cities. (Castells 1983, 3)

This statement conveys the motives that pushed me to write this book,
and whose title pays homage to Castell’s inspirational work. Whereas many
accounts of Mostar have been written to assess the progress made in bringing
peace, reconciliation, and democracy to the war-torn city, this book enquires
into the everyday of the city, to understand how the urban space becomes
divided and what it means for Mostar to be a divided city. In other words, this
book considers how the citizens of Mostar navigate the city, make sense of it,
and envision its future. In doing so, this book aims to shed light on the
existence of small yet radical pockets of inclusion where people mix,
cooperate, and socialise across ethno-national boundaries.
This book explores the formation of ethno-national identities spatially; it
will account for how people move within the city, how they socialise, and
how they use public space. As other scholars working in Mostar and, more
generally, BiH, I too share ‘the discomfort’ (Hromadžić 2015) in categorising
people in Mostar as ‘Muslim’, ‘Croat’, ‘Serb’ (or ‘mixed’) because of the
limits of these ethno-national categories and their power to flatten complex
dynamics into stereotypical representations of which group lives where, or
wants what. These ethnic categories are both important and misleading. In
Mostar, I have spoken to young, cosmopolitan, well-travelled individuals
concerned with racism globally but adamant in refusing to befriend those not
belonging to their own ethnic group—proving the extent to which shifting
contexts and coordinates could change their perception of social justice and
inclusion. I have met older citizens who remember how, during the era of
Yugoslav federalism, their friends were from all ethnic backgrounds,
suggesting that ethnic differences were known, but they were not, alone, a
reason not to be friends with someone. I sat silent, listening to one of the few
remaining partisans venting his frustration at the demise of the secular
Yugoslav dream where everybody was just a socialist and everything worked
fine. I mingled with many who were born right before or after the war; they
preserve childhood memories of ethnic-related abuse, refugee camps, and
foreign languages they acquired to attend new schools, but some decided to
believe that people are to be judged according to their actions instead of their
ethnicity and mobilise to create a more inclusive society. I have girlfriends
who have partners from ‘the other side’ and met women who would never
dare such a thing. I met parents of young children who are vocally pro-ethnic
division and segregation (especially in schools) and others who teach their
kids that ethno-national differences are not a reason for conflict, embracing
what they describe as the ‘spirit of pre-war Mostar’ (see also Summa 2016 ,
196). More importantly, all these narratives and stories of ethnic exclusion or
inclusion are not consistent. Rather, the like or dislike of the ‘ethnic other’,
projects of inclusivity and exclusivity, and internal mobility in the city often
depend on the context and the audience of the conversation. Stereotypes of
the ‘ethnic other’ as the culprit of all evils are thus still present in daily
conversations, especially when the need to place culpability for the many
dysfunctionalities of the city must be satisfied. But then someone will most
likely conclude that, all in all, we are all just people.
It is important to remember that ethnic groups have always existed and
they were not created by the secession wars. Accordingly, one should avoid
romanticising pre-war Mostar as the city of peace and tolerance in stark
contrast to the post-war city of hatred and division. Differences based on
ethnicity were always present, but what has changed is the articulation of
these differences as motives for outright segregation and intolerance. In one
of his latest articles, Stef Jansen (2016), author of some of the most eye-
opening portraits of post-war BiH, reflects critically on his scholarship (and
legacy), arguing that ethnographers in the region might have downplayed
existing nationalist voices, or addressed them as a direct product of
brainwashing campaigns initiated during the conflict—arguments that
somehow proved that people are not fomented by ancient, unsettled hatred,
and thus rejecting essentialist/primordialist approaches. I interpret this as
Jansen’s call to account for post-war BiH in all its complexities, by throwing
light on both nationalist and antinationalist voices, which often coexist. This
book was written with the opposite goal, that of making visible anti-
nationalist practices in the city best-known for its nationalist voices. All in
all, we both claim the need to challenge existing representations of post-war
BiH to find the ways to portray complexities that often challenge entrenched
binaries of division/unity, nationalism/anti-nationalism, conflict/solidarity. Of
course, the book asks, in a country ruled by ethnic politics, is it possible to
escape the logics of ethno-nationalism? And if this is possible, where do we
search for resistance to entrenched patterns of division? If the political
impasse in Mostar has become consistent with normal everyday life, how
could movements countering the social injustice produced by spatial
segregation possibly take place, and what would they look like? Jansen is
addressing (mainly) ethnographers in this region to reflect on whether they
might have been too lenient with nationalisms and why. This book embraces
this call for a different reason. Mostar has been extensively analysed in terms
of how its nationalisms dictate urban politics, but few have asked whether
there is more to nationalism in Mostar than simply division and stasis.
Indeed, existing processes of urban rebellion and movements against
nationalism have been downplayed—they are too small, too short-lived, or
too thinly populated to make them relevant. This book wishes to further a
debate into the politics of representing Mostar (and BiH) to critically rethink
how we understand notions of normalcy, identity, and ethnicity by embracing
the very socio-political nuances engendered by the rhythms of everyday life.
In short, the books aim to unsettle what we think we know about the city of
Mostar.
If the city was taken as the exemplary case-study of how the
implementation of peace, reconciliation, and democracy prove difficult in
deeply divided societies, this book proposes to re-examine Mostar once
again, but this time to explore the social excess and surplus of action beyond
ethnic divisions: the inconsistencies of ethno-national programmes, the
moments of spontaneous solidarity, and the projects forcefully countering
ethnic segregation. Overall, this book suggests that the division of Mostar,
albeit real and present, is unstable, unsolved, and changing. This book
discusses the many ways in which Mostar remains ‘divided’; its
infrastructures, political impasses, and contested imaginaries account for the
entrenched divisive practices that resign Mostar to one of the most researched
‘divided cities’. But also, the book wants to make visible the manifold ways
in which divisive practices are resisted either because of contingencies or as
part of organised movements. I do not intent to draw a picture of Mostar as
devoid of conflict or to suggest that the division has been solved. Rather, I
wish to reflect on how ethno-nationalism and movements against it are
relationally shaped in order to assess how the perceived sense of immobility
hides and holds very different political projects.
In this introductory chapter, I begin by discussing the emergence of the
‘divided city’ as a pressing urban phenomenon and I briefly review the
scholarship on ethno-nationally divided cities and to situate the case of
Mostar. I pay attention to the work of scholars who look at inter-ethnic
movements, supra-nationalist groupings, and the everyday life of ethnically
polarised cities, and I explain how this book attempts to make a critical
intervention in this field of research. In the second part of this chapter, I
discuss the theoretical choices that underpin this research and I explain how
Lefebvre’s theory of space production not only inspired my work but
provides innovative tools for the study of divided cities more generally.
Lastly, I reflect on my place in Mostar—as a foreign researcher, an activist,
and an educator—to trace the different ways in which the material for this
book has been collected, analysed, and interpreted. In doing so, I also wish to
contribute to methodological discussions about how to approach the study of
divided cities.

Ethno-nationally Divided Cities and the

Relevance of Mostar as a Case Study
Urban scholars have long explored conflict and divisions in cities (Marcuse
1993). If levels of division, segregation, and inequality are traceable in many
cities, they become extreme in the case of what goes under the label of
‘divided cities ’. These are places where segregation materialises through the
erection of walls, the existence of buffer zones, internal checkpoints, and the
production of material or immaterial borders that limit internal mobility and
fuel (often) violent conflicts. Belfast, Beirut, Jerusalem, Nicosia, or Mostar
are among the most popular examples of this urban typology. Conflict, in
these cities, is characterised by ethno-national aspirations to exclusive
sovereignty that manifests spatially into the desire to acquire more territory
for one community at the expense of others. I use the concept of ethno-
nationalism , following Connor (1994), to define a type of nationalism that is
linked to ethnicity. Nationalism is sometimes used in non-ethnic terms and
not all ethnic groups identify over a particular state. Ethno-nationalism refers
to an ethnic group that strives for its own state. In other words, the term refers
to ‘both the loyalty to a nation deprived of its own state and the loyalty to an
ethnic group embodied in a specific state, particularly where the latter is
conceived as a “nation-state”.’ (Conversi 2004, 2). Ethno-nationalism defines
political strategies that raise ethnicity as the chosen category to determine
alliances and enemies but also, the concept refers to how the safeguarding of
ethnic boundaries fuels aspirations of independence towards the creation of
ethnically homogeneous nation states (see also Anderson 2008, 2013). Thus,
ethno-nationally divided cities become both the stage on which struggles over
urban territory play out and the incubator of broader conflicts over state
sovereignty as such. Often, these divided cities belong to highly contested
states—Bosnia and Herzegovina , Israel/Palestine, and Lebanon are clear
examples—in which ethno-nationalism generates antagonistic claims to
political power, feeding conflicts whose violence waxes or wanes over long
periods of time (Bollens 2007; Calame and Charlesworth 2009; Pullan and
Baille 2013).
In a historical moment when nationalisms are on the rise, the study of
these extreme cases of division has found renewed interest. So far, the
diverse and multi-disciplinary literature about divided cities has interrogated
how to manage conflict through the potentials and limits of consociational
agreements (McCulloch and McGarry 2017), how to foster reconciliation via
‘peacebuilding in practice’ (Oberschall 2007), or how to enhance inter-ethnic
dialogue, transforming antagonism into agonism, and in turn producing a
shared society (Nagle and Clancy 2010). Yet, with the intensifying of
research into divided cities, a number of scholars have also pointed to the
limits of their shared label. Firstly, by grouping very different case-studies
under this category, we obscure the many differences among these cities by
focusing instead only on what they have in common: their division. This
leads to simplified analyses that reduce historical, economic, and political
complexities to stereotypical representations of urban polarisations, which
might limit the scope of urban research rather than broadening it (Allegra et
al. 2012). Each city that became known as a ‘divided city’ has a different
history that led to different conflicts, which need specific solutions: there is
no universal formula for solving the crisis of ethno-nationally divided cities.
Yet, as this book argues, there could be a benefit to looking at all these cities
as more-than-divided searching for moments that disrupt the facts of the
division shedding light on the possibility for these cities to host dynamic
movements towards inclusion to which attention might not be given. This is
an idiographic account of Mostar that does not seek to compare and define
the experience of this city in relation to other similarly fractured
environments at a general explanatory level. This book details the
complexities of Mostar and its urban division as a process (rather than a fact)
in order to solicit a shift in the literature about ‘divided cities’ that could
engage with these extreme cases as not only places of division and conflict,
but also as sites of solidarity, confusion, and resistance.
Secondly, and directly relating to my first point, to label these cities as
divided normalises their representation as places of permanent (and often
unsolvable) partition annihilating the very possibility of social
transformation. Proof lies in the fact that scholarly research about divided
cities tends to be about management and transition rather that change, which
is often perceived as impossible. For instance, the scholarly literature on
Mostar tends to probe urban segregation by looking at its effects on the
reconstruction and management of the city or everyday life. They examine
how religious communities have been rebuilding their spaces in order to
affirm their (antagonistic) identities (Makaš 2007) or criticise the conduct of
planners who were never interested in rebuilding shared spaces—allegedly to
boycott the process of reconciliation (Calame and Charlesworth 2009;
Bollens 2012). But the very facticity of Mostar’s division is never
substantially questioned, which thus gives the impression of an immutable
reality. Crucially, these analyses are mainly based on interviews with
officials, group leaders, and policy-makers. Yet, engaging solely with elite
actors reflects a narrow selection of a specific layer of the population not only
in terms of their public authority but, more importantly, their political
membership (O’Leary 2005; Sasso 2016; Wilford and Wilson 2006). In fact,
as in many other ethnically divided societies , power positions are bestowed
according to ethnic quotas, and largely taken by candidates who are willing to
comply with such a system—de facto facilitating and empowering nationalist
discourses and divisions. The existing literature concerning the contested
reunification of Mostar similarly fails to consider that elite understandings
and visions of the city’s future do not always comply with that of the
citizenry, assuming simply that Mostar’s dwellers are (silent) members of
ethno-national communities whose views are automatically pre-determined.
However, ethnographic accounts of post-war life in Bosnia and
Herzegovina have already successfully challenged such an assumption,
demonstrating that ethno-national categories are not static or solid
(Hromadžić 2015; Kolind 2008; Jansen 2008; Palmberger 2010). Rather,
such categories are negotiated according to the always-changing
contingencies of everyday social agency. Thus, citizens do not passively
inhabit their acquired constitutional identity but proactively engage with it,
often in challenging ways. Similarly, this book embraces an understanding of
ethnicity as a process of becoming (Wilmer 2002) and it will argue for the
possibility of seeing the formation of ethnic groups as non-teleological, and
to understand their crystallisations as the socio-historical result of violence
and the contingencies of conflict. A similar approach has already facilitated
research into supra-national or inter-ethnic movements, such as the LGBT
movement or the feminist groups in Belfast, or the ‘You Stink’ campaign in
Beirut (Nagle 2009, 2016). As Nagle emphasises, these campaigns are rare,
but also fundamental to peacebuilding. In fact, ‘nonsectarian social
movements… contribute in different ways to innovative forms of
peacemaking that lie outside of more official and established forms of
conflict management …[T]hese social movements strive to challenge and
unsettle the basic grammar and structure that support violent separation in the
divided society’ (2016, 24). These non-sectarian groups are often
unacknowledged both by academic scholarship and the international
organisations guiding reconciliation processes. For instance, Kappler,
discussing the positive roles of grassroots supra-ethnic cultural associations
in divided societies, concludes that these are often side-lined because ‘they
might not have a clearly articulated policy agenda nor do they respond to
formal demands of project organisation’ (2014, 166) even though their
activities and networks are fundamental to peacemaking. Accordingly, this
book accounts for people in Mostar as individuals whose identities are
constructed in complex and multi-layered ways, revealing unexpected
moments in which ethno-nationality loses its centrality, becoming merely one
among many factors, and not always the most relevant.
By drawing on much of the debates highlighted so far, this book aims to
make two critical interventions. Firstly, it wishes to contribute to the
emerging literature about Mostar’s everyday life . Scholars such as
Hromadžić (2015), Laketa (2015b), Moore (2013), Palmberger (2016), and
Summa (2016 ) have written on the everyday life of this city by reflecting on
the persistent feeling that Mostar is surely divided, but not entirely so. This
literature has started challenging the ossified representation of Mostar as a
hopelessly ‘divided city’. This is not because the process of reconciliation has
progressed substantially but rather because of the realisation that the ethno-
national division cannot account for or explain everything that happens in
Mostar. If it is evident that the city struggles to be reunified, and if this
affects the ways in which people understand their position in the city and the
limits that it entails, it is also clear that social dynamics often escape the
logics of division, reflecting instead the fluidity and inconsistency of daily
life. Accordingly, the book gives importance to moments and gestures that
create inclusion and solidarity (even when they do not challenge openly
ethnic politics and divisive practices) in order to reflect on what resistance
could be/mean in Mostar, as well as other places of deep division. Secondly,
like Wollentz et al. (2017), Kappler (2014), and Forde (2017), who have
researched bottom-up approaches to ethno-national reconciliation in Mostar,
this book looks at grassroots activities that transcend lines of division. It
accounts for cultural and artistic projects that reappropriate public spaces to
subvert divisive practices and create—temporarily—inclusive environments
where ethno-national belongings lose their saliency.
Overall, this book is an attempt to engage with the divided city of Mostar
in all its complexities . Its goal is to make visible, rather than obscure, what
does not make sense within established practices of division, in order to
challenge the representation of this city as a permanent case of urban division
—the missed opportunity. Conceptually, this book proposes to consider the
city of Mostar as more-than-divided. This means that whilst the book
interrogates the facts of persisting division, and how the process of
reconciliation has been largely boycotted, it also surveys everyday practices
and the activities of organised movements that contest, erase, and often re-
establish ethnic boundaries in complex ways.

Henri Lefebvre and the Production of Space in

Mostar
This book was inspired by Henri Lefebvre’s call to multiply the readings of
the city as a means to challenge normalised (and normalising) urban
representations, and in so doing, forge radical strategies for promoting social
change and justice (Lefebvre 2006 [1968]). As I have already discussed, the
issue of representation is crucial when approaching the study of ‘divided
cities ’ given their tendency to be portrayed as places of absolute violence,
segregation, and intolerant group behaviour, leaving little or no space for
imagining them as other-than-divided (in the present and in the future).
Lefebvre argues that the ways in which cities are represented is itself a
productive practice (1991, 40–46). Representations are ‘shot through with a
knowledge (savoir)—i.e. a mixture of understanding (connaissance) and
ideology—which is always relative and in the process of change…
Representations are thus objective, though subject to revision’ (Lefebvre
1991, 41). The representation of a city, contrived through the discursive
framework of elite knowledge/power, conveys the essence of an ascribed
‘urban reality’ that is adequate to a particular class project. Yet, being an
abstract construct, this representation is also a simplification of urban
dynamics, insofar as they remain silent on the complex realities of everyday
life. Representations are programmatic in the sense that they facilitate a
specific understanding of what the city is meant to be, and to become in the
future. In this sense, representations support the idea that the present (and
future) is plannable (and predictable). For Lefebvre, these representations
play a crucial part in how we get to know a city because they shape our
imaginaries and expectations, as well as limiting the very possibility to
conceive change (Lefebvre 1991, 48–53). In fact, urban representations
become normalised and, as such, are rarely challenged. This is why the
majority of scholarship on divided cities is shaped by the ‘facts’ of division,
yet rarely focusing on the often imperceptible (though no less real) dynamics
of social change or resistance to such representations. In contrast, Lefebvre’s
theory of space production provokes a confrontation with the ways in which
cities are mapped and represented (in abstract terms) by giving credence and
analytical weight to the contingent and contradictory practices embedded in
‘everydayness ’. In fact, it is by living in cities that people not only make
sense of the built environment, but decide how to use it and, often,
reappropriate these infrastructures to counter imposed ideologies and norms.
In other words, it is only by looking at the interplay of urban design, political
discourses, and everyday movements within the city that a more complex
rendering of urban dynamics becomes possible. Such an approach is also
conducive to capturing the emergence of actors and movements that rebel
against existing urban directives (often imposed without the consent of the
citizens) to produce alternatives ways of living and using the city.
Accordingly, this book also critically engages with the activities of
existing organised groups of citizens, which attempt to disrupt the normalised
cartography of the city in order to imagine and produce social change. The
aim is ultimately to look beyond ethno-national divisions and to challenge the
main representations of Mostar as divided in order to account for the
possibility of an urban revolution, which could produce a different urban
space. In particular, the research interrogates Lefebvre’s claim for creativity
and art in imagining and producing heterotopias: ‘the liminal social spaces of
possibilities where something different is not only possible, but foundational
for defining of revolutionary trajectories’ (Harvey 2012, x). This is a crucial
point of Lefebvre’s theory that must be accounted for in relation to the
scholar’s commitment to Marxian theory and its inherently revolutionary
content. In fact, the theory of space production was written with a practical
intent, i.e. to explore the capitalist mode of production, delineate its dominant
spatial form (abstract space), understand its mechanisms, and in turn disrupt
its rhythms to create a new, different space (heterotopia) (Lefebvre 1991,
419–420).
The introduction of Lefebvre’s thought into the critical study of divided
cities has only recently emerged, particularly in relation to the cases of
Belfast (Nagle 2009, 2013), Jerusalem (Rosen and Shlay 2014), and Skopje
(Véron 2016). Most Lefebvrian analysis has attempted to understand ethno-
national divisions and the struggles against them through the lens of
Lefebvre’s notion of the ‘right to the city’ , in relation to the ‘right to urban
life’, as understood as a ‘place of encounter [and] priority of use value’ over
alienation and exchange value (Lefebvre 2006 [1968], 158). Though initially
premised on the ‘working class’ as the true ‘agent’ of an urban revolution
(ibid.), he later acknowledged the significance of much broader urban social
movements—particularly in relation to the Paris uprisings of 1968—which
went well beyond the traditional working class (Lefebvre 1991, 55). There is,
therefore, a certain tension in Lefebvrian studies between more traditional
interpretations of the right to the city as a fundamentally anti-capitalist
project that transforms the entire field of social relations (e.g. Purcell 2002),
and more fluid approaches that start not from canonical texts but from the
concrete realities of urban struggle (in all of their complexities and
contradictions) that give life to the very idea of a right to the city (Harvey
2012). It is from this latter perspective that Lefebvrian scholars have
attempted to understand counter-movements against ethno-national divisions
as particular instances of political struggles against alienating discourses and
practices. As such, this book shares with these studies the commitment to
understanding how individual citizens and urban movements instigate their
own discourses on urban rights—on a right to a city without ethnic
antagonism.
And yet, almost a decade ago, Nagle (2009, 328) made note of the fact
that, ‘[Lefebvre’s] ideas have not been applied to ethno-national “divided
cities ” with any systematic rigor.’ Since then, and notwithstanding the near-
ubiquitous use of the ‘right to the city’ frame, the systematic incorporation of
Lefebvre’s core framework into the divided cities literatures has barely
progressed. The reason for this is not hard to fathom, as Lefebvre made little
reference to questions of ethnicity and ethno-national identity throughout his
oeuvre. As previously noted, Lefebvre’s true purpose was to deconstruct the
spatial conditions of possibility for the capitalist mode of production
grounded in the construction of abstract space , which attempts to abolish all
particular socio-historical qualities, including ethnic identity (Lefebvre 1991,
49). Nevertheless, and in line with his general commitment to a relational
theory of space (i.e., space as process [Lefebvre 1991, 83]), Lefebvre was
clear that ‘[a]bstract space is not homogeneous; it simply has homogeneity as
its goal, its orientation, its “lens”. And, indeed, it renders homogenous. But in
itself it is multiform’ (Lefebvre 1991, 287). Abstract space is thus expressed
by its parcelisation, which has its analogy in the social and technical division
of labour. Such differences possess an inter-changeability, in as much as they
are part of the same ‘whole’ (the capitalist market and space of commodity
exchange), yet their differential content expresses the inherently multiform
character of capital accumulation: on the one hand, accumulation presupposes
the element of competition as a social mechanism of rationalisation,
innovation, and growth. Thus, in concrete reality, “[c]apital exists and can
only exist as many capitals” (Marx 1973, 414, emphasis added. See also
Marx 1977, 40–51). On the other hand, the production of commodities takes
shape through a multitude of companies, branches, industries and
geographical regions, including spaces of consumption and reproduction
—‘“public facilities”, blocks of flats, “environments for living”’ and so on
(Lefebvre 1991; cf. Lefebvre 2009, 233–234). As Kipfer puts it:

Demarcated by property divisions, transportation routes, and lines of

functional and social segregation, these parcelized social spaces…
represent forms of minimal difference… [which] dissociates everyday
life, peripheralizes the working class, imposes much of the weight of
reproduction onto women, and banishes new immigrants to “neo-
colonial” shantytowns and the worst public housing tracts. (2008, 202;
see also Lefebvre 1976, 84–85)

Drawing upon the adage of colonial administration, the production of

abstract space, and its continued reproduction, relies on the fact that ‘it
divides and rules’ (Lefebvre 1991, 388).
What, then, is the relationship between abstract space—as a dialectical
process of unity/fragmentation under the dominance of capital—and the
politics of ethno-nationalism? At first sight this is not an easy question to
answer. But its resolution surely lies in the broader framework outlined in
The Production of Space, which was directly engaged within the problem of
abstract space itself.

The Spatial Triad , or on the Process of

Unravelling Space in Mostar
Lefebvre’s reference to the conceived, perceived, and lived provides the core
theoretical framework for the dialectical reading of social space . Considering
the interplay of physical, mental, and social space, as they inherently co-
participate in the production of ‘the urban’, this book undoes the process that
leads to producing Mostar as a divided city. This Lefebvrian investigation
necessarily engages with the materiality of space as well as the ways in which
cities are created (and recreated) through social interactions, negotiations, and
imaginaries. In fact, Lefebvre was the first to argue that space is not a passive
locus of social relations (1991, 11), but rather the product of social
interactions and contestation.
As a means of exploring the process of space production, Lefebvre
elaborates the analytical tool of the ‘spatial triad’. He thus imagines urban
space as the result of a continuous interaction of three moments:
representations of space, representational spaces, and spatial practice (1991,
38–42):
Representations of space (conceived) refer to the conceptualised spaces
of those in charge of designing and building space, such as planners,
architects, and bureaucrats (the dominant strata). This is the dominant space
of any society, and corresponds to the dominant mode of production,
constructed by hegemonic classes according to a certain politico-economic
agenda, carefully choosing symbols, signs, and forms to develop a certain
plan. The level ultimately congeals itself in the form of discourse.
Representations of space could either be written descriptions and definitions
of space, as well as maps and plans.
Representational spaces (lived) are the inhabited spaces, the space of
dwellers and users. Representational spaces are directly lived and could be
passively experienced, or appropriated and changed by imagination. The
level of the space of representation is the level of the symbol and it directly
links to the process of making sense of space and its material practice by
interpreting its materiality. Thus, representational spaces overlap physical
space and make use of the built environment. The level of representational
spaces must also be understood as the level of the irrational, of emotions and
instinct. In other words, this level accounts for social imagination and the
ways in which it is produced. Representational spaces are alive and they
“have a practical impact in the ways in which they transform and modify
urban texture” (Lefebvre 1991, 42, emphasis added).
Spatial practices (perceived) are ‘the specific spatial competence and
performance of every society member’ (Lefebvre 1991, 38). Spatial practices
count on the production and reproduction of space and guarantee continuity
and a certain level of societal coherence. Spatial practices result from
‘articulation and connection of elements or activities’ of individuals (Schmid
2008, 36). Therefore, this level refers to the ways in which a society is held
together both at the level of infrastructures and everyday material
(re)production. 3
While the three moments of the triad aim to express the indivisibility of
social space, and the always-connected relationships of the conceived,
perceived, and lived, the three moments of the triad must also be understood
as a means to disentangle space, with the final goal of reconstructing the
historically specific ways in which the three moments cohere. As Lefebvre
emphasised:

The understanding of space cannot reduce the lived to the conceived,

nor the body to a geometric or optical abstraction. On the contrary: this
understanding must begin with the lived and the body, that is, from a
space occupied by an organic, living, and thinking being. This being has
(is) its space, circumscribed in its immediate surroundings, but
threatened or favoured by that which is distant. Within the reach of the
body, that is, of the hands, it is what is useful or harmful to it; beyond
this proximity begins a social space that stretches out without well-
defined limits into physical and cosmic space. Three distinct spheres and
zones: the mental, the social, the cosmic – the lived body, the close, the
distant. (Lefebvre 2009, 229)

What is being set up here is a type of ontological layering, whereby the

inter-related elements are conveyed as existing in a type of emergent order,
somewhat akin to concentric circles. In this way, Lefebvre accounts for the
historical manifestations of the spatial triad—as ‘a history of space’—where,
‘[t]he lived gives rise to spaces of representations, imagined, beginning with
the body and symbolised by it. The conceived, the distant, gives rise to
representations of space, established from objective, practical, and scientific
elements’ (ibid.). Thus, the ‘lived’ is correlated to representational space
(‘spaces of representations’), the epicentre of social space, which is then
combined with representations of space that convey meaning to the ‘distant’.
In between these two is ‘the close’, the ‘immediate surroundings’ of the body
that form the field of immediate perception constituting spatial practice.
As Lefebvre also made clear, it is ultimately representations of space that
dominate any class society, which is ‘tied to the relations of production and
to the ‘order’ that those relations impose, and hence to knowledge, to signs,
to codes, and to “frontal” relations’ (cited in Merrifield 1993, 523). Class
society by definition contains a dominant class, which forms itself as
‘organiser’ of society’s rhythms and relations to nature (van der Pijl 2007,
23); the conceptualisation that renders this organisation systematic is
therefore the de facto (but not necessarily absolute) dominant ‘space’ of
society. 4 With the totality of the triad intimately related to the specific social
relations of any society, it then follows that the relative weight of each
moment will vary according to historical change, ‘wherein now one, now the
other prevails against the negation of one or the other’ (Schmid 2008, 34,
emphasis added; see also, Merrifield 1993, 525). As Lefebvre crucially notes:

Think of medieval space: on the one hand, the space of magico-religious

representation, with hell below, God in heaven above, and the terrestrial
world between the two. But this did not prevent representations of
space: the construction of the first maps, the knowledge of navigators,
merchants and pirates; the Mediterranean as the centre of the world, etc.
The history of space would show how spaces of representation and
representations of space diverge and come together, with practice
‘really’ changing the nature of space and the space of nature [espace-
nature]. (2009, 229)

Thus, the social relations that gave rise to medieval space (indeed, that
give rise to all pre-capitalist ‘spaces’) engender representations of space that
are circumscribed by the limited abstract understanding of the world, and
where the material production of everyday life predominantly flows through
qualitative representations, ‘a qualified space that is rendered as such not by
[abstract] geography, but by religion’ (Galli 2010, 14). While the steady
accumulation of scientific knowledge was never entirely absent, its
delimitation gave rise to an over-determination of representational space—the
symbolic ‘poesy’ that articulated the material meaning of abstract knowledge.
Understanding the socio-historical constitution of the three moments is
essential if a proper understanding of their articulation under capitalism is to
be grasped. For just as Marx noted the historically unprecedented nature of
capitalism in terms of its formal separation of politics and economics (Wood
1991), so too Lefebvre understood capitalism as the dominance of a formally
separated abstract space constituting the representations of space within
bourgeois society. This dominance implied a historically novel separation
between the symbolic coordinates shared by all members of society, and the
process of systematisation wielded by the dominant class that gave meaning
to symbolic content (Merrifield 1993, 524).
It should be noted, of course, that this book does not engage with a
critique of capitalism as a socio-economic system, nor the specific spatiality
of capital accumulation. However, it is undeniable that the present mode of
spatial production is ultimately determined by the advancement of the
capitalist world system and, as such, these systemic dynamics are also to be
found in Mostar’s urban production just as much as in other cities, albeit with
geographically specific manifestations. With these concerns in mind, and in
light of the above analytical deconstruction of triad’s three dimensions, we
can start to appreciate how the relationships between the three main groups of
actors within the story of Mostar—the European powers , ethno-national
elites, and everyday citizens—occupy often contradictory positions with
respect to the three moments of space production.
Lefebvre ’s historical reading of social space, in which one particular
moment dominates at a particular point in time, leads him to categorise space
in somewhat ‘epochal’ terms. Indeed, like Marx, he makes a clear distinction
between the ‘modern’ (capitalist) and pre-modern worlds, which are
underpinned (respectively) by ‘abstract space ’ and ‘absolute space ’. This
latter term refers to the fragmented and the particular, the socio-political
importance attached to natural objects, sacred sites, and rituals based on ‘the
bonds of consanguinity, soil and language’ (Lefebvre 1991, 48). Though
abstract conceptions played a part in pre-capitalist societies, their basis in
absolute space expresses the relative dominance of representational space
shared between all classes and groups in society. And while abstract space
(and the kernel of representations of space ) eventually came to dominant,
absolute space ‘lived on, though gradually losing its force, as substratum or
underpinning of representational spaces’ (ibid., 49). In understanding the how
and why absolute space lives on during the epoch of abstract space, it
becomes possible to arrive at a more concrete understanding of the
relationship between capitalism and ethno-nationalism. For as Lefebvre
makes clear, the historical phenomenon of nationalism is itself a product of
two principal elements: market formation and political violence (Lefebvre
1991, 111–112). Embedded within the wider world system of commodity
relations and competition, every particular space (state) grounds itself by the
‘lived body’ of the People-nation, and the ‘close’ corresponding to the
frontiers of the state. Bound by fate, blood, and loyalty, these mythical (and
representational) elements (and spaces) provide protection, cohesion, and
security against ‘the distant’—the abstract domain beyond the community’s
borders populated by the incomprehensible content of transnational capital
and ‘other’ nations. And yet, not all nations experience these dynamics in the
same way. For while every national market is ultimately signified by its
historical roots—hence the ‘British’ pound (which cannot be used directly in
the US market) and the ‘American’ dollar (which likewise cannot be used in
Britain)—some nations (and national currencies) are more international than
others. Thus, the Atlanticist West has always embodied a radically
transnational, ‘cosmopolitan’ drive, embracing the distant as a means of
uniting the world through the ‘rational’ and ‘civilised’ practice of commerce
and private gain. And yet, ‘[i]n the case of the English-speaking West… we
are looking at a universalism in which the rest of the world is considered a
backward anomaly’ (van der Pijl 2007, 144).
At around the same time Yugoslavia was experiencing its undoing, then
US Secretary of State James Baker explained to an audience at the Aspen
Institute in 1991 that, ‘[w]e must begin to extend the trans-Atlantic
community to Central and Eastern Europe and to the Soviet Union.’ But
Baker was clear as to the nature of this possible trans-Atlantic extension:

the trans-Atlantic relationship stands for certain Enlightenment ideals of

universal applicability. These values are based upon the concept of
individual political rights and economic liberty rooted in European
ideals of the 17th and 18th centuries and first planted in the new
American nation. (Baker 1991, emphasis added)

Thus, from the above discussion on the connections between capitalism

and (ethno-) nationalism , the dominant practices among various classes and
groups within Mostar correspond to:

(1) A predominant moment of representations of space (abstract space)

among EU actors, in the form of ‘rationalising’ the city, recreating the
European cosmopolitan ‘ideal’ within Mostar’s problematic divisions,
and establishing adequate conditions of investment for international
capital and market relations;

(2) A contradictory fusion between the two moments of representations of

space and representational spaces (abstract and absolute space), insofar
 as Mostarian elites aim to establish a ‘normal’ city, but on segmented,
divided, and ethno-nationally specific terms, and through the grammar
of ‘consanguinity, soil and language’;

(3) The contradictory divisions between different forms of representational

spaces among urban dwellers who are, in different moments and
contexts, both bound by established ethno-national norms yet also going
well beyond them in unpredictable ways.
This framework thus speaks to the above discussion on the dynamics of
the spatial triad, insofar as ‘cosmopolitan’ European actors evoke the
‘distance’ inherent in the abstract space of capital—itself a citizen of the
world—while local elites fuse the cosmopolitan with the local, who aim to
(partially) internalise the discourse of the ‘normal’ European city , if only for
the benefit of ‘their own’ people. Meanwhile, Mostar’s citizens are caught in
the middle—no doubt eager for the return to ‘normalcy’, but not necessarily
in tune with normalcy understood by the neoliberal EU nor even the iron cage
of ethno-national belonging. Thus, while the power of ‘Europeanisation’, and
the relations of force underpinning it through the sinews of neoliberal
geopolitics, remains always in the background as the politico-economic
context, the present study of Mostar’s spatial divisions, practices, and
discourses aims to uncover the dynamics of everyday life, and their
seemingly ‘banal’ (yet often transformative) ramifications within the context
of a divided city.
Thus, the representations of space stand for the ways in which cities are
planned, imagined, and built at the bureaucratic-elite level. In this book, I
account for recent plans of the development and regulation of the city
developed after its official reunification in 2004. In addition to this material, I
critically explore the ways in which the city of Mostar has been described and
addressed in the main policy documents produced by the international
administration in order to provide the reunited city with a Statute.
Representational spaces account for the moment of both ethno-national elite
strategies as well as the practice embedded in the everyday life of citizens,
and the multifarious and contradictory spaces in which urban dwellers
negotiate imposed directives and plans to find their own space within the city.
In this book, I account for my experience of living in Mostar to discuss
everyday practices and rhythms through vignettes and life stories.
 While the above analysis has focused on how different actors embody
divergent mixtures of representations/representational space, spatial practice
is to be understood as the ways in which urban cohesion is created through
everyday practices. On the one hand, this moment refers to the space of
infrastructures (e.g. roads, distribution of services, etc.), often planned,
directed, and implemented by elite actors that enable the city to become one
by establishing connections within a territory and creating a community of
users (citizens). On the other hand, this moment refers to the ways in which
citizens practise the city, how they make use of its built environment to
create their own communities of belonging. In the book, I question the
administration of public utilities, which existed as divided along ethno-
national lines in the aftermath of the war and should have been reunified as
part of the reconciliation process to shed light on the spatial practices of
administrative elites. In fact, by deciding how to rehabilitate a shared
provision of services, the urban administrators are consistently projecting
their understandings of the city (their representations), which are informed by
their political positions aligned to ethno-national partitions. I also discuss
what I call the ‘infrastructure of socialisation’, a way to picture and explore
how the citizens of Mostar come together and socialise. Crucially, spatial
practices are not only informed and initiated by the elite willing to maintain
(or not) a city united. Rather, citizens create their own infrastructures of
socialisation to form communities of belonging that often go well beyond
what dominant groups intended.
These three moments co-participate in the production of space , which is
pictured as three-dimensional: material social practice refers to what is
perceived (the body experiencing the world); the production of abstract
knowledge refers to what is conceived (the knowledge used to maintain and
reproduce power structures and the system of signifiers that mediate society’s
rhythms); and the creative practice refers to what is lived (the emotional,
sensuous, and symbolic dimension of everyday life). These three moments
are superimposed and it is through their interactions that space is produced as
one. There is no temporal order because the three moments works in unison
to create (social) space. Temporality comes into play because the analysis of
space production is aimed at understanding society in a historical context. As
Lefebvre put it, ‘without this concept [totality] knowledge itself ceases to
have a “structure”. It becomes scattered into fragmented studies which
replicate exactly the division of social labour instead of controlling it and
understanding it’ (Lefebvre 2002, 180).

The Notion of Space as Becoming

In a dialectical fashion, the three moments of the spatial triad stand in
contradiction to each other, but they do not produce a synthesis. Space is
produced as one by the interaction of these three moments, which are not
independent but rather exist in relation to all others (Schmid 2008, 33). As
Milgrom (2008, 270) notes, ‘while this appears at first glance to be a circular
argument, it is actually an acknowledgement that the production of space is a
continual process, and that space is always changing as conceptions,
perceptions, and lived experiences change’ with it. The open nature of the
spatial triad accounts not only for the effort to understand how space is
produced, but is also a way to engage with the analysis of its becoming. This
point is made crucial in reference to the modalities of social change . In fact,
by focusing on the process of becoming, Lefebvre attempts to understand
how a strategy could be elaborated in order to interfere with the dominant
mode of spatial production (abstraction), to produce a more equal and just
society. As Harvey notes, Lefebvre’s dialectical method is that of an
‘immanent critical inquiry’ (2012, xiii). Investigating social reality by
unfolding space-production along the three moments could be useful not only
in exploring contemporary socio-political dynamics, but also in exercising an
active and vigilant willingness to be critically part of the present by
understanding contradictions and the ways in which they are solved to
become newly evident once more. In fact, Lefebvre understands the
importance of dialectics in the attempt to explore the relationship between
possible and impossible, which ‘point[s] the way towards a different space,
the space of a different (social) life and of a different mode of production’
(Lefebvre 1991, 60). However, in order to produce change, it is necessary to
consciously produce difference. In fact, difference is constantly produced and
reproduced by the capitalist mode of production, yet not all differences are
equal in kind. In order to produce revolutionary differences, it is necessary to
engage with creativity and to imagine how the present could be made into
something else (to interrogate the relationship between the possible and
impossible). The right to difference is complementary to the right of the city
and it means the right ‘not to be classified forcibly into categories which have
been determined by the necessarily homogenizing powers’ (Lefebvre 1976,
75).
This point becomes relevant when considering that the existing literature
about Mostar tends to examine the conduct of empowered elites that have
been elected within a system favouring ethno-nationalist claims. As a
consequence, these representations of Mostar render the city as if it were void
of life. Citizens are often depicted as victims at the mercy of political elites.
Accordingly, the citizen-victim becomes in need of being helped and
supported by external actors (e.g. the international administrators) in order to
achieve a better life. In contrast, by drawing on Lefebvre’s theory, citizens
quickly regain their agency from their everyday usage of the city, their
understandings of the urban, and their hopes and desires, and their right to not
be classified as ethno-national subjects, which are all taken into account as
vantage points over whether or not imposed directives (urban administration)
are followed or countered in (urban) practice.
The understanding of the moments of the spatial triad as always
reconfiguring themselves according to present (and shifting) circumstances
means that my spatial enquiry does not look at space as fixed, but rather in its
own process of transformation. This notion of space as a productive process
became of crucial importance for two main reasons. Firstly, it supports an
exploration of how the city of Mostar is divided (beyond common sense
notions) by looking at the ways in which the division unfolds as a
(contradictory) process, not as a given fact. Secondly, by accounting for the
idea of space as ‘in becoming’, it is possible to state that the future of the city
has not been determined, but rather is open to new possibilities. The very
idea of change —of a Lefebvrian revolution—becomes a concrete potential
(or a concrete utopia, in Lefebvre’s vocabulary) if the mechanisms of socio-
spatial production are sufficiently understood, and change is sought after
accordingly (I will return to this later when discussing the concept of
revolution in Lefebvre’s work). Furthermore, to allow the possibility of
Mostar as a city other-than-divided initiates new enquiries into what might
dissolve the ‘facts’ of division in order to facilitate the emergence of new
narratives.

Space Is Always Political

Another key concept in Lefebvre’s theory is the understanding of space as
always political (Lefebvre 2009, chap. 7; cf. Smith 2010, 225ff). However, I
wish to emphasise how the idea of space as political will relate, in this book,
to the dialectical character of space production and, in particular, to the ways
in which the dialectic production resonates with the movement set into
motion by the contradictions of the real. Because (social) space contains its
own contradictions , which cannot be solved outright, the triad will produce
new space(s) according to the ways in which these contradictions relate to
each other at any given historical moment. Yet they will be kept as such at
particular intermediate moments, in always-new forms and shapes. Making
reference to Aristotle, I argue that it is in this movement provoked by (socio-
political) contradictions that space qualifies itself as always political.
It is Aristotle , in his Politics, who wonders whether a city should or
should not be the space where citizens live together in ‘cooperation, harmony
and collective solidarity’ (Skultety 2009, 44), or whether cities are more
likely to be the sites of conflict and struggles. Reading Aristotle, Skultety
argues that the Greek philosopher belongs to the conflict tradition:
‘competition is a political ideal rather than an inevitable corruption of civic
life’ (ibid.). The polis and its democratic political ordering are not based on
harmony, but rather peace is achieved through struggle and the competition
among the best citizens. In fact, Aristotle believes that citizens should not
silence their voices in order to maintain peace. On the contrary, agonism is
the cipher of democracy. The problem appears when agonistic positions
become utterly antagonistic. This shift occurs when citizens lose the capacity
to (re)negotiate their political positions and their identity, which weighs upon
them as a social constraint. If citizens are forced to act upon a certain set of
ideas and beliefs that infer their identity as fixed and immutable, they will be
taking on pre-arranged practices—those required to perform their identity.
Antagonism is reached as a fixed point in which existing political positions
have been cemented through repetition and (re)presentation, to become non-
negotiable or changeable. Movement and dynamism, in contrast, support
agonism. For both Aristotle and Lefebvre, movement is the key to progress.
On the one hand, democracy is based on the capacity of citizens to negotiate
their identity in order to maintain the possibility of an open dialogue
guaranteeing the democratic process(es). On the other hand, Lefebvre’s
production of space is a continuous process of becoming, where ‘quality’
depends upon the relation of its formative moments and the reassessment of
contradictions. For Aristotle, lack of movement is defined by antagonism and
war. For Lefebvre, immobility is determined by the alienation of citizens
from the means of spatial production, which confines them to becoming
passive space-users.
This book looks at the possibility of thinking about the contradictions of
the real by accounting for the city as more-than-divided. In other words,
space becomes political by looking at the spatialisation of divisive and
counter- practices. Thus, I aim to challenge political discourses and
international representations of Mostar as the divided city that cannot ‘move
forward’. Mostar tends to be depicted either as the victim of the war or a
victim of the political system. The concept of Mostar as more-than-divided
accounts for the multifarious ways in which the city adjusts to the events of
war and division; a place where people negotiate new understandings of what
is ‘normal’ with humour , sarcasm, and cynicism. This book entertains the
idea that changing the representation of Mostar as ultimately divided is
necessary to consider the idea that social change is possible, even in places of
deep segregation. Surely, this requires further discussion on how social
change could be conceptualised in cities such as Mostar and what this entails.
If a radical restructuring of the city still depends on constitutional reforms,
this book highlights the potential held by existing spaces of difference that
test already the possibility of living in a divided city without embracing
divisive strategies or nationalist ideologies. This book defines resistance as
the practice of producing differences (other than divisive movements) and it
understands resistance as a spatial practice that, interfering with the
production of Mostar as a divided city, creates new meanings and openings
towards a different future.

‘The Urban’ and the Nation-State

Lefebvre’s analytical engagement with cities depends entirely upon the
concept of ‘the urban’. Cities are taken as the main unit of analysis and
depicted as dependent on (and yet potentially and historically independent
from) the nation-state. On the one hand, the emphasis is given to scales —the
relationality between the global, the national, the urban, and the family,
which demonstrates the commitment to elucidate a theory capable of
understanding the micro and macro levels of society by looking at their
moments of intersection (Brenner 2000). On the other hand, the prominent
importance given to cities is clear from Lefebvre’s reflections on the right to
the city , as the political right of the citizen to own urban space and
participate in its production. Lefebvre questions the very concept of
citizenship by discharging it from the nation-state and attaching it to the city
(see Purcell 2002). 5 The key here is not just ‘the city’ (though this is now a
crucial site of struggle in the contemporary world); rather, the struggle is
fundamentally over urban relationships. In this sense, ‘the urban is not
simply limited to the boundaries of a city, but includes its social system of
production’ (Gilbert and Dikeç 2008, 254). In Lefebvre’s wider interpretation
of ‘class struggle’, the notion of citizenship becomes central to renegotiating
the agency of urban dwellers. Certainly, Lefebvre’s writings on cities were
historically specific—as France was a specific state-form in the 1960s—and
as such his theory mainly addresses the French bureaucratic-administrative
organism alienating citizens through ever-more direct and extensive means.
As opposed to this, Lefebvre imagines cities (and their inhabitants) as
becoming proactive agents with the potential to counter the main state-led
directives, and interfere in the process of space production: ‘the right to the
city stresses the need to restructure the power relations that underlie the
production of urban space, fundamentally shifting control away from capital
and the state and toward urban inhabitants’ (Purcell 2002, 102). In fact, if we
understand scale not as an objective entity but as socially produced through
political struggle , then the importance of cities becomes evident in the
process of rescaling power dynamics (Purcell 2002, 103). Citizens could gain
visibility at the scale of the urban and become actors in renegotiating
distributions of social power with the state (Brenner 2000, 374).
This discussion on the state and its relationships with cities is also central
in this book. Lefebvre criticises the nation-state because of its centralisation,
which is based on his experience of the French state in the 1960s. In contrast,
contemporary BiH is far from being a strong nation-state or a highly
centralised one. On the contrary, it is a highly fractured and contested state,
which is socio-territorially fragmented and whose administration is still
largely governed by the international body of the Office of the High
Representative (OHR). 6 Because the degree of political centralisation greatly
affects the limit forced upon the state in terms of its capacity to impose its
main directives, in the case of Mostar it becomes important to address how
political fragmentation (at the city and state levels) affects the design and
implementation of directives for the city. In particular, it becomes crucial to
engage with state constitutional law in relation to the ways in which citizens
of BiH acquire political subjectivities (citizenship) as part of ethno-national
groups (this will be discussed further in Chapter 2). In fact, the articulation of
power along ethno-national lines means that the administration of Mostar is
framed accordingly. Hence, political elites are elected to represent ethno-
national interests, and citizens vote as part of communities constructed along
similar lines.
To reflect upon the role of the urban vis-à-vis the nation-state, it becomes
necessary to explore the ways in which scales (of political power) are
negotiated and produced. By looking at existing counter-movements and the
agenda of activists fighting for social justice, it becomes clear that they use
Mostar as a platform to negotiate change at the national level. In fact, their
demand for reforms must address the state as the political entity capable of
changing laws, but their activities are organised in the city as a way of
attaining visibility (within and outside the country). For instance, grassroots
activities that produce a space that is not polarised along ethno-national lines
are implemented at the urban scale. Yet their quest is irremediably aimed at
state authorities that alone could reformulate the constitutional law to reform
the legal understanding of citizenship as derived from ethno-national
membership to foster processes of inclusion (which will also favour social
justice). This further complicates the relationship between urban activism, the
urban revolution, and the withering of the state as posited by Lefebvre.
During my fieldwork in Mostar, the idea of the state was, for the majority of
my respondents, an abstract entity removed from their experience. Activists
engaged in political activities by approaching the reform of the state as one of
their goals. This is because of the felt need to make changes in the
constitution so that the imposed ‘abstract space’ of ethno-national categories
could be challenged. Yet, events that followed my departure, such as the
plenum movement in 2014, proved that citizens have become tired of waiting
for the state to be the prime initiator of reforms and they have already
proposed to take action in their hands by attempting to discuss possible
reforms during participatory and self-managed groups (the plenums) across
the country. This and other initiatives exemplify well the struggle over
rescaling power dynamics in BiH. Addressing the OHR and the international
organisations who helped draft the constitution of BiH as the actors imposing
an abstract space to order and rule the everyday means that the state could
become an ally in the process of reform. In fact, one problem lies in the fact
that both the OHR and the nation-state project their notions of abstract space
onto the country, which are often contradictory, producing further fractures.
Accordingly, the citizens have revisited the idea of the state as the site of
reform conducive to social change and formed more radical fronts that refuse
to engage with state authorities.

Approaching the Study of Mostar,

Methodologically
The material presented in this book was largely collected during a year-long
ethnographic project in Mostar (November 2009–October 2010). Some
material was collected during a previous project on the reconstruction of
sacred spaces after the war (December 2005 and June 2006) and during
shorter yearly visits from 2011 until 2013 when I continued my collaboration
with local activist groups. Later, I returned to Mostar in 2014 with a group of
postgraduate students for a summer school. In other words, I had the
opportunity to assess the process of rebuilding Mostar and the reassessment
of everyday life over the course of a decade, and to collect data and record
my impressions of the city over this long-term period.
My first research project in Mostar (2005) was based largely on elite
interviews , which were never easy to set, and often unproductive. Sitting in
front of representatives and spokespersons, I often felt I was the unwilling
spectator of the nth rehearsal of their political agendas and well-digested
stories. It must be recalled that Mostar has been a case study for multiple
international research projects and interventions. This means that officials,
representatives, or leaders of community groups have been approached
several times for interviews, which also explains their reluctance to agree to
new ones. For instance, the person who deals with the public relations of one
of the religious communities in Mostar (I prefer not to identify which one)
suggested that I read the material that has been published already rather than
arranging new interviews. This reveals both the fatigue of being under the
spotlight for such a long time and the sense that everything has already being
said. Surely, the importance of the interview material I gathered is not
diminished by its lack of unexpected information. Rather, the ways in which
officials dealt with me—specifically how they dealt with being interviewed
by a foreign researcher—could further expose the qualities of the many
encounters the fieldwork provoked. During my longer fieldwork in 2009–10,
elite interviews were also conducted with representatives of the main political
parties and religious communities, local and international officials working
on the reconstruction of the city, and civil society actors working on cultural
projects that targeted peace and reconciliation. Extracts of these interviews
are published in this book with the consent of all the interviewees. Most my
respondents did not wish to be recognisable in the book so their names have
been changed or anonymised. Interviews were not however my main research
tool. Rather, much of the data presented in the book is based on observation,
daily conversations, and participatory research.
As discussed previously, to engage only with elites is also problematic
because it privileges voices that tend to be supportive of nationalisms (as
these same nationalisms empower them). Because of this, and challenging
more usual approaches to the divided city, I did not engage with my
respondents as ethno-national subjects. Of course, I learnt to decode the
ethnic origin of names and surnames, but I never assumed that my
respondents felt comfortable declaring their ethnicity or that it mattered to
them. When people are approached as members of an ethnic group, especially
in divided cities, they tend to reproduce ethno-national discourses, divisive
patterns, and sense-making paradigms as if they were expected to do so. So
much so that, when they say or do something that differs from what the
majority of people in their community would do, they feel the need to point it
out. For instance, the woman who became, in Mostar, my teacher of Croatian
always wondered why I had chosen to live on the ‘other side’ (she lived in
west Mostar and I in east Mostar). I asked if she ever went to ‘my’ part of
town, to which she replied that she did not because none of her friends did
and she felt uncomfortable there. My teacher was responding as ‘the’ Croat
living in west Mostar would most likely do. The truth is, during the year I
lived in east Mostar, I met her occasionally browsing the goods of the
Chinese shop nearby my flat. This made me realise that even if she went to
‘the other side’, she preferred not to acknowledge it as this would have
complicated her position within established ethno-national practices in
Mostar. This does not suggest that all those who do not wish to cross such
boundaries never do so. Instead, I suggest that by approaching interlocutors
as part of one ethno-national group, there is the expectation that they either
conform to or counter stereotypical behaviours of the group, whereas, in fact,
everyday practices tend to be less consistent and not always rigidly shaped by
ethnic dogmas. Hromadžić’s (2015) ethnographic work in the Old
Gymnasium of Mostar shows that young people from different communities
who attend separate classes mix and flirt in the shared bathroom during their
breaks. Yet, when asked, they say that they would never seriously date
someone from the other side. Even if the contingency of having a shared
bathroom brought them together, erasing ethno-national barriers, these young
people respond discursively to the possibility of a mixed relationship by
inhabiting routinised patterns of sense-making that condemn dating ‘the
other’ to a subversive act with ruinous consequences. These examples show
clearly the spaces of contradictions, inconsistency, and paradox that this book
inhabits as a means to render the complexities faced by living in a deeply
divided society. It contrasts discursive and material practices of creating
Mostar as rigidly divided with less rigid modes of inhabiting the city. This is
because writing about this city is political. To select data and information to
create a portrait of Mostar, a city of multiple contradictions, means to take a
side and to allow or refuse the possibility for this city to be other than its
ossified representation as a place of violence and hatred. Many would argue
that the choice to downplay moments that disrupt the persistent division
depends on the fact that these are not significant or representative of the city.
For instance, Laketa, who is the author of a fascinating research into the
‘stickiness’ of the division in Mostar, writes:

Most high school students do not socialize with peers of different

ethnicity, some mention having acquaintances, and only a few report
being friends with someone from the opposing ethnic group. Thus, the
discourse on mutually hostile and exclusionary ethnic groups in Mostar
permeates not only school life, but social life as well. The geopolitics of
division is often re-enacted and supported by young Mostarians. (Laketa
2015a, 10)

The fact that the majority of the young people she has interviewed do not
engage in inter-ethnic socialising means that those who do—those who have
acquaintances and the few who have friends on ‘the other side’—are not
enough to trouble representations of Mostar as divided . And rightly so, as
she shows, most young people socialise within their ethno-national group.
But what about the others? What about those for whom the division is
problematic because they do not fully subscribe to it? This book reflects on
the roles of what does not fit into the geopolitics of division in order to shed
light on the multiple facets of resistance in Mostar and to acknowledge the
fact that movements towards different understandings of being and living in
Mostar exist and might contribute to creating the possibility for the city to
become less divided and more inclusive. This is what Lefebvre theorises as
heterotopias, those spaces that incubate ‘revolutionary difference’ and hold
the ultimate potential for social change to happen.
For my analysis, I draw largely on fieldwork diaries where I have kept
notes on what I saw, heard, read, and thought while living in Mostar. Even
though I moved there in November 2009, it took me a while to settle in, make
friends, understand the political situation, and learn how to navigate the city
and engage with people. After all, I was and I am a stranger in the city. Many
scholars who write about BiH are from the region, which is an advantage
surely but also presents a set of challenges different from the ones I faced,
especially with regards to their ethnic affiliations (see Hromadžić 2015).
Even though it was not possible to identify me as part of one of the three
ethno-national communities, I was one of the ‘internationals’ in town. On her
experience as a researcher in BiH, Jones writes ‘my positionality in this
politically and emotionally sensitive context was as an outsider… I was often
seen to speak for, and from, the international community and my position of
relative privilege meant some participants did not feel I was able to
understand their experiences and situations’ (Jones and Ficklin 2012, 3). This
is how I felt at the beginning of my stay in Mostar and here it is important to
emphasise that the international community does not stand as an abstract
foreign entity in the everyday of BiH, but rather is embodied in the several
international agencies for co-operation and development operating in the
territory and, more importantly, in the OHR, which is still overlooking the
state-building process. Thus, one of the main challenges set by doing research
in the area is that of negotiating the position of the researcher with the
existing unfavourable understandings of the foreigner official, researcher, or
developer i.e. the ‘liberal imperialist’ (Cox 2008, 250). I was fortunate to
connect with people, create friendships, and be accepted as a new member of
local communities. More than that, becoming friends with many local
activists and participating in the design and development of projects that
aimed at grassroots reconciliation, especially targeting young people, made
me realise the existence of groups within Mostar that not only oppose ethnic
politics but move and live in inclusive spaces that remain separate from the
divided city. In other words, as many other books, this project has been
written because of my friendships in Mostar and thanks to those who allowed
me to become part—even if partially and temporarily—of Mostar’s dynamics
by letting me observe, listen, ask, and learn. This book draws significantly on
data gathered while working in Mostar as part of one grassroots organisation
(Abart ) working broadly in the field of art production. I approached Abart
because I was interested in learning more about their projects and their desire
to reappropriate public space through site specific art interventions. What
made me curious about Abart in the beginning was that they did not make
sense in Mostar. They invited international artists, created festivals, curated
contemporary art exhibitions, and worked across boundaries as if they were
in a ‘normal’ city. They promoted art and culture to create new spaces where
to discuss modalities of being together. They were passionate, proactive, and
full of expectations for the future. Everything about them was at odds with
immobility, crisis, and division. I became more than an observer and I joined
their efforts shortly after meeting them. I participated in the design of new
projects, fundraising activities, and the implementation of some of their
initiatives. I started as a volunteer with the aim of observing their group
dynamics, concept-development, and approaches to Mostar. I quickly became
more active in the group, and this is why parts of this book are
autobiographic and account for my own work within Abart discussing how
becoming part of the collective meant also that I became not only attached to
Mostar differently (the city became more than a case study for a research) but
also my research became part of my political and activist engagement with
the city, moved by the desire to contribute to social change.
As Cerwonka and Malkki describe, ethnography is ‘simultaneously a
critical theoretical practice, a quotidian ethical practice, and an
improvisational practice’ (2007, 164). Ethnography is about encounters
between humans—between affective beings—and the social artefacts
produced and possessed by humans. The very social processes bound up with
the ‘production’ of everyday life carry with them a weighty emotional
content and context (whether or not this affective dimension is perceived by
the researcher), and whose meaning cannot be wholly reduced to objectively
determined criteria. Thus, one of the associated problems is how to engage,
manage, and account for emotions (from both researcher and participants to
the research) within the framework of an academic project. This book has
been written engaging with these emotions rather than suppressing or
suspending them (other scholars have written about this topic, for example,
Bollens 2012; Dumper 2014). I wrote my doctoral dissertation from a
position of deep frustration that fed the desire to rectify the overly negative
representations of Mostar. I owed that to the many activists and socially
engaged individuals I befriended during the time I spent in the city whose
work goes largely unnoticed. A young activist once confessed how tiresome
it is to be interviewed for research projects not because she dislikes talking
about what she does, but rather because interviewers are interested only in the
ethnic divisions, the ethnic warfare, the corruption, or what does not work.
The fact that there are also people like her who fight for a different future is
often dismissed as a naïve and ineffective. I am writing this book moved by
the intent of complicating existing reductionist representations of Mostar. As
Lefebvre states, reductionism is indeed a tool in the hands of power, which
aims at the simplification of contradictions and differences to establish (and
normalise) a specific body of knowledge, which itself becomes implicated in
a specific set of power relations (Lefebvre 1991, 105–108). From this view,
power draws on scientific production to reinforce its ideological rendering of
reality and impose it. Lefebvre’s exhortation to account for the everyday (the
‘lived’) in order to complicate the representation of cities remains the basis of
this entire project.
Structure of the Book
The book is structured in four main chapters. Chapter 2 introduces the city of
Mostar by providing an historical excursus into the urban expansion of the
city during the wars of the 1990s, its destruction, and the main phases of
reconstruction up to the most recent architectural interventions. Along with
the discussion regarding the physical expansion of the city, this chapter
engages with the shifting roles of the ethno-national communities throughout
the history of BiH to provide a solid ground for subsequent discussions of the
polarisation of Mostar in relation to contemporary understandings of the
ethno-national membership. This chapter is about the physical reconstruction
of the city and it focuses on the discursive strategies that underpinned the
international and local approaches to peace and reconciliation. Firstly, I
discuss how the international organisations overlooking the transition to
peace (and the reunification) engaged with the city of Mostar by picturing the
city as stubborn, difficult, and unmanageable, blaming the ‘locals’ for the
lack of progress towards European standards, reminiscent of colonial
discourses. I contrast the international imaginary of Mostar as a future
European city with the local administrators’ desire to keep the city divided. I
discuss how the imposition of a Statute that reunifies the city has been
boycotted locally but it is almost never discussed because, in the meanwhile,
attention has been redirected to discussion on the safety of Mostar, which
creates uncertainty in the city and for the future. Further, the chapter explores
the various means by which these representations inform and support specific
spatial practices. In particular, I refer here to the process of merging the
independent infrastructures of service provision in east and west Mostar to
explore the ways in which urban administrators are dealing with the
reconstruction of the city as a unique territory, thus imaging its inhabitants as
a single community of users.
Chapter 3 looks at how people move, live, and understand the limits and
possibilities of the city. It continues the analysis of spatial practices by
uncovering the ways in which citizens make use of the city and how their
representational spaces (everyday lives) influence such practices. Drawing
on small surveys that I co-designed with Abart, the chapter assesses how
people socialise in Mostar and it compares contemporary practices of
socialisation to pre-war habits (also gathered through small surveys). Further,
the chapter presents and discusses a selection of examples of live stories
collected while living in Mostar. These samples constitute the starting point
to discussing the inconsistencies produced by living in an ethno-nationally
divided city that pretends absolute loyalties to abstract and normalised
understandings of urban behaviour—where to go, friends to make, and who
to avoid. This chapter starts a more focused discussion on Mostar as more-
than-divided, which is continued in the following chapter. If Chapter 3
accounts for unplanned moments that disrupt the rigid logics of ethno-
national divisions, Chapter 4 looks at planned moments of resistance to
ethno-national segregation. Based on first-hand experience working in Abart,
this chapter discusses two art-based projects that reclaimed Mostar’s public
space to create a more inclusive society: Arts in Divided Cities (2009–10) and
(Re)collecting Mostar (2010–13). It compares these projects with other
initiatives developed within the broad field of arts and culture production in
Mostar and it discusses critically the limits and potentials of these initiatives.
Drawing on the preceding empirical analyses, Chapter 5 discusses how space
is produced and reproduced in Mostar as more-than-divided. It explores the
potential presented by looking at the excess of division for reframing the
study of ethno-nationally divided cities.

Notes

1. The UN Urbanism research project was conducted within the framework

of the Bauhaus Dessau Kolleg in 2005–06 with the goal of assessing how
international organisations and, particularly, the United Nations initiate
and guide post-war reconstruction processes globally. Mostar and Kabul
were the two case-studies chosen for the research. My contribution to
this project was a research into the international religious networks that
participated in the rebuilding of sacred spaces in Mostar and their
relations to the International Organisations overlooking said process. The
outcomes of the project, including my own, were later published in
Bittner et al. (2010).

2. I developed my doctoral research as part of the Conflict in Cities and the

Contested State and I was affiliated to Queen’s University Belfast from
October 2008 for four years. This interdisciplinary project, involving
also the universities of Cambridge and Exeter, compared a sample of
 ethno-nationally divided cities in Europe and the Middle East focusing
on everyday life and the possibility of change. More information about
the research and its outcomes is available from http://​www.​
conflictincities​.​org.

3. The explanation provided for each of the three moments has become an
intense object of discussion within the scholarly literature. In fact,
Lefebvre’s description of the three moments of the triad are not very
specific; rather they leave space for the researcher to reformulate them
according to their case-study. For an in-depth discussion on the different
interpretations of the three moments of the spatial triad, see Stanek
(2011).

4. Or to use a more classic formulation, ‘the ideas of the ruling class are in
every epoch the ruling ideas’ (Marx and Engels 1974, 64).

5. This sharp focus on ‘the urban’ distinguished Lefebvre from traditional

Marxist approaches, which continued to see the workplace as the
essential point of economic struggle, and the nation as the essential point
of political struggle.

6. The High Representative (HR) is an international authority that exercises

governmental power along with local authorities. Although this position
was imagined only to supervise the process of peace building and the
implementation of democracy through the enactment of the Dayton
Peace Agreements, since 1997 the various HR(s) have issued over 800
decisions (Haynes 2008, 79–113). The controversy that surrounds the
figure of the HR derives from the fact that, although HR decisions are
justified as a means to overcome political stalemate, this justification
merely undercuts the very democratic norms of which the international
community speaks so highly (cf. Chandler 2005). As Belloni (2003)
describes, ‘the High Representative powers and attitude resemble that of
colonial governor’.
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© The Author(s) 2018
Giulia Carabelli, The Divided City and the Grassroots, The Contemporary City,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-7778-4_2

2. Imagining, Planning, and Building

Mostar After the War
Giulia Carabelli1
(1) Max Planck Institute for the Study of Ethnic and Religious Diversity,
Göttingen, Germany

Giulia Carabelli
Email: carabelli@mmg.mpg.de

Introduction
This chapter offers an introduction to the city of Mostar. Starting from a brief
historical overview, I capture how ethnic groups gained and lost power in
Mostar according to the political aspirations and plans of the many empires
and rulers that dominated this territory and the balance of forces among
ethnic groupings and alliances that heavily shaped the region’s expansion and
destruction. The main aim of this chapter is to review the process of
transition from war to peace in Mostar by focusing on the international and
local approaches to reconciliation and urban management. I start by
accounting for the wider state-building project of Bosnia and Herzegovina ,
which was initiated from the signing of the Dayton Peace Agreements (DPA)
in 1995. The ways in which the State was reimagined and partitioned along
ethno-national lines gave reason to legalise territorial partitioning between
the ethno-national communities in Mostar as a means to end the conflict. I
draw on the guidelines of the DPA and the understandings of citizenship
along ethno-national lines to review the long process, guided by the Office of
the High Representative (OHR), to bring peace in Mostar and subsequently
reunify the city under a single administration. Here, I focus on contested
discursive and political strategies adopted by the OHR to direct the process
and, eventually, impose the reunification for the good of Mostarian society.
Through a close reading of the official documents drafted during the
contested process of reunification, I discuss the emergence of Mostar as an
abstract entity whose future could be rectified through the correct
implementation of rules based on European standards, which makes
transparent the OHR’s understandings of the city only in terms of its
functionality. I then trace the effects of the imposed reunification in the
contemporary life of Mostar paying particular attention to the several
moments of impasse that characterised its first decade as a reunited city—
including the persistent difficulty in creating a city council or electing a
mayor. I discuss how the imposed reunification has been boycotted,
manipulated, and reshaped by (the always present) ethno-national aspirations
to territorial sovereignty in subtle and more evident ways.
The chapter starts with a Lefebvrian analysis of space production in
Mostar by assessing the moments of the representations of space and spatial
practices. The first moment—the representations of space—draws,
theoretically, on the notion that the ways in which modern cities are planned,
built, and represented depends on an understanding of space that is abstract
and devoid of social content (Lefebvre 1991, 285–291). By focusing on how
the city is imagined in legal and administrative documents, as well as how the
future of the city materialises through urban design and plans, the chapter
wishes to reflect critically on how space is conceived in Mostar. This is made
extremely complex by the political situation of the city. Although the city has
its own administration, the international peacekeeping body of the OHR
continues to interfere in the decision-making process, often imposing
decisions that were not agreed upon by local authorities. It is from the
perspective of these divergent and inconsistent elite views and practices—
between the abstract space advocated by the OHR and the relative
determination of absolute space informing the ethno-nationally specific
strategies of local elites—that ultimately forms the basis of Mostar’s current
impasse.
It should be recalled that in Lefebvre’s analysis of the conceptions of
space, political centralisation is a function of the state’s ability to impose its
main directives. As he notes, national state formation pivots on the ‘political
principle of unification, which subordinates and totalizes the various aspects
of social practice—legislation, culture, knowledge, education—within a
determinate space; namely the space of the ruling class’s hegemony over its
people and over the nationhood that it has arrogated’ (ibid., 281, emphasis in
original). While this refers to the level of the nation-state, these political
coordinates are equally applicable to other scales; for even a city cannot truly
be unified in the presence of multiple claims to authority and legitimacy by
different groups representing ‘their’ people against ‘others’. In the case of
Mostar, it will be important to address how political fragmentation (at the city
and state levels) affects the design and implementation of directives for the
city, and how these centrifugal forces impact on material infrastructures in
the built environment. Furthermore, it will be of crucial importance to
consider how competing ideologies (nationalisms) are struggling to attain
visibility and impose a homogeneous understanding of space—itself
immanent to the formation of an abstract, ‘modern’ political space and
market system (Lefebvre 1991, 112)—yet one that can only be achieved by
expelling the other. This discussion will further benefit from the concepts of
biopolitics and pastoral power to assess how citizens are framed by dominant
discourses and practices.
The second moment—spatial practices—illustrates how the system of
infrastructures providing services to the city is conceived and implemented
by the administration. Spatial practices are what keep a city materially
integrated, and in this sense they are both conceived and lived. Unpacking the
(often) contradictory uses and perceptions of material infrastructures by
different classes and groups thus lays the groundwork for the next chapter
concerning the dynamics of everyday life (representational space, the
‘lived’). Overall, this chapter aims to explore the imaginaries and values that
underpinned the process of rebuilding, reconciling, and reunifying Mostar
after the war.

Mostar Before the War: Embracing Contested

Memories of Unity and Division
Mostar is an Ottoman, Habsburg, and socialist city whose landmarks have
been destroyed and (partially) rebuilt, often with symbolic intent. The
Ottoman Old Town occupies both banks of the river Neretva across the Stari
Most (Old Bridge ), the global (and yet contested, see Forde 2016; Makaš
2007) symbol of Mostar and its rebirth after the war. Now part of the
UNESCO World Heritage List, this part of the city preserves and heightens
the city’s Ottoman history . Multiple shops offer miniatures of the Old
Bridge, džezve to prepare Turkish (Bosnian) coffee, socialist memorabilia,
belly dance costumes, ‘oriental’ jewellery, postcards, and paintings of the
Stari Most. The atmosphere of a Turkish bazaar has been joyfully crafted.
The preservation of the Ottoman heritage intersects with the performance of
waitresses calling out to tourists in traditional outfits, and the call to azan
from the nearby minarets. The sense that authenticity has become a business
comes as reality, especially in summer when it is difficult to walk without
zig-zagging larger and smaller crowds of international tourists looking for the
perfect angle to photograph the Old Bridge. A stone, set on the western
entrance to the Bridge, reads, in English, ‘never forget’. This is now the
Muslim side of town, which was brutally destroyed during the war and rebuilt
with much international efforts after the ceasefire to prove that Mostar could
survive this tragedy. Major investments came from foreign countries in
Europe, the Middle East, and the United States through different channels—
NGOs, registered charities, religious networks and international loans to the
city of Mostar. Great efforts were put into the reconstruction of the main
symbol of the city: the disappeared Stari Most, which was destroyed in 1993
during the second siege of the city. The reconstruction of the Bridge soon
became, in the international lingo, the way to establish a continuum between
the tolerant past and a potentially harmonious future (Armaly et al. 2004).
The grand reopening of the Bridge was meant to be, symbolically, an open
invitation to the city and its citizens to believe in the possibility of a future
where peace and civil cohesion could be restored like the bridge itself
(Grodach 2002, 63). 1 Yet, the symbolic performance did not please the entire
population, starting with Bishop Perić—the official representative of the
Catholic community in Mostar—who decided not to attend the event and
made bitter comments about the whole enterprise, stating, ‘we are aware that
the Old Bridge cannot be a symbol of the necessary social renewal, peace,
coexistence and tolerance’ (Traynor 2004). The new-Old Bridge, selected as
the main symbol of reconciliation, was not by itself enough to foster a
dialogue between the two sides. Above the Old Town runs Tito Street, where
impressive Habsburg buildings stand in ruins, dangerously overlooking cars,
pedestrians, and stray dogs. Walking towards the western side, crossing the
Bulevar—the unofficial border—traces of the Habsburg heritage are also
visible. In fact, under Habsburg rule, the city expanded westwards through
the building of streets, highways, a central train station (where today the
Bulevar resides), and improved gasworks, street-lighting, and general
infrastructures. It is again walking in this part of town that the material
remnants of Yugoslavia are so visible, especially in the high-rise residential
quarters. After the Second World War, Mostar became an industrial city
hosting metal-work factories, cotton textile mills, an aluminium plant, food
processing, and wine production. Due to this industrial expansion, the
number of urban residents increased from 18,000 to 100,000 inhabitants, and
‘[d]istinctions between East and West were blurred as citizens moved into
new job-based apartments, leaving behind old family residences in the
mahale [Ottoman neighbourhoods]’ (Bing 2001, 240). At this time, the
Habsburg railway was relocated to the east part of Mostar (where it now
stands) and replaced with a large boulevard named (inspirationally) Bulevar
Narodne Revolucije (Boulevard of the People’s Revolution).
Religious affiliations and differences were preserved under both Empires
(Donia and Fine 1994; Malcom 1994), yet soon became conflated with
national belonging (i.e. Croat-Catholic, Serbian-Orthodox, and Bosniak-
Muslim) under the Habsburgs, who tried to confront the emergence of
divisive nationalist sentiment by promoting the multi-ethnic notion of
bošnjaštvo (Bosnianism). Before the war, the different ethnic and religious
communities were spread throughout the city, with many mixed
neighbourhoods and cordial relations among these communities. Around
6000 Croats lived among the east bank’s 30,000 predominantly Muslim
residents and 15,000 Bosniaks resided among the 45,000 majority Croat
populace of the west bank. One third of the marriages in Mostar were
interreligious (Hayden 1996, 788–790; Robison and Pobrić 2006, 249;
Yarwood 1999, 31). 2

The Wars in Mostar: Urbicide

Problems in this multi-ethnic city started soon after Bosnia and Herzegovina
seceded from Yugoslavia (following Slovenia and Croatia) (March 1992) and
was internationally recognised as a sovereign nation-state (April 1992). Units
of the Yugoslav People’s Army (JNA) attacked BiH with the intent of
arresting the dissolution of the Socialist Federation, and arrived in Mostar in
early April (Donia and Fine 1994, 240–241; Malcom 1994, 234–236)
keeping the city under siege for three months until a Croat-Muslim counter-
offensive expelled them in June 1992. A year later, the Croatian Defence
Council (HVO) attempted to evict the Muslim community to make Mostar an
exclusively Croat city and the capital of what they envisioned as a separate
entity within the borders of the newly formed nation state: Herceg-Bosna
(Donia and Fine 1994, 248–254; Grodach 2002, 66–70; Malcom 1994, 240–
241; Mazowiecki 1993; Hayden 1996). 3
During the second war in Mostar, the Bulevar —the main artery
dissecting the city north to south—became a front line and, at the end of the
war, the unofficial border dividing the city into two halves. The war
transformed a street into a territorial boundary. Thereafter, ‘the contested
nature of the town made it a target of nationalist leaderships keen to
consolidate their power symbolically and demographically’ (Bieber 2005,
422). Whereas, in other areas of the country, post-war internal migrations
guaranteed the creation of an ethno-national majority, the two dominant
communities in Mostar continued to inhabit the same territory, with both
claiming their inherited right to stay in the city (often at the expense of other
groups). As Bieber (2005, 421) recalls, ‘in the aftermath of the war, crossing
to the other side was even formally restrained’. If post-war life began by
reinforcing this line of division, it was with the arrival of the international
organisations in Mostar that the ‘ethnic border’ was legitimised as a
necessary step forward in the process of reconciliation, favouring—
incidentally—copious internal and external migrations. Following the newly
implemented logic of ethno-territorial belonging, citizens of Mostar (but not
only those) moved towards territories where the majority of their community
was already settled. West Mostar became a Croat enclave and east Mostar a
Bosniak/Muslim territory. The number of Serbs declined dramatically to less
than five percent.
The concept of urbicid (urbicide) was chosen by a group of Mostarian
architects as a central theme for a monograph which aimed to visually display
the destruction of Mostar’s physical landscape. Later, scholars like Martin
Coward drew on the destruction of Mostar to conceptualise the notion of
urbicide as the process that ‘[destroys] a specific existential quality through
the destruction of the built environment’ (2006, 428). Coward understands
heterogeneity as the main target of urbicidal attacks. In fact, he argues that
urban infrastructures—the built environment—are shared in the sense that
urban dwellers possess them in common, and use them to ‘[n]avigate
through, or orient themselves in relation to, the places and spaces around
buildings’ (2006, 428). Cities are here understood as mixed spaces in
becoming. It is the process of inhabiting and using the built environment that
produces diversity (in usage, understandings, roles, etc.). The urban fabric is,
in other words, a catalyst and producer of both difference and cooperation—a
clear enemy of ethno-nationalist attempts to purify and homogenise
territories. Coward draws on the philosophical work of Jean-Luc
Nancy (1996) to suggest that a community is the sense of being with others,
the experience of sharing with other beings. As such, urban infrastructures
are necessary for co-existence, for being together with and forming a
community because they guarantee, to a certain extent, the very existence of
the possibility of relationality between beings. This resonates well with
Lefebvre’s notion of spatial practices as the city-infrastructures that ‘ensure
continuity and some sort of cohesion’ in cities (Lefebvre 1991, 33). Not only
does the urban fabric create the conditions of possibility for encounters to
take place, it also provides a space in which people acquires the competence
to navigate the city and share its infrastructures with others.
Coward’s analysis also expands beyond destruction, to infer that
‘[h]ouses cannot simply be rebuilt if the very terrain of community has been
reorganised into antagonistic enclaves’ (2006, 436), and thus implicitly
criticising post-war directives that aimed to rebuild what had been lost in
order to recreate a multi-ethnic environment—like the case of the Old Bridge.
In fact, it would not be sufficient to rebuild what has been lost or damaged
for the sake of recreating heterogeneity—rather, a community could only be
re-established in its original heterogeneous form if individuals wanted, and
were given the opportunity, to recreate experiences of co-existence by re-
establishing meaningful (and socio-politically grounded) relations with others
in a shared space. If, however (as happened in BiH), citizens become part of
antagonistic communities expressed through politico-legal structures of
division, which are themselves grounded by constitutional law, they would
hardly have the required opportunities (infrastructures) to reorganise their
urban experience with others outside of their new, socio-spatially
homogeneous communities of belonging, which all but de facto boycotts the
process of reconciliation. An example of this emerges from the restructuring
of the education system according to ethno-national curricula, which led to
the creation of ethno-national schools, and thereby obstructing processes of
socialisation outside one’s community through entrenched segregation
(Kovač et al. 2017; Hromadžić 2008).

The Dayton Peace Agreements (1995) and the

Geopolitical Context of Bosnia and
Herzegovina
In order to understand the present socio-political dynamics at play in Mostar
after the war, it is necessary to firstly account for the wider state-building
project of Bosnia and Herzegovina , which was initiated in 1995 with the
signing of the Dayton Peace Agreements . 4 The DPA included a new
Constitution and institutional arrangements for the new born state, which
crucially shaped the country’s post-war scenario and informed the modalities
of its (re)construction.
A consociational (power-sharing) system was envisioned as the best
option among those available. In a manner that differed from all other
former-Yugoslav Republics, BiH was declared a multinational state
constituted by three distinct peoples: Bosnian-Muslim/Bosniak, Bosnian-
Croat and Bosnian-Serb, thus de facto precluding the very possibility of the
legal existence of a (united) Bosnian identity. As a result, the legitimacy
given to the three constituent peoples imagines (and enacts) citizenship on an
exclusively ethno-national basis. Consequently, minorities and those who do
not primarily identify with one of the three ethno-national categories are left
without constitutional validation and excluded from politics, undermining, as
a side effect, the very same project that brought them into existence.
The Sejdić-Finci case against BiH exemplifies well such a constitutional
inconsistency (Cirkovic 2016). Dervo Sejdić and Jakob Finci are both
Bosnian citizens; the first belonging to the Roma community and the second
to the Jewish community. Both are actively participating in the political life
of the country, but according to Articles 5 and 7 of the Constitution, they
cannot be elected members of the Presidency and House of People because
they do not belong to one of the three constituent peoples. After having
appealed to the European Court of Human Rights (2006), the High Court has
declared that Articles 5 and 7 of BiH Constitution violate Article 14 of the
European Commission of Human Rights (2009)—i.e. citizens should not be
discriminated on the issue of their ethno-national belonging. In September
2011, the parliamentary Assembly of BiH set in motion a constitutional
reform to comply with the directive of the High Court, which—at this date—
has not been yet formalised.
After the Peace Agreements , BiH was (re)imagined as a state comprising
two primary geopolitical entities: The Federation of BiH (arranged into ten
Bosnian-Croat or Bosniak cantons) comprising 51% of the territory, and The
Republika Srpska (with a large Serb majority) occupying 49% (Chandler
2000, 67). A special status was granted for the area of Brčko that, for its
strategic position, was declared a multi-ethnic District and administrated
separately (cf. Bieber 2005; Jeffrey 2006) in a manner referred to by Robert
Farrand, as a ‘mini and accelerated Dayton’ (cited in Chandler 2000, 85).
The DPA drew on census data (1991) and ethnic mappings as the
necessary hard facts determining the ‘reality’ of separate ethno-nationally
homogeneous enclaves, although this situation was far from the landscape of
pre-war Bosnia where people were intermingled on a very wide scale. By
breaking up the territory of BiH into smaller administrative units, the DPA
reinforced nationalist claims for each nation’s right to self-determination by
giving them territorial authority in a way that Campbell described as
‘reminiscent of apartheid’ (1999, 400).
To reimagine BiH as such triggered various internal and external
movements of population willing to live within the community of belonging
(even if their residence was elsewhere prior the war). The result was a de
facto constitution of quasi-homogeneous ethnic enclaves whose political
stability was achieved through a ruling ethnic majority, which tends to
safeguard its own interests. Thus, the post-war scenario rarely encouraged the
recreation of mixed neighbourhoods. According to 2006 unofficial statistics,
90% of the population of BiH lives in ethnically homogeneous spaces
(Robinson and Pobrić 2006, 249). Given these premises, the very idea of
cooperation and dialogue between contending parties becomes totally
inconsistent; as Soberg notes, ‘given strength to the entities, the federal
institutions did not represent the real centres of power in BiH’ (2008, 716;
see also Yiftachel 2006; Anderson 2013). In other words, in the narrative of
Dayton, the articulation of sovereignty becomes formally an ethnic issue, and
thus legitimating ethno-national groups as the main political actors by
transforming the democracy into an exclusive ethnocracy .
 Borders can be understood as spatial divisions that ‘provide most
individuals with a concrete, local, and powerful experience of the state, for
this is the site where citizenship is strongly enforced’ (Lamont and Molnar
2002, 183). Boundaries can emanate from a central power in order to
normalise and administer territorial sovereignty, but it can also be constructed
by local interests (e.g. an ethnic minority reclaiming its boundary from within
a nation-state). In both cases, the boundary constructs otherness by drawing a
line of difference. In Dayton, the line of difference was symbolically
represented by the ethnically qualifying hyphen that inhered in the new
mapping of Bosnian citizenship, i.e. Bosnian-Muslim, Bosnian-Croat and
Bosnian-Serb. This recategorisation was already contained within the
preceding Vance-Owen plan (1993), where:

Cantons were given ‘ethnic’ labels on the map, and at the same time the
impression was given that the precise boundaries on the map were not
yet final. This had the entirely predictable effect of inciting renewed
competition for territory. And, worst of all, it incited competition
between Croat and Muslim forces for parts of central Bosnia where there
had been a mixed Muslim Croat population. (Malcolm 1994, 248)

Within the Dayton framework, ethnicity has been called into being as a
static and rigid phenomenon, which discards the possibility of understanding
ethnicity (as nationality) in a dynamic and socially constructed way. If
ethnicity was instead understood as a process of becoming, the ‘facticity’ of
ethnicisation could have been taken into account as, in essence, a political,
social, cultural process. This alternative perspective opens the possibility of
seeing the formation of ethnic groups as non-teleological. Hence, the
crystallisations of ethnic groups are merely the socio-historical result of
violence and the contingencies of conflict. As Hayden (1996, 789) writes,
‘various ethnographers from mixed regions have consistently reported that
while national differences were recognised, tensions were low in the 1980s
until political events from outside of these regions overtook them.’
In line with the framework discussed in Chapter 1, the spatialisation of
ethno-national categories , which rewrote the geopolitics of BiH, is partially
articulated through abstract space, which is a ‘product of violence and war, it
is political; instituted by a state, it is institutional. On the first inspection, it
appears homogeneous; and indeed it serves those forces which make a tabula
rasa of whatever stands in their way, of whatever threatens them—in short of
differences’ (Lefebvre 1991, 285). This abstract space is created through
processes of reductionism. Firstly, by reducing three-dimensional realities
into two dimensions, ‘defined by its “isotopy” (or homogeneity), a property
which guarantees its social and political utility’ (ibid., 285). This resonates
with the practice of ethnic mappings that reconfigured BiH in a number of
cantons assigned to one or other community. Such a practice reduced the pre-
war reality of ethnic-mingling to the post-war reality of ethnic-separation.
The reduction was meant to simplify complex inter-ethnic dynamics to flatten
them as antagonistic, and thus the need to create borders between the
communities.
Secondly, reductionism is enacted by denying that space is social and
preferring an understanding of space refracted through the ‘logic of
visualization’, which ‘tends to relegate objects to the distance, to render them
passive… By the time this process is complete, space has no social existence
independently of an intense, aggressive and repressive visualization’ (ibid.,
286). This resonates with the rebuilding of the Old Bridge in Mostar that
filled post-war narratives that celebrated the rebuilding of this symbol as the
omen for a successful process of reconciliation. Yet, this is again a reduction
that does not engage with the changed dynamics of the city and the fact that
this bridge, in the Ottoman town, has become a Muslim monument. To recall,
the goal of abstract space is homogeneity , which is both produced and
productive (Lefebvre 1991, 288). Yet it is always a specific, politicised
homogeneity, expressed by the multitude of particular political spaces (states)
across the capitalist world system. Read in this light, engender this specific
homogenisation, yet with two contending identities claiming the same
territory. As such ethno-national divisions, becoming normalised, sustain,
justify, and produce further division in the city and the country.
The case of Mostar—in which two ethnic communities almost equal in
size inhabit the same territory to which each side makes exclusivist claims—
soon became an exceptional case study for peacekeepers, who came to see
Mostar as a laboratory ‘to work out at the micro-scale the key parameters of
shared governance and territory needed for the effective functioning of
Bosnia Herzegovina at the macro-scale’ (Bollens 2007, 213; see also
Grodach 2002, 63). In fact, the unresolved nature of ethno-national
ownership in the city fuelled renewed attempts by nationalist groups to
monopolise urban space in the capital city of Herzegovina, which led to an
increase (and diversification) of efforts on behalf of the main international
actors, local and international NGO workers, and activists to neutralise
existing divisive practices, and to imagine a different future for the city.

EUAM (1994–1997): Dividing Mostar,

Temporarily
Given the bellicose atmosphere permeating the city, the presidents of BiH
and Croatia agreed on permitting the European Union to provide an interim
administration with the aim of settling lingering animosities and opening the
way to the reconstruction of the city (1994). The EUAM (European Union
Administration of Mostar ) became the organ in charge of administering the
city, headed by the Special European Representative. The first challenge
confronted by the EUAM (1994–1997) was the formulation of a strategy
capable of overcoming both the polarisation of the city and fostering the
process of reunification. The municipality of Mostar was reorganised into six
sub-districts (three Bosniak and three Croat) and a central—neutral—zone
around the area of the former frontline. Each of these districts could obtain a
certain level of autonomy in decision-making. The idea was to separate the
intolerant communities while fostering a dialogue between them at a higher
level of city governance. But, the lack of general goodwill and suspicions
with regards to cooperation, combined with a complicated administrative
system, resulted in a complex and inoperable arrangement, thus leading to the
failure of the first experiment (Bieber 2005, 422–423). As Bieber (2005, 424)
points out, ‘ironically… the international presence reinforced the division
between Bosniak and Croat parts of town … Rather than challenging the
ethnic division of the city, the rigid power-sharing system—instituted by the
international administrators—both accepted and perpetuated the post-war
status quo’. The empowerment of ethno-national groups as the prime political
actors, and administering the city as a mosaic of ethno-national enclaves,
merely strengthened bellicose positions of nationalist leaders that maintain
strategic control of economic resources and public enterprises (Moore 2013,
77–80).
OHR (1997–2010): Conceiving Mostar,
(Re)united
At the end of the EUAM mandate (1997), the responsibility for implementing
new strategies for the reunification of Mostar was taken directly by the OHR
. Several reforms were promoted in the attempt to reunify the separate public
services, schooling, and medical infrastructures, though without much
success. In 2003, Paddy Ashdown (the High Representative at the time)
established a Special Commission for reforming the City of Mostar with the
aim of retackling the problematic division of the city.
The Commission, formed by elected councillors with the representatives
of the major political parties, had to come up with a viable strategy to reunify
the administration of the city following specific guidelines given by the
OHR, which included: (1) no changes to the current boundary of the city; (2)
a unified and downsized administration for the city to end parallel structures
and to ensure efficiency; (3) a composition of the city administration that
reflects the last census; (4) a single budget for the city; (5) sufficient
revenues; (6) a single assembly and electoral system; (7) full respect for the
principle of responsibility of office; (8) institutional mechanisms to safeguard
the vital interest of the Constituent Peoples (Commission for Reforming the
City of Mostar 2003, 15). The first deadline (mid-2003) was missed because
the convened parties could not agree upon how the existing separate
administrations were to be united. The largely Bosnian-Muslim party (SDA)
opposed the idea of transforming the existing six administrative units into
one, fearing that an alleged numerical majority of Bosnian-Croat citizens
would entail the political dominance of Bosnian-Croat elected
representatives. The impasse was resolved by the direct intervention of the
HR Paddy Ashdown. In August 2003, he stated that although the convened
Commission failed to agree on a working draft, the process had to be
continued to correct the negative signal that BiH sent to Europe and to meet
the impatience of the citizens of Mostar (OHR Press Office 2003c). In
September 2003, the HR established a new Special Commission for
Reforming the City of Mostar. In this instance, the representatives of the
main political parties were supported by international experts to facilitate the
discussion (including an International Chairman). In December 2003, the
Chairman of the Commission, Norbert Winterstein, 5 circulated to the OHR,
the Council of Ministries, the Government of the FBiH, the Government of
the Herzegovina-Neretva Canton, and the Mayor and Deputy Mayor of
Mostar a report on the current state of progress. He stated that the
Commission discussed a strategy that was able ‘to examine the legal
measures necessary to reform institutional structures and improve
administrative and financial performance’ (Commission for Reforming the
City of Mostar 2003, 56). The rationale for such a reform is both economic
and social (as part of neoliberal geopolitics as discussed in Chapter 1)—as
the HR wrote in a comment welcoming the finalisation of the Commission’s
work:

as Mostar overcomes its reputation for discord, it will also begin to

attract an even-larger volume of foreign and domestic investment and
recover its status as a major tourist attraction in BiH. The reunification
of the city will mean its administration is better able to serve its citizens,
effectively delivering proper education, healthcare, and other services.
The six municipalities that existed hitherto cost every man, woman and
child in Mostar 310 KM. (OHR Board of Principals Press Office 2004) 6

The compiled report summarises the main issues discussed by the

Commission and envisions strategies to restructure the city as a single entity .
Despite the delegates’ agreement on general guidelines, there was no
unanimous decision regarding the status of the city of Mostar and the
electoral reform (the final proposal was in fact mediated by the Chairman).
Regarding the legal status of the city, two contending positions arose. One
proposal was to organise Mostar as one municipality, while the other was to
organise the territory into a satellite of smaller units of administration
monitored and coordinated by a central organ (either reducing the existing six
municipalities to four city areas or increasing the number to 37 mjesna
zajednica on the model of former Yugoslavia). 7 The disagreements that
arose with regards to the electoral system reform were the consequence of a
lack of common vision over the legal status of the city. Different scenarios
tended to materialise depending on the level of centralisation or
decentralisation of the administration, i.e. whether the political
representatives should be elected by smaller units within the city area, or
whether the election should be held in the form of the entire city as one
electoral unit. The discussions were also complicated by the fact that,
according to State electoral law, political representatives should be chosen
guaranteeing a fair ethno-national representation with consideration to the
census data of 1991 that become obsolete after war-induced processes of
displacement and internal movement.
With the political parties refusing to adopt the final proposal, the HR
imposed its recommendations in January 2004 with effect from March 15,
2004, officially ending the political polarisation of the city (Bieber 2005,
425–426). As Soberg noted, ‘the only viable way to move the country
forwards is for the HR to impose reforms’ (2008, 216; see also the concept of
inertia in Chapter 1). The Statute has not been altered since, 8 primarily
because the City Council has not yet legally accepted it. In fact, to amend the
Statute, the City Council would first have to accept it, and only later attempt
to vote against it with a minimal threshold of two-thirds majority of elected
councillors (Commission for Reforming the City of Mostar 2003, Article 58).
In April 2009, Ljubo Bešlić (acting Mayor at the time and current Mayor of
Mostar) said to the International Crisis Group (ICG) that the city would never
adopt the measure (ICG 2009, 5, fn. 28).
Regarding the contested status of the city, the OHR abolished the existing
six administrative units brought about by post-war agreements in favour of
one single entity (Commission for Reforming the City of Mostar 2003,
Article 3). The six units were transformed into electoral constituencies (ibid.,
Article 7). Each unit elects three councillors for a total of 18; the other 17
councillors are to be elected from a city-wide list. At least four candidates of
each Constituent People (Bosnian-Serbs, -Croats, and Bosniaks), while one
of the Others is also to be elected from the city-wide list (ibid., Article 17).
The City Council must have a President and two Vice-Presidents from
different Constituent People (ibid., Article 25). The Mayor must be elected
by the City Council from amongst the Councillors by a two-third majority
(ibid., Article 44). 9
The final Report is not only an executive document. As I will show in the
next section, the language and narrative of the final Report spells out how the
Chairman conceived Mostar, the role of cities, the conception of the rights
and commitments pertaining to the citizens of Mostar, and the legal measures
taken to reform the city as a united whole.
According to the final report, ‘Mostar is a city with a noble and historic
past, yet in the present days is mostly acknowledged as being the emblem of
political divisions and structural inefficiencies’ (ibid., 12). Mostar was a city
in the past, but this city is no more. Instead, contemporary Mostar represents
the antithesis of the (idealised) city and, as such, it needs to be fixed
especially because ‘it has failed to deliver acceptable levels of service and
responsible self-government to its citizens’ (ibid., 12). Currently ‘the city of
Mostar has never come to life and it is a dead letter on a paper instead of a
normal or close to normal situation’ (ibid., 13). The city has only itself to
blame, however, because of its ‘stagnancy and stubbornness’ (ibid., 49).
The narrative of the document primarily depicts Mostar as a comatose
body with a stubborn resistance to any attempts at resuscitation. This physical
analogy (the city as a body) ‘is by extension an appeal to unity and, beyond
that unity, to an origin deemed to be known with absolute certainty,
identified beyond any possible doubt—an original that legitimates and
justifies’ (Lefebvre 1991, 274–275). To use the rhetoric of the city as a body
means to appeal to the myth of origins and to eliminate ‘any study of
transformations, in favour of an image of continuity and a cautious
evolutionism’ (ibid., 275). In fact, the history of the conflict or the highly-
contested nature of BiH as a nation-state are never accounted for creating a
bridge between the abstraction of Mostar as a united city and its future. The
status of city is given in terms of its functionality; in fact, to become a city
again, Mostar should prove itself capable of delivering certain services to the
citizens and self-government. According to HR Ashdown’s understanding,
‘politics is a practical business. It is about identifying problems and solving
them. And that is what the reform process is ultimately about. About creating
a better life for you, and for your children’ (OHR Press Office 2003b). The
seemingly proven incapacity to function precludes the possibility of any
future change unless some sort of (external) assistance is provided. For this
purpose, ‘the aim of the reform is that of actively engaging local authorities
in determining the future structure, administration and functioning of Mostar
so that the city could develop as a normal, unified city in line with European
norms and standards’ (Commission for Reforming the City of Mostar 2003,
12). All those ‘special regulations that would establish Mostar as an
exception are no longer required’ (ibid., 22), thus ‘Mostar can begin its work
to become a truly European city and a model for BiH’ (ibid., 49). The
implementation of the reform is not presented as optional, but as the only
solution to guarantee a future for the city (as a city), which incidentally
internalises the European spirit.
Although the document’s narrative never clarifies what it means by
‘European city’, it makes clear that the European city is ‘normal’ and
therefore normatively correct. The discourse underlining the document deals
with being European in two ways. First, it renders belonging to Europe as the
condition to be considered normal, and therefore more of a necessity than an
option. Second, it reifies the process of becoming European as the mere
practice of following rules and accepting norms (being functional). The main
problem stems from the fact that Mostar is in BiH, but its future is imagined
as European, erasing all the socio-historical complexities of its own context.
As Lefebvre also argues, functionalism is a means of political reductionism
that invokes neutrality through the use of scientific and technical means
(Lefebvre 1991, 106). In this case, the reduction is made on two levels.
Firstly, the level of the city: here, complexity and contradiction are flattened
so that simple and clear rules could be imposed to maintain an order that is
justified by ‘scientific’ approaches to best management. Secondly, the level
of Europe/being European: again, the idea of becoming part of Europe is
equated with normality, which implies that the local administration needs to
follow the imposed guidelines to become normal (democratic, efficient…). It
is also interesting to note that this document is written by a representative of
the international community chosen by the delegate of the European
Community in BiH. The EU had effectively co-supervised the post-war
military interventions and implementations of policies and regulations to
reform the newly born nation-state, yet, apparently, Mostar is entirely to
blame for being dysfunctional. If the various EU representatives were
effectively in charge (or at least supervising the implementation of their
rules), why is there a total absence of blame (at least from official
pronouncements) on their conduct as well? One answer points toward the
neo-colonialist logic undergirding international intervention, i.e. the moral
duty to export democracy (civilisation) where there is none (see Chandler
2000; Cisarova-Dimitrova 2005), which automatically absolves the West
from its mistakes in the name of liberty and human rights (see also
Majstorović and Vučkocav 2016).
Sentences like ‘Citizens of Mostar have demonstrated their desire and
hope for a normal city’ (Commission for Reforming the City of Mostar 2003,
54), or ‘There are signs that the people of Mostar want a normal city,
organized according to normal and widely accepted European standards’
(ibid., 55), render the roles played by the citizens of Mostar as somewhat
problematic. Citizens tend to be pictured as stand-still figurines, victims of
recent tragic events desperate to obtain the normal city they deserve. What
obstructs them in carrying out a normal life seems to be the absence of a
single administration and a legal framework within which the everyday could
be performed (Galli 2010, 81). As aptly noted by Agamben (2005, 30–34),
any political reflection upon the role of ‘people’ in western politics has to
start by accounting for the ‘amphibolous’ nature of the term. In contemporary
European languages, ‘people’ translates simultaneously into both a
functionally equivalent political subject and the category of those belonging
to lower social classes. 10 One the one hand there is the People—a coherent
and essentially homogenous ‘body politic’ and, on the other, the people, a
multiplicity of needy bodies excluded from the channels of political
empowerment. This double-meaning of ‘people’ is constructed along the
same categories that define, according to Agamben, contemporary
(bio)politics: bios (People/political subjectivity) and zoé (people/bare life). In
other words, the term the people contains a fundamental biopolitical fracture
—that which cannot properly belong to the whole of which it is already a
part. Galli captures this tension in the following way:

[W]henever… democracy wants to make itself concrete… it brings into

the smooth spatiality of the State a lacerating conflict against the
‘internal enemy,’ thus undermining from within the fundamental task
and objective of modern statuality: peace… [W]ithin this framework, we
can observe a sort of ‘dynamic of attrition’… among the spaces of the
State, the Subject, and Society… Within the space of the State, the
border between individual, Society, and State (as well as that between
the private, the public, and the statual), thus proves to be… a frontier – a
place of struggle, advances, retreats, and, in every sense of the word,
movement. (2010, 46–47, emphasis added)

Thus, what Galli calls the ‘frontier’ as ‘a place of struggle’ in modern

society could be reconceptualised along the lines laid out by Agamben about
the struggle that the people conduct to become the People. Yet this tension
mysteriously vanishes in the text of the Report, where people are often called
into being as victims, deprived of their capacity to act, crying out for help,
and thus forcing the OHR to act in an authoritarian manner to cure and to
heal their (bare) life. In doing so, the people of Mostar lose the political
possibility of becoming the People and the ability to decide their own
destiny. The ‘frontier’ is thereby annihilated, so that the possibility of
becoming involved in the political is made impossible by the undemocratic
authority of the OHR. The ‘silence of the users’ is also for Lefebvre, the
‘entire problem’ (Lefebvre 1991, 365) because until the people becomes the
People no change could be made in urban politics.
Interestingly, the document also expands on the ways in which citizens
could voice their desire to have a single city again. Public hearings were
organised on November 13 and 17 and December 2, 2003 with the following
groups: business leaders, professors and intellectuals, journalists, and young
people. Representatives from the business community lamented the high
costs of doing business in Mostar due to tax-revenue supported redundancy
measures and general bureaucratic fragmentation. The intellectuals stated that
reform is needed, but citizens must be educated on the benefits of such
reform to counter the efforts of anti-reformists. Journalists proved to be the
biggest sceptics—according to the Chairman of the Commission this could
possibly be ascribed to ‘the political biases that unfortunately affect their
profession’ (Commission for Reforming the City of Mostar 2003, 57). The
youth complained about being left out of the reform process, which led to the
conclusion that ‘they demonstrated to be the reformers and leaders of
tomorrow’ (ibid.). In contrast to the conventional practice of drawing on
numbers and statistics in order to evidence claims, this time the International
Representative mentioned neither how many participants attended the public
hearings nor how many were effectively in favour of reform. Further, against
the standardised practice of labelling citizens as part of an ethno-national
community, the participants at the public hearings were categorised on the
basis of their occupation (and yet, legally, citizens of BiH are part of one
three Constituent People through which they attain their political
subjectivity). This time the convened participants were not the People of
BiH, but rather the people of Mostar. The subaltern position of the citizens of
Mostar is further evidenced by the problematic—and yet reiterated—call for
their active participation. In fact, since April 2003, when the first
Commission was called to work on a draft document, the HR invited citizens
to speak up and send their own proposals for the new City Statute (OHR
Press Office 2003a) and yet the OHR website (main channel through which
the OHR disseminates news and official documents) was made available in
local languages only from September 9, 2003.
Another point to be made concerns the ways in which the document
renders the sought-after process of transformation highly emotional when
engaging with the citizenry: ‘[o]ne key-unifying factor remained: the
understanding that the citizens of Mostar deserve better’ (Commission for
Reforming the City of Mostar 2003, 49), and further: ‘the reform is needed
not for the parties and not for the politicians but for every man, woman and
child who want a better future in the place they call home’ (ibid.). As already
noted by Cisarova-Dimitrova (2005, 53), one of the main strategies used by
the OHR to impose unilateral decisions is to employ ‘rhetorical figures such
as the country’s endangered European prospects or its image in the eyes of a
putative “Europe” (ostensibly symbolizing the affluent “civilized” world)’.
To this we should add the intense references made to the real victims of the
political impasse—the people—to whom the OHR is directly appealing and
concretely helping by substituting the local politicians (corrupted and
nationalist) in the decision-making process (Cisarova-Dimitrova 2005, 52–
53). The sentimental connotation of the concluding paragraph to the Report is
also very telling. The fact that the reform is made for the ‘everyman’ is
striking, meaning that the supposed-to-be-ordinary human is not a neutral
character, but is instead the one who deserves better because of their
sufferance and patience. I am not here discussing the merits of the citizens of
Mostar, but questioning the choice of addressing in an official document not
to a legal category such as the citizen , but to a quality of being that the
citizen may or may not possess. Further, the everyman of the Report is an
abstraction and does not account for the real needs, desires, and visions of the
citizenry. Rather, to describe the citizens of Mostar as victims deprives them
of their political subjectivity. Again, citizens are depicted as detached from
the politics of the city and its participatory dynamics, as external observers of
what happens in the city. However, central to understanding the mechanisms
that brought about the urban division (and its maintenance) is not only the
analysis of historical and political dimensions, but also of how the division
was supported (or contested) in everyday life—by citizens themselves. Who
are the citizens of the various documents released by the International
Community? Citizens, according to the DPA, gain political subjectivities as
parts of one of the three Constituent People (to which they are invited to
adhere). Ethno-national groups are the main interlocutors of political debates
and campaigns, de facto empowering pre-existing nationalist discourses—yet
the HR is working for the people, the victims of the conflict, those who have
no power. They are not only victims of the local corrupted politicians, but
also of a system that does not recognise them unless they fit into ethno-
national categories. As Rancière noticeably argued:

The Rights of Man turned out to be the rights of the rightless, of the
population hunted out of their homes and land and threatened by ethnic
slaughter. They appeared as the rights of the victims, the rights of those
who were unable to enact any rights or even any claim in their name, so
that eventually their rights had to be upheld by others, at the cost of
shattering the edifice of International Rights, in the name of a new right
to ‘humanitarian interference’. (2004, 297–298)

As seen, the main disputes within the Commission for Reforming the City
of Mostar concerned both the status of the city and electoral law reform.
Since an agreement could not be reached, the Chairman proposed a mediated
draft, which was later approved and published by the OHR.
Article 5 of the proposed Statute makes clear that ‘the city shall be a
single, undivided area according to the state of the area span marked by
cadastre lines on 1 January 1991 and modified in 1995’ (Commission for
Reforming the City of Mostar 2003, 25). However, in contradiction to this,
Article 6 states that in ‘the City of Mostar, 6 city areas shall be formed
corresponding to the former city-municipalities. These areas are electoral
constituencies according to Article 15’ (ibid., 25). 11 The proposal appeared
to be a safe compromise to placate the delegates. Yet since the election of
political representatives is the main democratic tool guaranteeing the
effective participation of citizens in the political life of their city, instructing
them to vote within an area created by the post-war dynamics of nationalist
partitions means to perpetuate the system while trying to change it. In
practice, such a strategy empowers candidates elected from virtually
homogeneous communities (due to the post-war internal movements) in
contradistinction to the original intent of recreating a political space in which
a more heterogeneous community could exercise its political powers (the
reunited city of Mostar).
The final Statute also details the modalities of such elections. Each
electoral constituency (regardless of the actual number of inhabitants) should
elect three candidates belonging to the three Constituent People, de facto
limiting (or instructing) the free choice of the citizens or fuelling political
parties’ negotiations to position adequate candidates according to their ethno-
nationality. 12 The proposed solution does not seem to be consistent with the
main goal of reuniting the city. In fact, whereas the territory has been
formally reunified, the internal divisions became instrumental to political
games dictated by nationalist goals, i.e. maintaining political power
administered and divided among ethno-national lines. The system does not
encourage (or favour) popular political initiatives (or even the creation of
parties) outside of ethno-nationalist subjectivities.
In conclusion, the very idea that to reunite a city is sufficient to declare its
territory as one undivided space seems highly problematic. To conflate the
idea of city with its territory means to imagine (and understand) it as emptied
of people, human interactions, human labour, and the affective ties binding
citizens to their city (and each other). It is an abstraction and, as such, limits
the understanding of urban dynamics by simplifying the mechanisms
characterising the everyday, which is far more conducive to the needs of
bureaucratic administration.

Distracted Politics or the Politics of Division?

Garbage Collection and Electricity
Infrastructure, or How to Keep a City Divided
When Declaring Its Reunification
A decade passed. Paddy Ashdown vacated his post as High Representative in
2006 and three other HRs have since taken up the same position. 13 The OHR
is still in charge of overseeing the process of democracy building and actively
working with (supervising) local politicians. In Mostar, Ljubo Bešlić is still
the mayor. After being elected in 2004, he acted as a mayor in the 14 months
of political impasse while the City Council decided upon a new mayor, to be
re-elected in 2009. 14 A closer analysis of the ways in which the unifying
directives of 2004 were implemented will clarify the extents to which the
imposition of the Statute affected not only the administrative and legal
apparatuses, but also the everyday life of Mostar and its citizens.
In a long interview with the magazine START in May 2011, 15 Mayor
Ljubo Bešlić discussed the main issues regarding the process of reunification
which began in 2004. When asked for his opinion about the status of the
‘divided city ’, he promptly corrected the interviewer: ‘I have to disagree
with the assessment that the city is divided’, he argued. ‘[The division] exists
in the minds of someone in Sarajevo or Banja Luka. The truth is I cannot say
that the city is fully reunited, but Mostar is safer than other cities in BiH,
because there is no violence like there is in Sarajevo, for instance, where
there is always a new victim of crime’ (START 2011). I will return later to the
issue of public safety. For the moment, it is sufficient to focus merely on the
assessment that the city has been reunited. In another occasion, writing the
foreword for a new publication about Mostar in 2008, Mayor Bešlić wrote:

Three national communities Croats, Bosnians and Serbs and citizens of

other nationalities to a significant extent, retained their presence in spite
of war and migration, so Mostar is now practically the only truly multi-
ethnic town in Bosnia. It is expected, and I am personally and as mayor
and as a man an optimist, the city of Mostar, as such, will be guiding
BiH in its integration into Europe. (Bešlić et al. 2008, emphasis added)

In fact, the opinion of the Mayor is widely shared by other politicians in

charge of the administration of the city. When I met the then spokesman for
the Croatian Democratic Union (Hrvatska Demokratska Zajednica, HDZ) in
Mostar in 2010, he also confirmed that the division is just a matter of
misperception. For instance, the spokesman argued that although there are
two curricula in the school system, this is not an effect of divisive ethno-
national strategies, but rather the democratic possibility given to students to
study in their own language. He clarified further that there is no division in
Mostar and went on explaining that this is a European model, the
multinational system (personal communication 17/06/2010).
The attitude of the political class regarding the problem of the
reunification of the city is indeed peculiar. On the one hand, the imposition of
the Statute changed the perception of the city. If once Mostar was described
as divided (its main characteristic), today the city administrators find
difficulty in describing it as such. Indeed, they are all democratically elected
representatives of the city of Mostar, ‘one’ territory. However, they also feel
compelled to make sense of certain characteristics of the city such as the
segregation of the educational system, still existing parallel institutions, not
to mention an assessment of everyday life. The main challenge seems to be
that of formulating coherent descriptions of the situation without falling back
into the trap of depicting Mostar as divided. Thus, various strategies have
been elaborated accounting for both the ways in which administrators talk
about Mostar and how they practically manage the city.
Another example, in July 2010, I interviewed three people working at the
Spatial Planning Institute of Mostar, curious to learn about how planners
were addressing the process of reconciliation and reunification of the city. In
a personal interview, the Director of the Institute, Salem Bubalo, said that the
main obstacles are a conspicuous lack of a budget and almost non-existent
investors, which limit the possibility of both rebuilding and expanding the
city. In fact, existing plans imagine the expansion of Mostar northwards with
the construction of a new neighbourhood (the North Camp ). The original
vision included a new stadium (capable of hosting up to 40,000 people), 5000
parking places, pools, cinema, hotels, 3000 housing units (hosting 15,000
people), schools (one school has already been opened), and daily care
centres. Dr Bubalo hopes that the development plan could attract new
inhabitants and boost tourism as if the economic benefits could guarantee the
success of reconciliation practices. But, when solicited to answer more
delicate questions, such as which school (which curriculum) would occupy
the space planned for a school or which church would occupy the religious
space, he declined to answer, adding that this is about politics and not
planning (personal interview 20/07/2010). The answer is consistent with the
idea that architecture and planning are practices not concerned or dealing
with the political or social realms (see also Gunder 2010; Lefebvre 1991,
308). As many have discussed, politika (politics) came to be, in the everyday
realm, the space of corruption. Politics does not refer to the practice of
administration, debate, and decision-making, but rather to what is not
transparent (Kolind 2008). As an extension of this, to be associated with
politics amounts to a kind of guilt by association. Yet the emphasis given to
neutrality uncovers the necessity of avoiding difficult decisions. If the
division were not a problem, then to assign a certain building (area) to a
community would not have been an issue. It is a problem (and as such must
be avoided) because the division of the city has not been overcome.
Politicians and officials are downplaying it (or ignoring it) for the simple
purpose of ignoring the inconvenient truth of division. The lamented Statute
(which nobody likes, but nobody changes) becomes instrumental to these
practices. The fact that the city was declared as one means that reunification
is no longer an issue. The city has turned an historical page and now
(somehow) functions as one. The external imposition of the Statute is also
helpful in legitimising the unwillingness of the political class to actively work
towards a substantial reunification. In fact, the elected councillors never
agreed on the modalities of reunification and, as such, they are not
responsible for its effects in the everyday. The reunification has occurred as a
top-down imposition, rather than a process, while no strategy was discussed
to reunify the social life of the city. The territorial contiguity of Mostar alone
could not possibly have brought social and political reconciliation among the
warring parties. The lack of a single vision of Mostar’s future means that
many antagonistic positions of how Mostar should be conceived are fighting
to attain visibility, with the consequence of social immobility. I believe that
the word most often used by politicians in Mostar is ‘difficult’ or ‘complex’.
This is the complexity of the ambiguous, the unspoken, and the ambivalent,
which creates a real trap for the citizenry whose everyday performances
depend on the (provisional and shaky) infrastructures of the city. A closer
look at the administration of basic services (of spatial practices) such as
electricity, water, and city maintenance further illuminates the extent to
which the lack of a single vision for the future of the city affects its everyday
life.
The Statute of the city of Mostar prescribed that not only the
amalgamation of the former six municipalities, but also the merging of
parallel social infrastructures. Before reunification, Mostar had two payment
bureaus, two post offices, two public bus companies, two public city
sanitation companies, two water and sewage companies, two electric
distribution companies, two currencies, and two public pension funds (ICG
2000, 51–54). After the reunification, the two water providers were merged
but duties and competencies were redistributed in line with ethno-national
divisions, with a director in west Mostar—taking care of this part of the city
—and an executive director administering the eastern part (ICG 2009, 11–
12). The situation proved more difficult for other public service providers
such as Komos and Parkovi; the companies in charge of city maintenance
(roads, parks, nurseries, public buildings, etc.) in the east and west of the city,
respectively. On 6 December 2006, the City Council voted in favour of
closing the two separate organisations to establish a new public company
called Komunalno . In the meanwhile, Parkovi went bankrupt while Komos
refused to sign an agreement that would have compromised its finances. As
Parkovi cleared its balance sheet in 2008, Komos fell under mounting debt
burdens. No agreement between the two existing companies could have been
made. Later, Komunalno and Komos underwent internal reorganisation
(including the dismissal of workers from Komos) but the City Council never
convened to discuss the organisation of the new company or the
reorganisation of the two older ones. As a result, the city now has three
companies—Komunalno being the city-owned company that subcontracts to
Parkovi and Komos when needed, which incidentally fails to solve the
original problem, i.e. how to provide a more agile service for the city (see
ICG 2009, 12). To date, the situation remains the same if not worse by
increasing debt burdens—coming from the costs of managing three
companies rather than one. Further, citizens seem to be extremely dissatisfied
with the service provided so that in summer 2017 complaints voiced in local
newspapers argued that the garbage was not collected on time, creating real
problems when the temperature reached 40 degrees, threatening public health
and affecting tourism (C.V. 2017). Electricity is also provided by two
separate companies that reflect the divisions of the country along ethno-
national lines; Elektroprivreda Bosne i Hercegovina (EPBIH) and
Electroprivreda Hrvatske Zajednice Herceg-Bosne (EPHHZHB), which serve
the Bosniak and Croat territory in the Federation, serve the two sides of
Mostar independently. 16 A clear example of how this might affect the
everyday in Mostar was given in February 2012 when the electrical towers
holding the power cables to east Mostar fell under the heavy snow. Half of
the city was left for three days and four nights without electricity (no heating,
cooking, or hot water). Those who had the option went to ‘the other side’ to
seek refuge. Those without the western option had to survive by their own
means. In an interview with Oslobođenje, Mayor Bešlić was asked to
comment on how the event evidenced the current division of the city. The
mayor admitted that, if the electricity provider were one, the damage could
have been limited, but warned against the politicisation of the story. Rather,
he stated, we should consider the thousands of people who promptly
volunteered to help those in difficulty, ‘people who have sacrificed
themselves to help others’ (Gudelj 2012). In fact, the highly disorganised
service providers and the lack of contingency plans (it should be said that this
was a rare natural event) resulted in chaos, so much so that citizens
effectively organised themselves with the aim of providing basic provisions
for those in dire need. For instance, the Youth Cultural Centre Abrašević —
which is located on the former buffer zone, but obtains its electricity from the
west—opened its doors to those looking for a refuge offering hot food,
drinks, and provisional shelter.
The general sense of chaos and lack of strategies in administering the city
brought about a shared popular sentiment against politics, which was
perceived as a game played by individuals who do not in fact represent those
who elected them, but act on the basis of futile legalistic arguments. The
sense of frustration is galloping ahead even among those who have not given
up on politics. As the local activist Jandrić (2011) commented on the political
situation of BiH:

I always conclude that the biggest obstacle in the development of Bosnia

and Herzegovina society, democracy, human rights, economy and
finance are actually all those numerous levels of government, imagined
and signed in Dayton. Bosnia and Herzegovina suffers chronically of a
surplus of rights of ‘constituent peoples’ and lack of rights for
individuals, citizens and minority social groups. Such a constitutional
composition of the country based exclusively on ethnic approach has
brought us into this situation… This vicious circle pushes even
nominally left-oriented parties into populism, flirtation with patriotism,
nationalism, and in extreme cases open chauvinism. All with the goal of
overtaking the power for the privilege it entails, and not for the reasons
of wellbeing of ‘constitutive people’, not to mention the citizens.

All the social infrastructures of BiH, in either providing basic services

such as water, or constituting the blueprint for practising democracy, seem to
produce fractures rather than social cohesion. They instigate exasperation and
discontent, alienating citizens from the active management of their political
space. The lack of a strong governing institution at the state level reverberates
down the scalar structure of social power. The empowered political parties
and actors use their positions to manipulate the foreign-imported democratic
tools to express their disagreement with those imposing the rules of the game.

But You Are Safe! The Logics of Pastoral

Politics in a Dangerous World
As many have already observed, ‘[the] consociational system allows elites to
keep people in a continuous state of fear by invoking threats to their own
territorial-political autonomy or highlighting the discrimination that co-
ethnics face in other ethnocratic spaces in Bosnia’ (Moore 2013, 78; see also
Laketa 2016; Bassuener 2015).
In a rather Foucauldian way, the political class (those elected and those
imposing themselves as the High Representative) asserts its authority despite
the increasing dissatisfaction among the population by adopting the rhetoric
of social safety . When Mostar was left without a mayor in 2009, the HR
justified his direct intervention (and the partial amendment of the City
Statute) by appealing to the need for saving lives. When asked about the
division of Mostar, Mayor Bešlić said he could not truly say that the city was
effectively reunited, but that it was certainly safer. Referring to the city park,
Bešlić highlighted the introduction of ‘discreet and invisible 24/7 control and
the ban on introducing pets and consuming alcohol… It is beautiful for
mothers and children.’ (START 2011). Jandrić (2011), commenting on this,
expressed his perplexities: ‘from all the sides we start to hear requests for
building more prisons for minors, equipping the streets and schools with
CCTV cameras, increasing the jurisdiction of police agents. That is as
hypocritical as it gets’.
The production of bare life (zoé)—the strategy of sovereign power
establishing itself—is what Foucault called governmentality (see Foucault
2008). This is the bio-political rationality behind the modern state, which has
been characterised since the beginning by pastoral power (Foucault 1991). 17
The shepherd’s role, writes Foucault, is to ensure the salvation of the flock.
For this reason, it is the shepherd’s duty to wield power and to make
decisions in the interest of all. The relationship between shepherd and flock is
one of devotion and absolute dependence. Whereas political power creates
political subjects, pastoral power is exerted over individuals devoid of
political subjectivity. The flock fully submits to the shepherd’s orders for the
sake of maintaining its safety and internal order. The emphasis on safety must
be seen along these lines as the use of a technology of power, which reduces
citizens to helpless individuals to expropriate their political subjectivity in
exchange for their personal security. This exchange is particularly meaningful
in a post-war urban scenario, where the memories of conflict (danger, death,
fear) are still fresh (Pain and Smith 2008). Citizens are constantly reminded
of their perilous (supposed or real) environment to aggrandise the success of
the political class in providing security, thus distracting people from the
problems they originally voiced (the lack of clarity, the lack of organisation,
the lack of jobs, and so on). Symptomatically, when people took the streets of
Tuzla to protest against the government in 2014, they said they were no
longer sheep to be manipulated by the fear of another war (see Hromadžić
2015, 190). The strategy adopted by the administrators of Mostar disguises
the (local and international) political class’ demand for uncritical deference.
Thus, the dominant (and reductive) rhetoric used to discuss the future of
Mostar revolved around the notion of functionality, whose effect was one of
reducing the idea of a normal city to that of an organism capable of providing
and executing its functions satisfactorily. Therefore, the reunification of the
city is conflated with the reincorporation of its territory, while the reform
process was mostly intended to reorganise the existing parallel institutions.
Contrary to the notion of space as a social product, mobilised in this book,
space has been taken as an empty container ‘ready to receive fragmentary
contents, a neutral medium into which disjoined things, people and habitat
might be introduced’ (Lefebvre 1991, 308). At another level, this idealisation
of the city could not provide instruments capable of informing the concrete
process of reunification. In fact, the relatively quick decision (because of its
external imposition) of eventually making Mostar into one could not be
translated in an equally fast ‘rebooting’ of shared everyday practices. Yet, the
fact that the city is legally one allows those in charge to neglect the
reunification process a substantive social policy. Citizens are lamenting the
dysfunctionality of the city (maladministration), which could be seen both in
the incapacity of the administration to provide basic services, but also (and
more importantly) in the impossibility of citizens becoming political subjects.
As such, stripped of their political voice, they are seduced by the siren-calls
of those who claim to operate on behalf of their wellbeing (their pastors). A
major problem arises when we consider that Mostar does not have one
pastor-leader, but many. Accordingly, the flock is fractured, and the sheep
antagonised.

The Administration of Mostar Today: The

Challenge of Political Representation
Mostar is today a medium-sized city (roughly 100,000 inhabitants) where the
violent conflict has been largely resolved; no major fights are disturbing the
everyday, apart from diffuse unemployment , 18 widespread corruption
(Pignotti 2013), 19 and a high distrust in the political class. Currently, the city
faces the problem of reforming its electoral system , which has proved
extremely difficult. As already mentioned, in 2008–2009, the city was
without an administration for over a year until the direct intervention of the
HR broke the impasse by reinstating the former mayor until new elections
could be held. National municipal elections were called for September 2012
but Mostar was the only city where they could not take place. This is
because, in the meantime, the Constitutional Court of BiH established, on
November 26, 2010, that the electoral law enforced by the Statute of the City
of Mostar was unconstitutional, for two reasons. Firstly, the existing six
electoral units were voting according to the 1991 census that does not reflect
the current makeup of Mostar’s population. 20 Secondly, the electoral system
was disadvantaging those living in the former central zone, which was never
made into a constituent unit, and whose inhabitants could vote only for the
city-wide list. Because of the failure to implement a reform to the electoral
law as instructed by the Constitutional Court of BiH, before the national 2012
elections, Mostar was the only municipality were people could not vote, a
problem that recurred in 2016. For the past nine years, citizens have not been
able to vote and all matters regarding the city have been handled by mayor
Bešlić. The next elections are planned for 2020. At the moment, the reform of
the electoral law remains unsolved and, as local elections are nearing, the
discussion is becoming more and more pressing.

Conclusion
The decision to reunify Mostar was given (and taken) as an imposition. As
the analysis of the documents written by international officials has shown, the
description of Mostar as dysfunctional and its citizens in need of help
compelled the direct intervention of the international community in order to
normalise the situation. Discursively, the representation of space emerging
from the documents drafted by the international administrators visualises the
urban territory as one, homogenous , and unproblematic. The imposition is
meant to silence existing contestations over territorial sovereignty in order to
provide the framework within which normal life could be performed. Thus,
within these representations of space
 The [functional] State and [its] territory interact in such a way that they
can be said to be mutually constitutive. This explains the deceptive
activities and image of state officials… They seem to administer, to
manage and to organise a natural space. In practice, however, they
substitute another space for it, one that is first economic and social, and
then political. They believe they are obeying something in their heads –
a representation (of the country, etc.). In fact, they are establishing an
order – their own. (Lefebvre 2009, 228)

In the case of Mostar, historical particularities were never accounted for,

but wiped out with the aim of proposing a different (normal and functional)
future, which is conceived as ‘European’. For instance, the political and
social fragmentations of the city were not engaged with as products of
historical and political processes, which needed to be explored and resolved
in their own terms. Rather, the division is taken as a temporary sickness of
the city, a type of abnormality, which could have been healed by the
imposition of a more functional structure. In the context of such maladies,
‘The physician of modern society see [sic] as the physician of a sick social
space. Finality? The cure? It is coherence’ (Lefebvre 2000, 82–83).
In particular, the construction of identities according to ethno-national
membership was never challenged; yet it is the legalisation of political
subjectivities as ethno-national that must be addressed as problematic
(resulting from another imposition of one set of representational spaces onto
an already existing set, as homogeneity versus heterogeneity). In fact, by
delinking political subjectivity from ethno-national belonging, it could have
been possible to imagine and discuss political and social issues as urban
affairs, rather than ethnic affairs. Instead, there is a double contradiction
embodied in a simultaneous and superimposed abstraction of political
subjectivity (ethnic differentiation) and political territoriality (urban
unification). From the (ir)rationality of this superimposition, even if formal
democratic mechanisms are in place their social value will come to nothing as
long as they are fractured along lines of subjectivity that subvert any
meaningful social reconciliation.
In the case of Mostar, the imposition of abstract space occurred in the
context of a democratic apparatus. But the nature of this apparatus itself,
being merely ‘representative’ (of whom, or what?), circumscribed the very
possibility of legitimate opposition to the implementation of unification.
There was never a question of whether categories of political representation
were the key factors in producing political deadlock. Indeed, elected
councillors, who never approved the City Statute, were willing to sabotage
the imposed normalcy on several occasions. Proof lies in the fact that the last
time citizens were called to vote for the local administration was in 2008,
while the City Council had hardly approved any new plans because of their
irreconcilable differences. The manipulation of democratic tools in order to
keep the space of Mostar divided must also be appreciated by looking into the
ways in which it manifests as spatial practice. The provision of services in
Mostar is still highly problematic and this must be seen as one of the failures
of the imposition of the (internationally developed) abstract space devoid of
socio-political considerations. Local political authorities targeted the existing
parallel companies in order to initiate a reform capable of reunifying services,
but the result was nothing particularly radical, such as the creation of new
companies working for the entire city. Rather, existing companies were either
formally united but kept in operation as separated, or worked for a third
company owned by the city. The reunification was literally paper-thin. These
processes of reunification clearly show that the city’s infrastructure
reproduces space as divided, rather than united. An explanation for the causes
of this phenomenon must be sought by looking at the ways in which the
international and local representations of space differ and conceive space
separately.
Again, while we can see how an imposed unification of the city, and its
political fragmentation along ethno-national categories, implies modes of
elite abstraction, they are not of the same kind. The abstract representation(s)
of Mostar contains convergent and divergent elements that are the
manifestation of political contestation along different scalar levels. The
difference of scale here corresponds to the distance with which actors relate
to their socio-spatial environment, where the actors most removed from on-
the-ground developments (international) will tend further towards
representations of space (abstract/distant), while local elites occupy a
problematic middle-ground between abstract conceptions and more local
concerns articulated by representational space. In this way:

The coincidence of anti-statist interests between an OHR seemingly

obsessed with squeezing public economic space as a key to developing
the liberal peace, and nationalist management elites anxious to hold on
 to the public space they had captured for private gain, diverged only in
the methods by which the general population would be marginalised and
workers excluded… The restrictions on the public sphere cannot be
understood without taking into account the interplay between external
actors and these domestic elites. (Pugh 2005, 6, emphasis added)

Thus, on the one hand, the somewhat ambiguous international

representation of Mostar as unified was welcomed by local political elites as
a step towards normalisation; on the other hand, the OHR has continued to
intervene after the ‘reunification’ in order to solve political impasses. The HR
described Mostar’s present as still disruptive: ‘The situation in Mostar is
increasingly volatile, with rising tension manifesting itself in escalating
rhetoric, including threats to boycott elections, a deadlocked City Council,
boycotts of ceremonial events by councillors and one shooting incident’
(OHR 2012). Thus, the formal acceptance of unification by local elites is
simultaneously rejected at the urban level. They describe the city as one, yet
the division is never accounted for as a substantive political issue. For
example, the existence of parallel curricula in school is explained as the
liberal guarantee of equal rights for ethnic groups. The accent is put on
safeguarding of minority rights to obfuscate nationalist discourses creating
and supporting the need for a separated education system. Further, the city is
planned as if an ethno-national conflict had been solved or cannot be ever
solved, thus to be ignored. In fact, sensitive spaces such as schools and
churches are designed without considering who will be their recipients
(which is a political choice) confirming that the division is a problem that
shall not be discussed. Spatial practices are instructed by perceptions of
Mostar as a divided city, while the city is conceived as one. Paradoxically,
the very imposition of a united abstract space became instrumental to
preserve the division. In fact, to plan a united city meant—for local
administrators—ignoring that the city was divided and in need of being
reconciled through ad hoc spatial practices.
This chapter has discussed how, together, the moments of the
representation of space and spatial practices produce frictions. This is
because of the existence of, and competition between, multiple
representations of space that imagine the future of Mostar very differently.
Existing spatial practices are not designed to produce the city as one—to
implement the abstract space of unification, but rather to keep the city
divided, and to concretise the abstract/absolute space of ethno-national
divisions. Because spatial practices in Mostar are designed by the local
administration, they follow localised claims to territorial homogeneity.
Instead, the abstract space of reunification, being imposed by the
international actors supervising the administration of Mostar does not
produce concrete spatial practices that correspond to the material integration
of the city. This recalls Björkdhal and Gusic’s notion of Mostar as ‘a site of
friction between the international, and the local’ (Björkdhal and Gusic 2016,
85), which produces antagonism but also collaborations. Symptomatically,
the local administrators have embraced the imposed space of Mostar as
reunited to avoid engaging with the reconciliation process. In other words,
the existence of competing representations of space allow the political elites
to produce contradictory discourses and practices, which are consistent with
the idea that Mostar is both united and divided. Indeed, the existence of
conflictual representations of space affect the representational spaces of
everyday citizens as well. In fact, everyday life in Mostar presents
contradictory movements that reflect this original split, as the next chapter
will discuss in more detail.

Notes

1. It should also be noticed that the Article 2 of the Law on

Implementation of Decisions of the Commission to Preserve National
Monuments, created as part of the Dayton Peace Agreement (Annex 8),
rules that all the destroyed monuments shall be rebuilt exactly as they
were prior the war (using the same materials and employing the same
building techniques). See http://​old.​kons.​gov.​ba/​main.​php?​id_​struct=​
83&​lang=​4.

2. I agree with Hromadžić that interreligious marriages should not be

romanticised nor taken as proof of a ‘uniquely Bosnian multicultural
social order’ (2012, 34). Rather, pre-war ethnographic research shows
that people identified with an ethnic group and negotiated their
differences—often peacefully. The main change to observe in the post-
war environment is the need to articulate these ethnic differences
territorially by erecting boundaries that could establish ethnically
homogeneous areas of dwelling.
3. The Croat nationalist commitment to the project of Herceg-Bosna did
not end with their military defeat, nor with the implementation of
several measures adopted by the international organisations to maintain
territorial cohesion within the borders of the FBiH. Their ideas are still
alive and fully shared throughout cyberspace (see, HercegBosna
website, for instance). Also, in the 39th Report of the High
Representative for Implementation of the Peace Agreement on BiH to
the Secretary-General of the UN, Inzko (the High Representative)
writes, ‘Since the election campaign, the leaders of the Bosnian Croat
HDZ BiH [Croatian Democratic Party of BiH] and HDZ 1990 [Croatian
Democratic Party 1990] parties have continued to call occasionally for a
third [Croat] entity. In 2010, the then Federation President (Bosnian
Croat) also referred to the “realistic possibility” of BiH’s dissolution.’
(OHR 2011, Part III, Political Update, Point 18).

4. A formal agreement to end the war was reached at the Wright-Patterson

Air Force Base near Dayton, Ohio, and formally signed in Paris
(December 1995) by the President of the Federal Republic of
Yugoslavia Slobodan Milošević, the President of Croatia Franjo
Tuđman, and the President of BiH Alija Izetbegović witnessed by
French President Jacques Chirac, US President Bill Clinton, UK Prime
Minister John Major, German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, and Russian
Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin.

5. Norbert Winterstein had previously been the Head of the EU

Department of City Administration in Mostar (1994–1996).

6. The idea of implementing reforms to boost the tourist economy in

Mostar is also consistent with the internationally led plan for the
reconstruction of the Old Bridge (reopened in July 2004) and the
entrance of the Old Town in the UNESCO World Heritage List, which
happened a year layer (July 2005). On the latter point concerning the
municipal ‘cost’ to Mostar’s citizens, 310 km roughly equals Euro 160
and, in 2004, corresponded to 5% of the average annual income (see
also Bieber 2005, 424). It must be noted that there is a discrepancy
 between the cost given by the HR and the cost given by the OSCE
mission to BiH Public Administration Reform Unit for 2003; the latter
accounted for a total of 288 km. According to the OSCE report, in 2003
there was one public employee for every 189 citizens (Commission for
Reforming the City of Mostar 2003, 62, fn. 24).

7. The mjesna zajednica were service-oriented units with no legislative

function or competency in interpreting the law. They often worked at
the level of the neighbourhood to assure a closer relationship between
the government and the citizens often providing basic services. For a
more detailed account of all the positions taken by the participants at
the discussion, see Commission for Reforming the City of Mostar
(2003, 59–61).

8. The only amendment to the Statute was made via another direct
intervention of the HR Valentin Inzko in December 2009, after
13 months of failed attempts to elect a Mayor, see later in this chapter.

9. The electoral law in Mostar has been at the centre of public debates
since. More about the reform of the constitutional law later in this
chapter.

10. For example, Agamben (2005, 30–34) observes that in Abraham

Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address (1863), the invocation of a ‘Government
of the people, by the people, for the people’ implicitly contains the
ambiguity of the term ‘people’ and what it signifies (see also Blackburn
2011, 41).

11. This decision was particularly ostracised by the main Bosnian-Croat

parties, which wished for a direct system to elect the Mayor and the
abolition of ethnic quotas. In fact, on the strength of an alleged ethnic
majority at the city level, they could risk losing fixed quotas.

12. For instance, the Bosnian-Serb population is now too small to elect one
representative on their own. As a consequence the four elected
councillors in 2008 were part of other parties including HDZ (Croatian
 Democratic Union) and SDA (Democratic Action Party). Hence, in the
City Council there were four Bosnian-Serbs, but there is no political
representation of the Bosnian-Serb Constituent People as such (ICG
2009, 10).

13. Christian Schwarz-Schilling (2006–2007), Miroslav Lajčak (2007–

2009) and Valentin Inzko (2009–incumbent).

14. From the election in October 2008, there were 17 sessions of the city
council, which yet failed to elect a mayor (Bose 2017, 202). Without an
approved budget, the city of Mostar stopped paying its employees in
April 2009, leading to a general strike the following summer. At this
point, the HR intervened directly to approve a city budget until the end
of September and that new elections should be held. In December 2009,
the previous mayor, Bešlić was reinstated until new elections could be
held. Two years later, in 2011, the Constitutional Court of BiH
established that the voting system in Mostar was unconstitutional for
two reasons. Firstly, the electoral units were voting according to the
1991 census that does reflect the current makeup of the population in
Mostar. Secondly, the electoral system was disadvantaging those living
in the former ‘central zone’, which was never made into a constituent
unit, and whose inhabitants could vote only for the city-wide list.
Because of the failure to implement a reform to the electoral law as
instructed by the Constitutional Court of BiH, in the national 2012
elections, Mostar was the only municipality were people did not vote.
Bešlić remains to this day the acting-major of the city.

15. START is a Sarajevo-based magazine part of the SCOOP network of

investigative journalists in Eastern and Southwest Europe.

16. The third provides service in the Republika Srpska.

17. The genealogy of this mode of power can, as Foucault pointed out, be
traced all the way back to the ancient Judaic tradition of government
(Dean 2007, 74).
18. According to the independent centre for social research, Moje Mjesto,
the unemployment rate in Mostar was 35.6% in 2013 (Analitika 2013).

19. In the Corruption Perception Index 2016, Bosnia and Herzegovina

scored 39 in a scale from 0 to 100 where 0 signals a society perceived
as highly corrupt (Transparency 2016). On the subject of corruption and
organised crime in BiH, the article of Van de Vliet (2008, 205–235)
offers an extensive account, particularly addressing the lack of a clear
strategy to strengthen the rule of law in the DPA as an important factor
to understand the endemic practice of corruption in the newly formed
public sector.

20. Croat parties complained to the Constitutional Court of BiH that rights
of Croats were being violated, i.e. that one Bosniak vote in Mostar is
worth several Croat votes, because some former Bosniak municipalities
had only a few thousands of voters, while one of the Croat ones had
over 20,000; yet, they returned the same number of councillors to the
City Council of Mostar.

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© The Author(s) 2018
Giulia Carabelli, The Divided City and the Grassroots, The Contemporary City,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-7778-4_3

3. The Everyday Life of Mostar

Giulia Carabelli1
(1) Max Planck Institute for the Study of Ethnic and Religious Diversity,
Göttingen, Germany

Giulia Carabelli
Email: carabelli@mmg.mpg.de

The Everyday Life of Mostar

This chapter attends to the everyday life of Mostar. Lefebvre writes that ‘[the
everyday] is a sociological point of feedback with a dual character. It is the
residuum (of all the possible specific and specialised activities outside social
experience) and the product of society in general; it is the point of delicate
balance and that where imbalance threatens’ (2007, 32). Thus, the everyday
contains, and is shaped by, the repetitive bureaucratisation of the quotidian
that oppresses the individual, which induces passivity, but it is also the site of
potential resistance that feeds revolutionary trajectories. Consistent with
Lefebvre’s theory of space production, I also engage with the ambivalent
character of the everyday for two main reasons. Firstly, I am interested in
evaluating how polarising practices and nationalist discourses shape the
everyday in Mostar. I do so by presenting and discussing the results of two
small map-based surveys conducted in 2011 by Abart Mostar, a grassroots
organisation working in the arts field, which I co-designed. The surveys show
how practices of socialisation and internal mobility changed after the war,
assigning new meanings and understandings to the built environment and the
city. Secondly, and drawing from five vignettes, I engage with the everyday
to single out moments that contradict routinised practices of ethnic division. I
point to the ways in which individuals, even when they subscribe to ethno-
national logics, escape from the iron grid of ethno-national conformity that
allows for unexpected moments of subjective ‘confusion’. I discuss these
disruptions in relation to Lefebvre’s notions of ‘ambiguity’ and ‘spontaneity’
to give meaning to the surfacing of socio-political tensions in the everyday.
Here, I confront the permanent political impasse (the sense that nothing can
change) with the fluidity of the everyday to make sense of how the perceived
immobility can facilitate movement. I do so by drawing on Berlant’s work to
think how resistance might be understood as ‘inaction’ in times of crisis, and
the conditions of possibility for a more organised movement (rather than
spontaneous) that might counter ethno-national segregation. Accordingly, I
discuss together Lefebvre’s notion of the urban revolution (and, opposed to
it, alienation) with political and ethical projects ‘formulated and conducted on
the terrain of the affects…[that] recognize that we are not sovereign subjects’
(Hardt 2015, 215). The life stories introduced in this chapter are not intended
to become representative of the city. Instead, they provide insight into the
difficulties experienced by those who negotiate their lives within ethnocratic
systems of power, which demand and impose ethnic membership as a means
of organising quotidian space. I discuss the relevance of these moments
within a broader discussion of how the city is produced and reproduced as
divided, and I begin a conversation about the possibility for Mostar to
become ‘undivided’, which will continue in the next chapter. By way of
conclusion, this chapter resumes a methodological reflection on how to
approach the study of deeply divided societies. It argues that exceptions to
the accustomed practices of the ‘divided city’ point to the methodological
fallacy of engaging with Mostar only by selecting cases of inter-group
segregation and intolerance. Instead, this chapter argues that a critical
engagement with the everyday allows for the possibility of unexpected
moments of collaboration, confusion, and paradoxes to become more visible.

Urban Imaginaries. Navigating Shifting

Patterns of Pre- and Post-war Mobility in
Mostar
Lefebvre argues that the production of the urban follows rhythms and
routines that can both cement and disrupt the patterns instructed by planners
and bureaucrats. These are what Lefebvre calls ‘spatial practices ’ (Lefebvre
1991, 33, 38, 45). Thus, spatial practices need to be planned to ensure urban
connectivity (within and outside the city) but they are also constantly
negotiated in the everyday by urban inhabitants (those who live the city). For
instance, road networks are designed to connect different parts of a city,
ensuring territorial consistency, but it is up to the individual to choose which
way to travel from one side to the other. In the previous chapter, I considered
how the infrastructures of the city that provide services such as electricity or
garbage collection have been restructured to serve the reunited city, but only
on paper. As an example, I discussed how the failure of electricity provision
in east Mostar in February 2012 made visible the extent to which urban
division is structural (spatial practices in the city are conceived not to
guarantee cohesion, but to materialise ethno-national partitions) with concrete
repercussions in the everyday. This exemplifies the general boycott to the
process of reunification sustained by urban elites. In this chapter, I reflect
further on how divisive imaginaries and patterns of segregation have been
cemented in the everyday by attending to the ways in which citizens make
use of the city and move across (or within) the perceived border that
separates east and west Mostar. Specifically, and drawing on map-based
surveys conducted in 2011, I examine what I call the ‘infrastructures of
socialisation ’ to assess how people gather and socialise, and in the process
form communities of belonging. By asking where people spend their spare
time, the survey aimed to gather information about the spaces that become
important in the affective economies of the city: the sites that ‘stick’ (Laketa
2017, 5), and facilitate the creation of emotional bonds to the city (or parts of
it). Further, the surveys consider internal mobility patterns by reflecting on
the location of fear in the city, as the places that people avoid because they
associate them with discomfort and exclusion. The analysis of spatial
practices is comparative in the sense that it confronts data gathered around
movements and usages of the city before and after the conflict (and the
division). In doing so, these maps aim to provide a rich portrayal of how
reforms in the urban administration have shaped different imaginaries of the
city, which prompts a discussion about how, in present-day Mostar, the
feeling of being ‘safe’, ‘secure’, and ‘welcome’ is constructed not on
(personal) experience, but rather depends on a static representation of the
‘ethnic other’ as the ultimate enemy, and the potential threat they pose.

The Infrastructures of Socialisation

In spring 2011, within the framework of Abart’s project (Re) collecting
Mostar , two small map-based surveys were conducted to assess socialisation
practices in the city before and after the war, as well as perceptions of being
safe and welcome in the old and present urban environments. The surveys
addressed two separate sample groups gathered through snowballing
techniques by the university students who took part in Abart’s project as
researchers (this was a group of twentyfour university students enrolled in
different departments across the Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences of the
two major universities in Mostar: Sveučilište, in west Mostar, and Univerzitet
Džemal Bijedić in the east). The first group of respondents included 100
people aged 35–60 who have been living in Mostar all their life and the
second group gathered a younger generation, 100 citizens aged 18–35, who
were born during or just before the conflict and grew up in a divided city.
The first group was asked to respond the survey’s questions for the pre-war
city and the second group for the post-war city. Two blank maps and a pen
were given to each participant. In the first map, interviewees were invited to
circle the places they associate with hanging out and meeting friends, and
record what makes these spaces friendly (while the older generation did so
for pre-war Mostar). For the second set of maps, the same respondents were
asked to circle the places in the city they would rather avoid and explain why.
The questionnaire did not ask for the respondents’ ethnicity but rather for
their age and gender. In fact, the survey wanted to picture the ways in which
citizens of Mostar socialise spatially without addressing them as members of
ethnic groups. 1 Of course, some of the comments made, especially in the set
of maps about uncomfortable spaces, must be read within the frame of ethno-
national tensions, but the option to identify oneself as more than an ethnic
subject gave the opportunity to step out the process of performing ethno-
national antagonisms that so often populates Mostar’s political debates. Thus,
it is not a matter of knowing who goes where but rather to get a sense of how
the city was/is used and understood. In this sense, these maps wanted to be
‘affective’ because they did not attempt to become stable and precise
representations but rather to provide a feeling or an orientation of mobility in
the city (Flatley 2008, 7). All the answers were then combined to draw four
maps (extracts from the commentaries were also added to enhance the
visualisation of the results for the final exhibition of the project’s outputs).
This map-making exercise was accompanied by the making of an archive of
oral histories about the pre-war cultural scene in Mostar focusing on
underground arts and music production (more on this in Chapter 4).
This first map refers to the practices of socialisation in pre-war Mostar
(Map 3.1). It records the physical spaces that the sample associates with
positive memories of being together in the city before the war. It is easy to
see how the meeting places recorded on the map were spread throughout the
central area (across the Bulevar ). These spaces are very different in kind;
there is a stadium (that was used both for sporting and music events),
cinemas, cultural centres, clubs, bars, the park with the memorial to the fallen
partisans of War World Two, and even entire sections of streets (especially
those connecting the two main squares in west and east Mostar). While
pointing at the blank map, the respondents shared memories of late summer
nights spent listening to popular bands touring across Yugoslavia (Majke,
Disciplina Kičme, Laibach, Psihomodo Pop, Partibrejkers among those cited
most often). They recalled dancing, singing, and drinking at outdoor festivals
(in Kantarevac, just off the Bulevar), playing records in the facilities of local
communities (mjesne zajedinice), and also celebrating Tito’s birthday with a
grand parade at the Stadium. Many remembered walking up and down
‘Korso ’ (from Musala square in east Mostar to the Bulevar) to look and be
seen, or sitting in the Old Town outside specific venues that catered for their
‘underground’ musical tastes. Looking at the map, the thoroughfare
connecting Musala Square (east Mostar) with Rondo (west Mostar) appears
as a continuous solid line; the streets connecting the two main squares across
the Bulevar—Korzo from Musala Square to the Bulevar and Promenade
Lenin from the Bulevar to Rondo 2 —are recognised as the old social
connectors in the city. These streets are now separated by the Bulevar and the
central ‘neutral’ area, the unofficial dividing line, which creates a decisive—
if immaterial—fracture between the two sides of the city. One respondent
pointed to the fact that different crowds frequented the two sides (separated
by the Bulevar), though this difference was not associated with ethnicity but
rather with age; ‘there were serious and less-serious sides [of this long
walkaway]. The serious side went from Hotel Bristol to the pharmacy [east
Mostar] and it was frequented mostly by older people. The other end—from
the Bulevar to Rondo [west Mostar]—was instead the centre of social life for
young people’ (Abart 2011). Crucially, it is emphasised that ‘all the
happenings’ took place in the streets—open spaces that were felt to be public
and shared among the population. Surely there were infrastructures
facilitating these encounters that were constitutive of social life. Before the
war, Promenade Lenin (the street connecting the Bulevar to Rondo, west
Mostar) was an attractive street where people could stroll, sit on benches, and
hang out. The area, left in disarray by the war, remained desolated for many
years; overgrown vegetation, ruins, aggressive (and illegal) parking, and
garbage bins did not make for inviting surroundings. The destruction and
later neglect of this area quickly erased the memories connected to its
previous role as social connector and it contributed, spatially and
aesthetically, to the production of the central area as the empty space of the
border dividing the two sides of the city. Spanish Square , previously known
as Brotherhood and Unity Square, was the centre of the pre-war long
walkaway where people socialised, but it also became the central stage of
violent conflict, which explains its complete destruction. In 1998, King Juan
Carlos I placed here a monument to commemorate the death of eighteen
Spanish soldiers who were part of the UN peacekeepers troops that
intervened to end the conflict, renaming the square (see also Makaš 2007,
309). Interestingly, all the respondents associated this area with social
mingling. The square, which was dominated by a popular department store,
Hit, offered benches and trees on which to sit and relax. This was the place
chosen by the youth of Mostar for daily gatherings. Some refurbishment of
the square took place with the beginning of the reconstruction of the Old
Gymnasium in 2004, but major works to recreate a liveable public space had
to wait until 2012 (Picture 3.1).
Picture 3.1 Spanish Square before renewal. February 2010. Photo of the author
Map 3.1 Pre-war socialisation practices. Designed by Mela Zuljević for Abart (2011).
Used with permission

As Palmberger discusses, there is much to be said about remembering in a

post-conflict city , because ‘remembering [is] a narrative act of generating
meaning located in the present and directed towards the future…
Remembering and its counterpart, forgetting/silencing, therefore have little to
do with a mere retrospection on the past but also relate to the way one’s
present and future are conceptualised’ (2016, 13). Since the conflict created a
clear temporal (and spatial) fracture in Mostar, the ways people remember
need to be related to their present conditions and their expectations of the
future (Palmberger 2013). Accordingly, the older generations interviewed
here not only associate pre-war Mostar with their youth (often nostalgically)
and with the last years before everything, including their life plans and
trajectories, were disrupted (making the pre-war past almost mythical). They
also attempt to make sense of what happened during the war (and after) by
tracing genealogies of ever-existing and persisting differences among the
population. For instance, the interviewees state that the space of socialisation
(taking the entire area of the city) was very diverse. In fact, people would
socialise within their ‘own crowd’ (raja). Thus, differences among the
population were clear, but as one of the interviewees commented, ‘sjajno smo
funkcionirali’ (we just got along together) (Abart 2011). Overall, the
respondents avoided the idealisation of pre-war social life as lacking
confrontations: ‘not everything was idyllic, God forbid! But there were places
in the city where young people would see each other and interact much more
than today’—says another respondent (Abart 2011). However, as the quote
suggests, differences among the population were negotiated, rather than
causing outright spatial fragmentation. In fact, there were places where a
certain group would prefer to meet and spend time, but there were also places
where everybody would go without (social) restraints. Crucially, when
attempting to make sense of the existing spatial segregation, the respondents
observed that conflict was always present and different groups were created,
but membership to a group was not forced because of ethnic belonging.
Rather, it depended on cultural preferences, social classes, and taste. For
instance, one interviewee states that she did not like the Bulevar in the 80s
and the area around the Stadium in the 90s because they were associated with
‘fancy girls’ (šminkeri) with whom she had nothing to share.
Yet, the most relevant comments must address the pre-war location of
social life around the centre, which is now a no-man’s land. As Simmons
writes, in Mostar like in Sarajevo and other cities, there have always been
neighbourhoods that were predominantly inhabited by one ethnic group, but
in the centres of these cities ‘the various ethnicities commingled, worked
together, and often intermarried’ (2005, 30). The city centre was a vibrant
area that served as meeting places for different groups and it facilitated the
process of encounters and interaction. Talking about the city park , which is
also in this central area just past Spanish Square off Promenade Lenin, one
respondent commented:

They have renovated the park, kids play here now, but almost all other
activities are forbidden. Before the war, teenagers used to go there in the
evenings with their lovers; it was a place to sit with a drink, but now it is
under 24-hour surveillance … what happened then could not be possible
now. (Abart 2011)

And here, it becomes interesting to note how the securitisation and

policing campaigns, advertised as one of the main achievements of the united
administration to improve everyday life in the city (see Chapter 2), are
assessed negatively because of the ways they have intruded into everyday life
to the point of limiting social interactions in public space. While I was living
in Mostar, in summer 2010, I read (quite surprisingly) the news that police
would start prosecuting couples engaging in amorous activities in the city
park at night. I now see the reasons why this became news, reflecting so well
the changing habits of the city.
The map representing post-war infrastructures and practices of
socialisation tells a completely different story (Map 3.2). Even though several
of the pre-war locations still exist, and actively attract people (the stadium,
the Partisan Memorial, and few other venues across the city), the major
change happened in the central area. The area expanding towards east and
west from Spanish Square is no longer the place in which social life takes
place, but became a void that clearly separates the two sides of the city. This
area, which corresponds to the main space of socialisation before the war,
was destroyed and then ‘neutralised’ in the attempt to create a physical border
that could settle the conflict. Here it is worth recalling Coward’s notion of
urbicide as the planned destruction of urban infrastructures that facilitate
encounters in the city (see Chapter 2) as a means of annihilating the very
possibility for heterogeneity to exist. The central area still awaits the
realisation of projects to reinhabit it by recreating a shared space through the
centralisation of administrative units and offices for the reunited city 3 (see
D’Alessio and Gobetti 2009). To associate the possibility of a shared area in
Mostar with the construction of a new administrative headquarter seems as
though the administrators were planning a re-education of citizens to the
multiplication of their identity—to become open to multiculturalism, and a
multiethnic environment—by performing administrative routines (visiting
offices of the public administration). The project is also consistent with the
idea that a sense of the city (or of the state) as united could be constructed by
giving precise rules to follow (according to functionalist models), which
would eventually create a fair environment for all (see Chapter 2). And yet,
how do we account for citizens as individuals rather than functions of the
state? I wonder whether a different scenario could have been imagined, in
which prominence might have been given to recreating meaningful and
emotional relations to the city in order to reframe the present and the past. In
fact, Laketa’s research into the affective bonds that young people create in
Mostar shows clearly that the Bulevar has become ‘a place where affect and
emotion congeal to create the effect of boundary between the two ethnic
entities’ (2017, 12). But also, the space is reappropriated by the few young
people who still socialise among the ethnic divides and who frequent the
Youth Centre Abrašević (just off the Bulevar) and the bar Coco Loco, near
Spanish Square. The central area has become an empty space, which affects
the general patterns of socialisation but, as the next chapter will show,
because of the area’s symbolic value in relation to memories of pre-war
socialisation in Mostar, this space is often reappropriated through cultural and
artistic activities that attempt to bring critical focus and discussion on the
spatial segregation in the city.
Map 3.2 Post-war socialisation practices. Designed by Mela Zuljević for Abart (2011).
Used with permission

Even more prominently, the areas circled as focal points of contemporary

social life in Mostar are clearly far from each other and the centres of the
territories inhabited by each community. Braće Fejića Street in the east of
Mostar and Rondo/Avenija in the west, have the highest concentration of
cafes, restaurants, and clubs in the city—confirming that youth in Mostar
socialise within the two areas separately and with little or no interaction. The
new shopping centres, in west Mostar, and especially the most recently built
Mepas Mall (the biggest so far), attract young people from both sides,
although visiting the mall creates, according to Laketa’s study, anxiety in
some youth from the east (Laketa 2015a, 102–103). And how could this be
different when the educational system is kept rigidly separated across ethno-
national lines? Hromadžić’ ethnography of Mostar Gymnasium, one of the so
called ‘two schools under one roof’ —a contested project initiated by
the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) to bring
pupils attending the Croat and the BiH Federation curricula under the same
‘roof’ yet without studying together (see also Hromadžić 2015a)—shows that
even though teenagers in that school mix, they are aware of the impossibility
of building relationships outside the protected (and heterotopic) environment
of the school bathrooms because they have been fed with narratives of
exclusion and fear, convinced that in the world outside the school there is no
space for them to be together without inconvenience or, even worse,
generating problems that cannot be easily solved.
Two main comments could be made from these observations. First, the
process of rebuilding the city’s infrastructures shaped, and was shaped by, the
conflict and the consequent ethnic polarisation. The central area was
imagined by the International Organisations that intervened to end the war
and reconcile the city’s antagonising communities as ‘neutral’ (Aceska 2016;
D’Alessio and Gobetti 2009; Laketa 2017). They located their offices there,
also symbolically, in order to create space for pre-fabricated reconciliation
practices, from the city centre to both peripheries, forging a physical void
between the communities for the sake of controlling violence. This meant
that, until very recently, the Bulevar and its immediate surroundings were
(and still are in many cases) ruins or abandoned spaces waiting to be assigned
new functions. If prior to the war this area worked as a social connector, now
it stands largely as a no-man’s land, an empty, transitory space. The long-
term vision was for the central area to house all the administrative buildings
of the city, hoping in this way to create a new shared space (since all the
citizens would need to access the same offices for bureaucratic and legal
matters). This imagined ‘shared space’ would not be geared towards
socialising, but rather constructed as a centripetal force in the construction of
a unity citizenry.
Writing in eerily similar terms, Lefebvre notes how:

When an urban square serving as a meeting-place isolated from traffic is

transformed into an intersection or abandoned as a place to meet, city
life is subtly but profoundly changed, sacrificed to that abstract space
where cars circulate like so many atomic particles. (Lefebvre 1991, 312)

Whilst the two communities reorganised their social infrastructures by

building, rebuilding, or assigning new meanings to existing venues in their
own territory, they created new spatial practices that became deeply ingrained
spatial habits (people socialise within the territory of their community). As
the next section will show in greater detail, many of the survey participants
could not fully explain why they do not ‘cross/travel to the other side’.

Mostar, the City That We All Fear

The second set of maps produced within the scopes of Abart’s project
investigates where people feel/felt uncomfortable in the city: the spaces of
fear , danger, and the no-go areas. The question posed was whether there
are/were locations that the participant would not frequent. Among the
suggested reasons was a lack of infrastructure, general discomfort, and fear.
Interestingly, the pre-war map (Map 3.3) shows few clear locations that the
participants associated with drug trafficking, prostitution, dirt, and violence
(illegal activities) or places that were frequented by confrontational groups of
people. Some of the comments show racialised fear—for instance, areas used
by the Roma population were associated with danger (Abart 2011). The
comments gathered from the older generation in relation to spaces of fear
seem to have one common denominator: that they all involved references to
the police and security. For one participant, these sites were fearful because
they hosted illegal activities that called for police intervention, and it was best
to stay away from the police (and the places of illegality). For another
participant, the police were fair and kept the situation under control, so it was
a good sign to see them, but if you did, it signalled dangerous areas. Overall,
Mostar emerges from the memories of the interviewees as a safe city. This
chimes with Palmberger’s account of how the ‘Last Yugoslavs’ (those old
enough to remember life before the war) tend to narrate ‘pre-war BiH as the
“secure past ” while present and future BiH is seen as insecure’ (2013, 19).
This is also because of how they associate pre-war life with a sense of
financial and social security that was completely lost with the war. The
situation changes dramatically when younger generations are asked about
fear and safety in the city.
Map 3.3 Pre-war spaces of fear. Designed by Mela Zuljević for Abart (2011). Used with
permission

The after-war map (Map 3.4) is perhaps the most telling. The map
resulting from accumulating all the provided answers is entirely yellow—the
colour chosen to represent spatial discomfort. The younger respondents did
not think about a bar or a park or crime-ridden area as unwelcoming as it was
for the older generation. Rather, the majority circled an entire ‘side’ of the
city—most likely the one they did not live in. One respondent (referring to
west Mostar) candidly wrote that there is no specific reason for the answer
provided, but rather a sense of reluctance to cross to the other side (‘even
though there is not a specific threat, I prefer not to go to the other side’)
(Abart 2011). Another respondent, confessed: ‘I don’t go to the other (east)
side. I am fearful, but also nothing attracts me there. I know nobody who
goes out there too’ (Abart 2011) bringing attention to how the existence of
parallel institutions and places for socialising result in the impossibility of
getting to know people who are from ‘the other’ side/community (see Laketa
2015b; Hromadžić 2015b).
Map 3.4 Post-war spaces of fear. Designed by Mela Zuljević for Abart (2011). Used with
permission

The above results lead to three considerations. Firstly, in this map,

unpopular areas are defined according to where people socialise, rather than
according to other signifiers, as it was in Map 3.3 (illegal activities, lack of
hygiene, or violence). Thus, spatial discomfort is caused by the
overwhelming presence of people who do not belong to the same ethnic
group as the respondents and it is accentuated in areas where these ‘others’
go to socialise; the processes of inclusion and exclusion are drawn on the
basis of where time is spent and emotional/personal bounds made. Secondly,
the map of contemporary Mostar shows that the entire city is unpopular,
which registers a strong sense of uneasiness among the population that surely
affects mobility, and a sense of ownership and belonging. In fact, younger
people felt uneasy in explaining what they feared about going to ‘the other
side’ and retreated in the comfort offered by the unquestioned representation
of Mostar divided in two halves, one of which is safe and the other to be
avoided (ironically, the majority of young people in Mostar shared this
normalised, even if problematic, understanding of the city). Thirdly, before
the war there were clear voids—unwelcoming spaces linked to criminality or
disorder that were also patrolled by the administration to protect the (good)
citizens of Mostar. After the war, voids are linked to spaces of socialisation
(bars, cafes, clubs, the two centres of social life in east and west Mostar and
also, symptomatically, the entire half where one does not belong) as if
deviance manifested itself in being from a different ethno-national
community.

Everydayness: Flexible Identities, Porous

Borders, and Surviving Mostar
Lefebvre writes that the everyday is a product and, as such, it is primarily
controlled by those who own the means of (space) production (Lefebvre and
Levich 1987, 9). The modern city dweller, in his view, has a passive
experience of cities because the rhythms of the everyday are largely dictated
by needs, duties, and desires that are imposed onto citizens by centralised
forms of power (Lefebvre 1991, 51). And this is where Lefebvre’s theory of
space production becomes revolutionary; if, as Lefebvre suggests, we could
understand how capitalism produces abstract space that renders citizens
passive to its dictates and procedures then we could also interfere with the
mechanisms of its spatial production (to initiate the urban revolution), and in
doing so, urban dwellers could free themselves from the oppressive chains of
capitalist spatial rhythms to propose new modalities of living in the city that
also involve a more direct control of urban production processes (self-
management). Accordingly, the ‘critique of the everyday life is a question of
discovering what must and can change and be transformed… [this] critique
implies possibilities as yet unfulfilled’ (Lefebvre 2008b, 18).

It is in everyday life and starting from everyday life that genuine

creations are achieved, those creations which produce the human and
which men produce as part of the process of becoming human: works of
creativity. These superior activities are born from seeds contained in
everyday practice… The human world is not defined simply by the
historical, by culture, by totality or society as a whole, or by ideological
and political superstructures. It is defined by this intermediate and
mediating level: everyday life. In it most concrete dialectical movements
can be observed… The repetitive part, in the mechanical sense of the
term, and the creative part of the everyday become embroiled in a
permanently reactivated circuit in a way that only dialectical analysis
can perceive. (ibid., 44–45)

Through an ‘endless appeal to what is possible in order to judge the

present and what has been accomplished’ (ibid., 45), the everyday contains
absolute potentials because it is not fully predictable, ‘yet, it still makes
critical differences to our experiences’ (Lorimer 2005, 84). Approaching the
study of the present means to privilege the tension between routinised
rhythms and creative movements that enact change (and here I point to my
understanding of practice as constitutive of the world in its own right). Such
an analysis becomes a way to capture ‘the tension of [the] present tense of
becoming, a not yet enacted moment where we meet and greet ourselves in
the affect that inspires action’ (Dewsbury et al. 2002, 439). This idea of
potential ‘combines temporalities in complex ways. It exists as a presence
within the now that is predicated on an imagined future concertinaed back to
uncover or recognize what presently exists. Potential exists only to the extent
it is found’ (Cooper 2014, 78). Of course, as Lefebvre rightly suggests, the
everyday is both about mindless repetitions that do not favour (or imagine)
social change, and moments of illumination that shed light on alternative
ways of living and being in cities (what is possible); this is the desire that
produces revolutionary difference (Lefebvre 1991, 385).
 Drawing on examples from my experience of living in Mostar, this
section engages with two key and interconnected Lefebvrian concepts,
‘representational space’ and ‘everydayness’.
As argued in Chapter 1, representational space already finds a place
within the moment of representations of space (the conceived). Thus, while
today elite practices are often associated with the dominance of abstract space
—the construction of markets, bureaucratic systemisation, and urban spaces
adequate to leisure/consumption—they are often accompanied by the residual
elements of blood, soil and language, and the ‘shared’ history that articulates
these elements. It is these residual aspects that allow elite hegemony to reach
down into the realm of the everyday, to (partially) colonise its rhythms and
mould its body towards a spatial shape and temporal flow that is conducive to
the reproduction of abstract space. Yet given that the moment of
representational space belongs to the lived experience of the everyday
(Lefebvre 1991, 33, 39–45), it alludes to more than simply the passive
acceptance of dominant codes of conduct, but rather to a multifarious
processes of making the urban by living in the city, reappropriating its
infrastructures, following patterns that are both suggested, imposed, and
legitimised but also creating unexpected dynamics that disrupt—by
reinterpreting—space as it was conceived, designed, and built. The moment
of representational space thus also captures the creativity and excess of urban
living; the emotional and sensual bases of oppositional forces that contest the
dominant representations of space (and some articulations of representational
space, as with the discursive core of ethno-nationalism) and reappropriate
cities to remake them according to people’ needs and aspirations (which are
often neglected or silenced in planners’ and administrators’ agendas).
Importantly, representational space does not always follow rules of cohesion
or coherence, but it is rather produced by dreams, passions, and intuitions that
might as well challenge one’s habitual practices and understandings of the
city. In other words, representational space overlaps physical space and
assigns meaning to it. For instance, people in Mostar frequent certain spaces
(as seen earlier in the post-war socialisation map) because they feel ‘safe’
here having embraced ethno-nationalist discourses that depict members of the
other communities as ‘dangerous’ even when there is little or no evidence for
this. Thus, representational space, assigning meanings, also instructs or alters
spatial practices in cities. In this section, I explore the ways in which
everyday discourses and practices confirm or challenge narratives of ethnic
segregation. In doing so, I wish to reflect upon the representations of Mostar
as ultimately divided by considering the many ways in which citizens of
Mostar disrupt and contest this narrative in their daily life—rendering the
division more complex, less definitive, and much harder to represent in
absolute terms.
By ‘everydayness ’, Lefebvre conceptualises the atmosphere of a city, the
affect produced by the sum, and negotiations, of urban rhythms (Lefebvre
and Levich 1987). Again, the concept of everydayness both organises
passivity or tokenism that preserve the status quo and holds difference and
change. Even though there is a sense that everydayness is made immutable by
sets of routines that determine and shape each single day, it is easy to point to
changes and differences between the experience we have of two consecutive
days that can never be identical. Surely, what ‘changes’ between days does
not (most likely) suggest revolutionary trajectories, and this depends on how
the production of desires has also been hijacked by the capitalist mode of
production whereby the demand for new commodities requires the elicitation
of desire (Lefebvre 1991, 395). For these reasons, Lefebvre argues, some
treat the everyday with impatience—wondering why nothing ever changes or
gets better (Lefebvre and Levich 1987, 11). Instead, he suggests turning our
gaze towards the moves and actions that disrupt the rhythms of the city in
order to appreciate their political potential. In this section, I reflect on the
rhythms, riddles, and spatial and temporal practices that collide in Mostar
with the aim of picturing its complex patterns of everydayness.
Overall, this section wishes two make two separate, yet interconnected,
interventions. On the one hand, I want to explore the micro-movements of the
everyday—what makes each day unique and different from the others—as a
means to trace the potential of difference to produce social change in relation
to ethnic polarisation. I am interested here in the kind of difference that, for
Barthes, ‘requires the displacement that opens up a space of desire’
instructing revolutionary trajectories (Ffrench 2004, 294). On the other hand,
I wish to connote the sense that Mostar is immobile and stagnant through a
dialogue with Berlant’s (2007, 2011) notions of ‘flat affect’ and ‘lateral
agency’ to interpret the pervasive sense of immobility as a sense-making
strategy that aims at survival.

The Vibrancy of Sameness and the Opening to

Difference
When my landlord asked me if I wanted to join him for coffee on a Sunday
morning, I accepted without much thinking. He and his family had been
extremely generous to me; helping me to settle in and navigate the city, and
sharing memories and stories that could contribute to my research. Sitting in
an isolated, tiny café far from the city, I asked what is so special about this
place and I was told that the air here is better than in Mostar. I drank an
espresso, quickly. He suggested I order something more. I said I was fine and
that I had made plans for the rest of the day. The conversation remained quite
superficial, interrupted by long pauses of uncomfortable silence. Then he
invited me to plan a trip together for the next weekend. I declined with a
smile. I said that I was not interested in dating if he was aiming at that.
Becoming somewhat irate, he asked why I accepted his invitation for a
coffee. I stared at him, puzzled. He continued, ‘in Mostar, to go for coffee it’s
not just for coffee!’ In that very moment, I learnt an invaluable lesson about
the social implications of drinking coffee, which is not ‘just coffee’, in
Mostar (see also Hromadžić 2015a, 99–102). When I told this story to my
girlfriends they laughed and said it happened to me just because I was
foreigner and people (men especially) related to me differently. I am still
unsure about their assessment, but certainly coffee must be approached as a
serious affair in this city. To ‘meet up for coffee’ is a major bonding
everyday activity. Cafés are always highly populated and the ratio of café
spaces to the number of inhabitants is surely very high. To go for a coffee is a
way to sit down and catch up with friends, but significantly the café is also
the place where local news is discussed aloud, sports are followed, business
contracts signed, new friendships are made, fights burst out, and romantic
dates arranged. The café is where you go to meet your own crowd, a sort of
second home that signals your belonging to the space and to a certain social
layer of the city. Daily routines crucially materialise in the practise of
drinking coffees, which is why I will expand on the everydayness of Mostar
through coffee encounters.
I started taking a language class in January 2010. My instructor, Branka,
taught English to children in a small Language School in west Mostar, but
she offered to teach me Croatian in the absence of classes for foreigners
(there were not that many in town at the time). She was a very extroverted
woman in her early 20s. The first month, we used our bi-weekly hour to chat
about life, work, family, and friends. I learnt that she had left Mostar when
the war started and relocated with her family to Australia. They returned to
Mostar only three years before we had met and here she completed an
undergraduate degree in Croatian language and literature (at the University of
West Mostar, the only Croat university in BiH). What I remember about her,
after all these years, is her friendly and warm smile. We formed a close bond,
and soon took the habit of going for coffee after class. The first thing I heard
from her is that she would teach me the Croatian language . If this was not
clear enough, Branka emphasised that we were learning Croatian instead of
Bosnian (Serbian was never mentioned) because Croatian grammar and
syntax is more correct. I asked how different these languages are, reporting
that my first teacher, back in London, also from BiH, used to say that
Serbian, Croatian, and Bosnian are very similar. Branka explained
confidently that this is because my former teacher had left before the war and
never went back to BiH. Now the languages had evolved to become very
different, somehow suggesting an almost natural evolution (see also Grbavac
2015; Jozić 2012). After this conversation, we never spoke of this subject
again, but during all the following classes, she invited me to observe and
record on my notebook how differently people ‘where I lived’ (east Mostar)
would say things. For instance, she recommended to ask for ‘hleb’ at the
bakery rather than ‘kruh’ as she would say, somehow compromising her
mission to teach me the better grammar and syntax by coming to terms with
the fact that both words would have allowed me to obtain bread successfully.
On a warm evening of February 2010, after class, I was sitting in one of
the new trendy cafes in Rondo. I was with Branka and, unannounced, the
head of the school decided to join us. The head of the school, Marko, was a
man in his late 40s, stern and very self-confident. He told me that the
language school was not his only occupation and that he was also working at
the university in west Mostar. The conversation began on very general terms
and he seemed genuinely interested to learn more about my research project.
I explained that I was looking at everyday practices and how they were
affected by the management of the city in relation to the ethnic polarisation.
Somehow unexpectedly, he questioned my knowledge of local history. Did I
know that the two sides of the city are very different, culturally? He found
problematic that I wanted to research the city as if it could be one and made
sure I understood how my project was flawed. He told me how Mostar’s
spatial growth and aesthetics powerfully capture the cultural differences
among the two sides and preached to me about the absolute superiority of the
Croats over the Muslims. He went on, explaining that west Mostar looks
better, more modern, and that there are very few signs of the war because of
the attitude of people living here, the Croats, who are proactive and
hardworking. The other side, instead, is a ruin and nothing works because the
people there are lazy. I realised how unprepared I was to interact with
nationalist narratives , and I did not question or challenge his points as
strongly as I could have. Branka sat silent sipping her cappuccino throughout
the conversation. Then, when Marko stated that he feels as if his country
were Croatia and that (his part of) Mostar should not be in BiH, she joined
the conversation adding that, she felt the same. In fact, in her spare time, she
preferred to travel to Split (on the Croatian coast) rather than Sarajevo, which
she found extremely cold and unwelcoming. I never saw the head of the
school again, but I kept meeting with my teacher for coffee.
A few months later, Branka started dating a man from a nearby town,
Ante. They met online and he travelled once a week to Mostar to spend time
with her. On a Saturday night, I was invited for coffee to be introduced to the
new boyfriend. Ante was also in his early 20s, very outgoing, and funny. We
spent the entire evening in a café in Rondo talking about travels and work.
When I announced that I was heading home, Ante asked whether they could
walk with me, and I quickly replied that it was not necessary because I lived
nearby. Unexpectedly, Branka intervened suggesting that they could indeed
come with me and we could take the longer route to my house so as to cross
the Old Bridge . I looked at her, surprised. She must have noticed. She
explained that her boyfriend had never been to the OId Town because she
never went there as she had no friends on the other side, but since I lived on
that side we could all go together. And so we did. We walked to the Old
Town and stood on the top of the bridge, admiring the pretty landscape of the
Ottoman quarter. In fact, I met her walking around the Old Town a few more
times, when she was no longer my teacher but was still living in Mostar. We
of course went for coffee, in her ‘other side’ without even discussing it.
Later that year, Branka left her job at the school (and our weekly
meetings) and became an air stewardess for a Saudi airline. She mentioned it
without much fanfare. She was extremely happy and excited for this new
opportunity that would allow her to travel the world and have a better
income. The fact that the Saudis are Muslim, like the people on the other side
(with all the negative commentaries attached), was never mentioned.
 In summer 2010, I was drinking a coffee with my friend Sonja and we
were talking about university, postgraduate programmes, and how to get
funding to study abroad. She wanted to leave as soon as possible and this
seemed a feasible strategy. While we were discussing funding options, she
told me about her other friend, Marija, who had secured a scholarship from
the city of Mostar, though not without struggling.
Marija was also woman in her late 20s, who was born and grew up in
Mostar. She is ‘mixed’ (her parents have different ethnicities) and, maybe
because of this, she always states that she belongs to ‘the others’.
Nevertheless, Marija went to a Croat school where she befriended people
who became openly nationalist (a fact that seemed extremely important to
Sonja). Of course, Sonja concluded, it must be difficult to be ‘mixed’ in
Mostar today, but also, because of that, Marija could count on an ethnically
diverse group of friends. While she was already studying at the university,
the city of Mostar started granting scholarships to exceptional students, and
so she decided to apply. At the office of the municipality, Marija was asked
to declare her ethnicity because the city must allocate the awards according to
ethno-national quotas (as for everything else). She confessed to the woman at
the office that she did not want to reply because of her mixed ethnic
background. Considering options available to her because of her parents’
ethnicities, the officer suggested putting ‘Serb’ on the application. Serbs are
now very few in Mostar and she would have had a much better chance to get
the money as a Serb with less competition. And that was how, filling in a
scholarship application, Marija, who always refuses to declare belonging to
one ethnicity, became a Serb (and obtained the scholarship). Of course, Sonja
noted the absurdity of Mostar’s administration, but what can you do;
‘really?’—she asked me, frustrated. You cannot afford to stick to the ‘other’
(not declaring your nationality) if money is involved (and you need it badly).
Coffees gave rhythm to my days in Mostar after I settled in, and I started
to create routines that I became very attached to: my working days drinking
coffee with Mela, coffee breaks when Amila finished working at the
university, and often quick coffees with Francesca during her lunch breaks.
On Wednesdays, I had coffee with my language teacher; on Sundays with the
lady at the trafika (newspaper stand) near my first flat—a larger-than-life
woman who spoke perfect Italian and liked to tell me stories from the time
she spent in the country where I was born. And it is also because of these
repetitive coffee dates that Mostar’s everydayness materialised as a pervasive
sense of immobility; the sense that nothing changed, ever. I had the feeling
that we were always enveloped in an atmosphere of immobility that was
sticky and pervasive. At the beginning of my journey, observing that nothing
seemed to have changed (progressed?) since my first visit in 2005, I judged
this negatively and took it as a sign of neglect and political, social, and
personal withdrawal (Carabelli 2013)—I was approaching the everyday with
impatience. Living in Mostar for a year made me realise instead that much
was going on, bubbling under the surface. But it was as if there were a
permanent layer of ash covering a smouldering pile of embers. This is
because the everyday is not an abstract concept, but rather one that takes
shape and acquires meaning through experience. Accordingly, it was only by
participating in the everyday of Mostar that I could explore its concealed
dynamics. In this way:

In production, it is not only products which are produced and

reproduced, but also social groups and their relations and elements;
members, goods, and objects disappear while groups persist or crumble
away, remaining active, playing their games and developing their
tactics…beneath an apparent immobility, analysis discovers a hidden
mobility. Beneath the superficial immobility, it discovers stabilities,
self-regulations, structures and factors of balance. Beneath the overall
unity, it discovers diversities, and beneath the multiplicity of
appearances, it finds totality. (Lefebvre 2008b, 238)

Later during the fieldwork, I came to discover this ‘hidden mobility’, by

observing both the inconsistencies of ethno-national belonging and the work
of many activists working in the city. Yet, in becoming part of this grassroots
network, I also realised how difficult it was to gain visibility—to make space
for supra-ethnic logics in a city whose routines cement lines of ethnic
division. And this is why many accounts of Mostar describe a hopeless place,
stuck in political stagnancy. But this does not do justice to a city whose
stillness is nevertheless vibrant, nor to existing tensions between the
adherence and refusal of ethnic politics. In fact, the slow rhythm of this town,
where change seems an ever-present impossibility, hides and reveals many
different attempts to reinterpret, digest, and remake sectarian divisions.
Ethno-national categories and boundaries are constantly (re)negotiated in
everyday life. As these short vignettes illustrate, the always contested terrain
of representational space, with the notion of belonging to one of the three
ethnic groups, certainly exists, as it affects the ways in which citizens of
Mostar perceive and describe themselves. Laketa (2017) argues that through
repetitions and routines the space of division sticks to people in Mostar.
However, as these same stories also exemplify, ethno-nationality is not an all-
encompassing definition. Rather, it is used as a marker (it mobilises)
according to the specifics of the situation. Imagined boundaries between
communities are surely cemented but also reinterpreted, crossed, and
challenged. To a significant extent, these challenges and tensions become part
and parcel of being a citizen of Mostar. In fact, the former division and the
consociational power system facilitate a representation of the state as a single
entity constituted by different people and, accordingly, citizens often describe
themselves in this manner. The movements to disrupt the stickiness of the
division could be interpreted as spontaneous, rather than planned, but
spontaneity ‘is not always creative…with every risk it takes. It makes
mistakes, and it fails more frequently than rational prognostication and
calculation’ (Lefebvre 2008b, 218). Here, Lefebvre reflects on the notion of
spontaneity as lacking concrete political strategy; for him ‘metamorphosis
implies a plan and a policy’ (ibid., 57). Thus, quotidian disruptions to
entrenched divisions, such as the one I presented, feed into a state of
ambiguity , which is a ‘sociological category, a lived situation which is
constituted from contradictions which have been stifled, blunted and
unnoticed (unrecognised) as such… [and] is a condition offered to an
individual by a group’ (ibid., 220). In this way, the general state of
ambiguity, as a socially imposed (yet always imperfect and unstable)
container of society’s ‘permanent conflict’ (ibid.) itself provides the
conditions of possibility for the spontaneous emergence of social agency that
takes hold of this ambiguous situation in order to further exacerbate its
internal contradictions. Once these currents of spontaneous (disruptive)
action achieve sufficient weight, ‘the ambiguity of the past and of the present
becomes explicit, whereas when it was in control it was “unconscious”
(unrecognized), hidden under representations and symbols which maintained
and disguised it’ (ibid.).
The notion of ambiguity captures exactly the feelings emerging from the
vignettes I have presented; none of the characters of my stories disrupt
divisive practices through coordinated political strategy (a conscious
commitment). Rather, these moves were produced by contingencies (a visit
from a boyfriend from outside the city, for instance) and did not shape new
(counter-)practices. Even in the case of Marija, whose political project is to
challenge urban divisions, to become Serb was possible because of the
ambiguity produced by a field of multi-ethnic contestation. Ambiguity thus
creates a space in which it is possible to be indecisive; to subscribe to, and at
the same time abstain from, engaging with the rhythms of the divided city.
Such a fluid state of being, informed by forces of contradiction, explains how
the two communities of Mostar are not solid facts (like their representation),
but rather potentials (Brubaker 2002). As such, the ambiguous foundation of
ethnicisation must be explored as a political, social, and cultural process,
which entails the possibility that the formation of ethnic-homogeneous and
antagonistic groups is not a necessary condition, but rather the product of ‘a
balance of power between classes and fractions of classes, as between the
spaces they occupy’ (Lefebvre 1991, 281, emphasis in original). Ethnicity
should be taken as a category that constitutes a potential for group-formation.
4 In this respect, the crystallisation of antagonistic ethnic groups in Mostar
could be replaced by the understanding of group polarisation as often (but not
always) resulting from contingent strategies. For instance, ethno-national
categories become extremely flexible depending on what’s on one’s plate:
jobs, scholarships, money, and welfare. And yet, because this ambiguity does
not generate or support a political project (the overt countering of ethno-
nationalism), the immanent potential for a destabilisation of established and
well-rehearsed discourses of ‘national belonging’ is often downplayed. As
Kolind aptly summarises, these are not independent variables:

Trans-ethnic narod [people, nation] is not separable form the ethnic

tensions from which it materialised, to which it eventually refers, and
with which it stays intertwined. Therefore, one has to avoid an
inclination to celebrate forms of sociality that are potential rather than
actual, indeterminate and fleeting rather than routinized and reliable.
And yet paying attention to discourses of trans-ethnic narod is vital;
trans-ethnic narod does not suppress the ethnic meaning of narod but it
questions it and at times ‘renders it less important’. (Kolind 2007, 131)

As Hromadžić also suggests, ‘these ordinary people’s manoeuvrings

bring into sharp relief complex political subjectivities, uneasy relationships,
resistances to classification and relation, and enactment of political agency in
contemporary BiH’ (2013, 270), which becomes crucial not only in assessing
post-conflict and post-reunification life in Mostar but also to conceptualise
how spaces of resistance could materialise in a deeply divided society. As
Laketa suggests, engaging with the performativity of everyday life
contributes to the ‘project of destabilising the recalcitrant forces of ethno-
national identity in BiH [to show that] resistance to identify is always
possible; and finally, that both the suturing and unravelling of identification
must be accomplished in and through social space’ (2017, 3–4). In the next
section, I continue this discussion by reflecting on how to conceptualise the
dialectical movement between ‘ambiguity’ and ‘decision’ or how to imagine
and account for political agency when resistance is understood through
spontaneous (rather than politically planned) acts of subversion.

Space, Time, and Affect: Everydayness and

the Possibility of Transformation
For Lefebvre, the individual who ‘rejects uncomfortable questions…. evades
problems’ (Lefebvre 2008b, 58). My uncomfortable questions are: how do
we make sense of the representation of Mostar as permanently divided if the
everyday proves more fluid than expected? What does it mean for Mostar to
be divided? But also, considering the lack of organised political opposition to
the logics of the divided city, can we talk of (imagine) resistance as the act of
disengaging from organised political strategy?
Reading Spinoza with Hardt, it could be said that a position of immobility
is characteristic of the individual who cannot to be affected. It implies
detachment, and the refusal to participate in transformational possibilities.
This is because ‘the field of the affects often looks like a briar patch,
impassable, and sometimes minefield’ (Hardt 2015, 220). Surely, to engage
with transformational movements countering ethno-nationalism in Mostar
resonates well with the metaphor of the minefield. Lefebvre hints to the same
condition with the notion of the affective nucleus, which reveals itself as a
layer of the everyday. This is ‘the sphere of non-adaption, vague rejections
and unrecognised voids, of hesitations and misunderstandings. When we
reach this sphere, we discover the dramatic situation of the individual in
society’ (Lefebvre 2008b, 59). This attitude ‘is emptied of all expressivity
which might be compromising’ (ibid., 60). Both Hardt’s and Lefebvre’s
analyses attend, affectively, to the condition of being ‘still’ as the act of
reproducing, mechanically, rhythms, logics, and routines that have been
imposed without opening up to the possibility of being affected by other ways
of being in the city. This immobility has often been accounted for as political
withdrawal and passivity in Mostar, but it could also reveal the
disengagement from the politics of the divided city because alternatives are
stubbornly elusive. Lefebvre suggests that creativity and imagination could
feed new imaginaries that accelerate the desire for social change (Lefebvre
1991, 422). But, as Berlant has noticed, the possibility to imagine change is
also a privilege:

The fear of an optimism for social transformation is not just the fear of
people who have an investment in the norms of the world, it’s also the
fear of the people for whom the world isn’t working and who have a
political commitment to being otherwise, but for whom that kind of
excitement is unbearable. (Davis and Sarlin 2011)

Lefebvre conceptualises this as the ‘silence of the users’, which ‘might be

explained as follows: consumers sense that the slightest shift on their part can
have boundless consequences, that the whole order (or mode of production)
weighing down upon them will be seriously affected by the slightest
movements on their part’ (Lefebvre 1991, 383). As seen in Chapter 2, the
permanent political crisis in Mostar creates a sense of social immobility that
stretches the present with the intent of preserving a safe space, the space in
which people have created new ways of being normal ‘as a ground of
dependable life, a life that does not have to keep being reinvented’ (Berlant
2011, 169). The disruptions to ethno-nationalism here presented do not
‘reinvent’ modes of being in the city. Rather, they challenge existing
boundaries (whilst respecting and reproducing them) to test how far one can
go. Life in Mostar does not favour ‘flourishment’ (Berlant 2011), but through
adjustments and repetitions a new (post-war) normalcy has now been
reached. Making change to the achieved balance (though dysfunctional)
creates disruptions that could worsen the situation. Thus, immobility becomes
a survival strategy , and in this way agency becomes ‘lateral’ and must be
understood as ‘the activity of maintenance, not making, fantasy without
grandiosity, sentence without full intentionality, inconsistency without
shattering, embodying alongside embodiment’ (Berlant 2011, 114). Berlant
conceptualises lateral agency affectively as resulting in the under-
performativity of emotions, the lack of passion or enthusiasm for the creation
of a different future (cf. Duschinsky and Wilson 2015). This ‘flat’ affect
characterises the agency of survivors. She proposes to look at flat affect as a
mode of detachment (to avoid being affected) that resists dominant affective
investments and structures that organise everyday life (Berlant 2015b). In
other words, resistance might not be found only in political projects whose
intents are revolutionary and overtly transformative, but also in projects that
aim for survival in the divided city without being affected by it. With this, I
mean life orientations that favour immobility (the refusal to be affected) as a
preventive action that obstructs the logics of the divided city and allow for
fluidity and border crossing to exist alongside nationalist narratives, symbols,
and practices. The immobility caused by the aspiration of not being affected
in Mostar reveals not only the attitude of refusing to engage with radical
politics (radically nationalist and radically anti-nationalist), but also that of
disengaging with everything else to preserve that space of ambiguity that
allows inconsistency to exist, and to take advantage of the benefits produced
by attaching and detaching oneself from multiple projects (the enactment of
ethnic boundaries because it provides money as in the case of Marija, the
surpassing of the border if it provides a pleasant experience as in the case of
Branka and Ante).
Flat affect defeats the expectation of drama as the default answer to crisis
and it accounts for the (unexpected) disengagement from events that should
be significant for the subject, but are processed as irrelevant, often producing
sarcastic remarks. When the city was without an administration for over a
year, in 2008–2009, the councillors met seventeen times without reaching an
agreement, postponing the discussion to the future (see Chapter 2).
Construction and reconstruction projects have been halted and left to rot; the
city had no financial budget approved; the OHR issued warnings to the local
politicians urging them to solve the protracted political impasse—but there
seems to be no viable solution in sight. Quite remarkably, those with jobs in
the public administration continued working without receiving salaries (at
least until the summer of 2010 when they went on a short strike). Surely
conversations I often heard addressed the permanent crisis as the generator of
major concrete problems—lack of money, difficulties in obtaining permits or
certificates, navigating a city where decisions could not be made, no jobs—
but I rarely perceived anger or resentment. Rather, there was a quiet
acceptance of the consequences of living in an exceptional (dysfunctional)
city. Humour and sarcasm were largely used as coping mechanisms, to
diffuse the tension with jokes about the impossibility to understand how
Mostar became such a surreal place, where nothing could work. And this
was, indeed, a way of resisting by showing a critical attitude towards the
dysfunctionality of the city whilst, at the same time, strategically adapting to
its inconsistencies. ‘Hey… It’s Mostar!’—said with a mocking smile—served
to silence many conversations about current political problems that seemed
unsolvable as well as to create a critical distance between one’s everyday life
and everything else that no longer made sense. ‘It’s Mostar!’ addressed and
explained that, in this city, the notion of ‘normalcy’ has been forever
compromised.
But then, if subjects withdraw from active forms of politics, and stand
still, how can they repair what does not work, or change it altogether? How
do we think about the possibility of a life that can flourish, which is the aim
of Berlant’s theorising of the social? Where is the motor of transformation in
society? Hardt , reading Spinoza , argues that ‘the subject is more affected by
the world than effective in it’ (2015). This means that the subject does not
have—alone—the power to produce change, but rather that change comes
from the individual’s increased power to be affected (Berlant 2015a, 275). Or
as Hardt puts it:

We should conceive being affected by others as a virtue. The most

powerful is not the one least affected but, on the contrary, the one
affected the most and in the most ways. The more you are affected in
many ways, the more alive you are, and to the extent you cease to be
affected, to the extent you close off from the world, that much you die.
(Hardt 2015, 217)

Of course, being affected in the divided city might involve both joining
nationalist projects as well as the opposite. Following Lefebvre, social
change needs directionality:

The transformation of society presupposes a collective management of

space founded on the permanent participation of the ‘interested parties’,
with their multiple, varied and even contradictory interests… It is an
orientation… We are concerned with what might be called a ‘sense’: an
 organ that perceives, a direction that may be conceived, and a directly
lived movement progressing towards the horizon. (Lefebvre 1991, 423)

While never entirely breaking with the Marxist approach to analysing

social reality, Lefebvre’s preferred path to human emancipation was to be
found not within the ‘hidden abodes’ of production relations, nor within a
spectral incantation of (working class) liberatory agency, but within the
quotidien of everyday life, where the general themes of alienation particular
to late capitalism were most palpable, and ‘was therefore the proper scene for
a true revolution that would expand human potentialities’ (Kolakowski 1981,
482). Lefebvre was concerned more with creating an animating utopia as a
goad to political practice (see Katznelson 1992, 100–101), which was not
well received within some Marxist circles. Castells, for instance commented
on the abstract theorisation of the urban revolution as ill fated, arguing that
Lefebvre’s focus on space as a means of change obscured the agency of
social practice (Castells 1983; Stanek 2011, 51; Katznelson 1992, 100–103).
According to Castells, Lefebvre’s appreciation of creativity and spontaneity
deprives the revolution of a clear plan, thus impeding the development of a
political strategy. In contrast, I propose to revisit Lefebvre’s notion that
human agency is rooted in imagination in order to explore the political
potential of being affected as the motor of social change by discussing the
associated notion of ‘desire’. Even if Marx did not substantially engage with
a reflection on creative practice, he notes in Capital that:

[a] spider conducts operations that resemble those of a weaver, and a bee
puts to shame many an architect in the construction of her cells. But
what distinguishes the worst of architects from the best of bees is this,
that the architect raises his structure in imagination before he erects it in
reality. (2007, 198)

The importance of the architect is not in her technical skills that enable
them to build a safe and functional environment (whatever the purpose). The
importance of the architect must be seen in their capacity to imagine how
space could be constructed in relation to the moment in which they live.
Marx is not particularly interested in architecture or in a spatial analysis of
the urban landscape as a means to understanding class struggle. Yet, a point
could be made in favour of acknowledging the importance of imagination in
the formation of urban space. The crucial point is to understand how
creativity could facilitate such a process and what this entails. I believe the
answer must draw on two main points. Firstly, creativity should be
understood as a process and, more specifically, a social practice. Secondly,
creativity is nurtured by the contradictions of reality; social contradiction
produces desires for change.
Accordingly, political projects of social change could be then associated
with individuals’ openings towards desire (to be affected by desire) even if
this creates an unbalance that may threaten (normalised) life. According to
Lefebvre, disillusionment (which is consistent with the attitude of withdrawal
that prevents being affected) empties space; ‘nothing is allowed and nothing
is forbidden’ (1991, 97)—like spaces of ambiguity. But also, Lefebvre states
that space unleashes the desire for the urban revolution. Drawing on Spinoza
and Berlant , I read this as the subject’s wilful movement towards being
affected that embraces the desire for social change. This desire , according to
Lefebvre, ‘precedes, needs and goes beyond them, is the yeast that causes this
rather lifeless dough to rise. The resulting movement prevents stagnation and
cannot help but produce difference ’ (1991, 395). Thus, by allowing desire to
affect one’s life, the individual can step out from immobility (ambiguity) to
follow more radical political paths. According to Spinoza, joy (being affected
by joy, becoming joyful) signifies the power to act, which resonates with
Lefebvre’s notion of jouissance (roughly translated as ‘pleasure’,
‘enjoyment’); the affect that, centring on the body and its rhythms,
reappropriates the body (Lefebvre 2014) and produces differential space
(conducive of social change). In the space of jouissance, ‘the body behaves as
a total body, breaking out of the temporal and spatial shell developed in
response to labour, to the division of labour, to the localisation of work’, and,
indeed, ethno-national abstractions (Lefebvre 1991, 384). This is the festival,
which is not a social occasion (a one-off event to attend), but rather the
material outburst of a continuous creative engagement with the present aimed
at identifying and producing the potential for change (Lefebvre 2008a, 201–
227). It is the embodiment of social struggle turned towards an imagining of
how difference could be fostered in the interstices of a homogenising reality.
And the concept of spontaneity should be reframed accordingly. To be
spontaneous is not to be taken as an act of thoughtless improvisation. Rather,
spontaneity must be sought and cultivated as a counter-practice to the
homogenising tendency in capitalist society. In fact, being spontaneous
acknowledges the capacity to claim an independence of thinking, acting, and
living: ‘it is impossible to seize the everyday as such if we accept it, in
‘living’ it passively, without taking a step back” (Lefebvre; cited in Elden
2004, 113). In this sense, I point to the existence of two emerging
movements, both contained in the everyday of Mostar. On the one hand, there
is resistance , which entails stillness rather than action. This is because it
resists everything—favouring ambiguity—as a matter of survival. Immobility
is thus produced both as part of political planning (the elites that freeze the
possibility of reconciliation) and as an everyday practice that emerges from
the difficulties of navigating the dysfunctional city. On the other hand, there
is the project of the urban revolution, which implies movements towards the
goal of social change. Even if I conceive immobility as a form of resistance,
this does not mean that resistance is necessarily supportive of more
revolutionary projects. Rather, I suggest that immobility is shaped by
multiple and contradictory political projects, which are part and parcel of the
dynamics of the divided city. As such, immobility could incubate movements
towards social change when individuals are moved by desires (are affected)
that require to take a definitive position and the embracing of radical political
projects, which is the subject of the next chapter.

Conclusion
Tracing the existence of change within the perceived immobility of Mostar’s
everydayness demands reconsideration of the micro-politics of the everyday.
Citizens of Mostar seem to reproduce divisions in and through their spatial
practices. In fact, they tend to socialise (thus creating social infrastructures)
within the two clearly separate halves of the city. For Lefebvre, ‘when groups
degenerate (become isolated) the agon disappears … [and] the everyday
lapses into triviality’ (Lefebvre 2008b, 135). It becomes a series of tactical
moves (strategies to survival) and ‘reality lying between the level where there
are no more actions, where reality is stagnating and coagulating, and where
triviality dominates’ (ibid.). The sense of fluidity that resists and undoes
ethno-national categories could be explained both as a strategy to survival
(lateral agency) and as the resistance to embrace abstract categories that
could endanger life (both the category of ethno-nationalism and anti-
nationalism). As such, the sense of belonging to one of the ethno-national
groups (and to a section of the city) is acknowledged but constantly
renegotiated. Citizens of Mostar are fully aware of the division and they deal
with this peculiar trait of their city depending on everyday contingencies, e.g.
their ethno-national belonging is called in force or downplayed according to
circumstances that often contain no internal consistency. If asked to mark on
a map where they feel comfortable to go, they tend to draw circles within
their side. If asked where they do not go, they tend to answer by pointing to
the other side. The divisive spatial practices are rooted in the everyday and
reproduce urban division. Yet despite socialising within two separate areas,
many people also move freely across the city. Further, as the presented
portraits have showed, ethno-national identities are not solid, nor all
encompassing. Rather, they are flexible and versatile. This flexibility is not
merely an established, absolute fact (which would thereby do away with the
problem of division altogether), rather, it is the manifestation of
representational space being ‘the space’ of everyday life. In other words, ‘it
may be directional, situational or relational, because it is essentially
qualitative, fluid and dynamic’ (Lefebvre, cited in Merrifield 1993, 523) and
it shows how the capacity to be affected moves people, changing their sense-
making paradigms. Though repetition creates patterns and rhythms that come
to represent the city, individual movements end up challenging urban
stereotypes (cf. Barthes 1977, 296). In the case of Mostar, to focus on
individual experiences means to disrupt the stereotype of the city as a place
of permanent division and conflict, which also means to reflect on the limits
of methodologies that investigate ‘divided cities’ by attending to ethno-
national communities as homogeneous entities in which all members of
society act and behave consistently with the group’s ideologies. Contrary to
research that draws largely on interviews with leaders or members of ethnic
communities (and their various cultural, political or religious groups), the
choice to engage with the ways in which ethno-nationalist understandings are
challenged in quotidian practices sheds light on moments of inter-ethnic
collaborations or co-existence that reframe representations of the status quo
(the permanent division). In this way, we could also draw on emotions,
affects, and personal and spatial attachments to the urban to question
critically issues of citizenship and a sense of belonging outside ethno-national
quandaries. ‘Since we don’t know how things will turn out’, writes Tsing
(2005, 269), ‘it’s worth attending to states of emergence and emergency.
Here hope and despair huddle together, sometimes dependent on the same
technologies. Urgency springs up in ruined landscapes; utopian dreams, and
crass ambitious, are formed.’ Ultimately, this chapter suggests a readdressing
of future research about ‘divided cities’ that facilitates an understanding of
how citizens manage situations of permanent crisis that well represent their
everydayness. This would shed light not only on the complications and limits
of living in a deeply divided society but also the strategies to survive,
navigate, and even flourish that subvert the narrative of these cities as places
of negativity where nothing can change or move forward.

Notes

1. Importantly, opting out from the usual requirement to declare one’s

ethnic membership is one of Abart’s interventions to disrupt normalised
ways to self-identify in Mostar. This will be discussed in more detail in
the next chapter.

2. I intentionally use the names Rondo and Promenade Lenin despite their
new post-war denominations for two main reasons. First of all, these
interviews recollect memories from the Socialist time when these were
the names. Second, according to my experience, people in Mostar still
address these areas with the Socialist names rather than the new post-war
denominations of Trg Hrvatskih Velikana (Square of Croatian Heroes)—
formerly Rondo and Nikola Šubić Zrinski (after a Croatian general who
served during the Austro-Hungarian Empire)—formerly Promenade
Lenin. However, it should be kept in mind that the post-war names are
the official ones and as such they result in official documents (including
city maps). On the political implications of renaming streets and public
places in Banja Luka, Mostar, and Sarajevo, see Palmberger (2012).

3. This project has been somehow interrupted by an incident occurred in

2012 during the official opening of the New City Hall on the Bulevar.
The administrative offices of the city were to occupy an old elementary
school that, destroyed during the war, remained as a ruin for more than a
decade. Shortly before the inauguration, in March 2012, a monument
dedicated to the Croat soldiers appeared in the front garden. Bosniak
politicians reacted by boycotting the opening ceremony and, weeks later,
an unauthorised monument to Bosniak veterans appeared in the same
 location. Mayor Bešlić and other Croat politicians condemned the
confrontational act. This shows clearly that the attempt to neutralise the
central zone by transferring here administrative units remains
problematic until the ethno-national conflict is settled.

4. Brubaker conducted his fieldwork in the city of Cluj; a contested city that
hosts a mixed population of Romanian and Hungarian speakers. After
seven years of researching, Brubaker came to the conclusion that citizens
of Cluj have been largely indifferent to the nationalist claims made in
their names and their everyday lives are far from been instructed by
ideological commitments. This is not to say that in Cluj there are not real
divisions or tensions, but rather to argue that ethnic groups come into
being as violent and proactively engage in conflicts only due to
contingencies.

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© The Author(s) 2018
Giulia Carabelli, The Divided City and the Grassroots, The Contemporary City,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-7778-4_4

4. Grassroots Movements and the

Production of (Other) Space(s)
Giulia Carabelli1
(1) Max Planck Institute for the Study of Ethnic and Religious Diversity,
Göttingen, Germany

Giulia Carabelli
Email: carabelli@mmg.mpg.de

Civil Society, Cultural Projects, and the

(Potential) Dissolution of Divisions
The previous chapter explored the everyday of Mostar to trace ways in which
citizens disrupt polarising practices due to contingencies, needs, and survival
strategies with the intent to complicate the prevailing narrative of Mostar’s
polarisation as an all-encompassing, immutable fact. The representation of
the city as a territory cut in half, in which two ethnic communities live
separately, and where identities are constructed accordingly, is inconsistent
with the much more complex dynamics of ethnic formation and
destabilisation discussed in the last chapter. I accounted for these quotidian
practices as disturbances and openings that create difference in the divided
city and I argued that they allow for the possibility to think that social
transformation is possible.
In this chapter, I will continue investigating practices that challenge the
dynamics of the divided city by looking more closely at grassroots activism .
In particular, I am interested in the initiatives promoted by groups that do not
identify with ethno-national categories and whose urban imaginaries—as
ways of envisioning what a city might become—differ radically from that of
an ethnically divided city. In other words, I analyse the agency of those
groups that have abandoned the space of ‘ambiguity’ in favour of a
transformative approach to social space (see Chapter 3). Specifically, I
engage with Lefebvre’s notion of art as the revolutionary tool that contains
the potential for substantial change in cities, and the idea of the festival as the
space for political struggle, in order to locate and critically discuss the roles
of art and cultural practices in Mostar.
This chapter therefore engages with the aims, visions, and projects of
Abart Mostar, a platform for art production and urban research active in the
city from 2008 to 2014, to explore the ways in which their practice
challenged the production of Mostar’s spatial divisions. This chapter
illustrates how Abart’s cultural initiatives created heterotopic spaces based
on the radical rejection of ethno-national paradigms. As such, I consider the
possibility of protesting the divided city—by refusing to engage with ethno-
national categories—as a means of initiating new social ventures that rely on
the reappropriation of space. My interest in art practice is quite different from
that of other scholars who have researched cultural production as a means of
reconciliation (Kappler 2014; Kuftinec 1998; O’Rawe and Phelan 2016;
Simmons 2005) in the sense that I am not looking at how cultural production
facilitate and supports the creation of inter-ethnic spaces for dialogue. These
projects, for all their admirable qualities in supporting reconciliation
practices, do not disrupt the logics of the divided city because they are
designed to bring together individuals who are identified and classed as
members of ethnic communities. Instead, this chapter accounts for art
practice as a political tool to reappropriate space whilst countering the logics
of ethno-national segregation.
This chapter begins with a review of scholarly approaches to the study of
civil society in deeply contested states and in BiH. This critical reading
serves to locate my main case study, Abart, within existing debates on the
tasks, struggles, and potential of non-state actors in the process of transition
from conflict to peace. The remainder of the chapter discusses in detail two
projects developed by Abart in Mostar from 2009 to 2012 to reflect on three
related issues; the role of radical politics in Mostar, the value of art-based
projects in reappropriating space and giving new meaning to it, and the
potential and limits of grassroots activism in deeply divided societies.

Civil Society and Conflict Resolution in

Bosnia and Herzegovina , a Review
Much has been written about civil society in post-war BiH, assessing the
work of organisations whose goal is to influence public discourse and public
policy. These are mainly Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs) that
identify as a ‘non-partisan potential tool that may help in peace
implementation and long-term democratic consolidation’ (Keil and Perry
2015, 22). Researchers interested in NGOs frame the discussion broadly
within the peacebuilding literature because of the roles civil society groups
had covered within the national processes of reconciliation, democratisation,
and state-building, often producing controversial assessments (Kappler
2014). On the one hand, starting from the end of the conflict, international
donors (including states and private entities) have invested great financial and
intellectual resources to instruct, guide, and support local organisations. Their
assumption was that a strong civil society would have favoured dissent,
counter-discourses, and resistance to ethnic politics, which could have
informed a much-needed dialogue between the antagonistic communities, and
thus contribute critically to post-war reconciliation, conflict resolution, and
state-building processes. On the other hand, authors who conducted
participatory research (e.g. Jeffrey 2013) have challenged the donors’
working assumptions by showing that NGO workers had to negotiate national
and international agendas in order to gain political legitimacy, often at the
expenses of being the independent voice they were supposed to be. For
instance, Jeffrey observes that NGOs in Brčko tended to design their
programmes and activities according to the requests of international bodies,
and formed their specific goals around the technical vocabularies of donors in
order to gain their trust and thus financial support. As a result, NGOs often
renounced their role as voices of dissent as a basic survival strategy. Further,
and because of such mechanisms, local and international NGOs had started to
compete, rather than collaborate, to secure existing (and diminishing) funds.
This produced a widespread unwillingness among these actors to share
information and ideas, preventing the formation of alliances among groups
working in the same field of action, which may well have been beneficial to
the formation of a strong counter-discourse against, for instance, ethnic
politics and nationalisms (Evans-Kent and Bleiker 2003). In other words,
NGO workers had to learn new skills to advance their social and symbolic
capital, and to become more competitive on the international ‘markets’ of
assistance. Perry observes that these organisations have been often treated as
agencies that deliver services and, as such, their activities have been assessed
against the achievement of milestones or deliverables that cannot capture or
do justice to the difficulties of democratisation or peacebuilding processes
(Perry 2015, 15–40). As a consequence, financial support was made available
mostly to projects whose goals could be reached in the short-term, often
without consideration of the fact that only long-term interventions could shift
ossified stereotypes instructed by nationalist logics of exclusion.
The rapid deployment of funds has been so generous that an important
number of associations could be established (often without much control),
while NGO workers have often been associated with corruption which harms
the bonds of trust among local stakeholders. Sheftel, who explores the
adoption of dark humour as a means to produce counter-memories in
Sarajevo, reports a joke that perfectly captures this problem, ‘You know what
is a good way to get rich in this country? Start an NGO. All of a sudden, EU
and other international people, they will just give you money, and you can do
whatever you want with it!’ (Sheftel 2011, 156). If there has always been a
strong interest in the study and support of civil society in BiH, a more
specific focus on the activities, potentials, and struggles of cultural
organisations is more recent. Culture became the chosen platform from where
meaningful bonds between people were created, and from which values such
as peace, tolerance, and justice could be taught. In this way, ‘community
based arts processes can be an especially effective tool to bring together
identity groups through sharing common cultural experiences, raising
awareness about past suffering, and engaging communities in creative
projects’ (Zelizer 2003, 62). Clearly, as Kappler highlights, this attitude is
also problematic in the sense that it assumes that local culture is ‘passive,
backward and in need of change towards a culture of peace’ (Kappler 2014,
58).
Overall, the existing literature seems to criticise the idea that empowering
civil society could unproblematically lead to a more democratic political
environment. I also believe that we should revisit the notion of civil society,
which is far from politically and socially homogeneous. Indeed, ethno-
national divisions, much like class domination in general, would have
saliency if they did not reach down into the field of civil society itself. 1 In
this case, strengthening civil society could equally obstruct peace and
reconciliation processes. Because ethno-national divisions are entrenched in
the political system, other scholars, such as Fagan (2006), for example, point
towards how the transformative potential of the civil society is limited by the
persisting state infrastructures that have been designed to keep ethnic
communities divided. Clearly, as he argues, if the supposedly temporary
Constitution of BiH is not reformed, 2 little will be done to challenge ethnic
identities and ethnic politics (see also Moore 2013, 77). Thus, ethno-national
identity will continue to be ‘a bargaining chip that can be used as leverage’
(Björkdhal and Gusic 2016, 93). Furthermore:

It seems as though all aspects of Bosnia’s internationally-led post-

conflict transition hinge on civil society development. There is an
implicit assumption that a vibrant sector of local advocacy networks can
entrench democratic values, heal the wounds of ethnic conflict, and
facilitate economic growth, bringing an end to the international
administration of Bosnia. In other words, a point in which the Bosnian
state is able to be left to rule without the international community …
[yet] the capacity of civil society to realise radical transformation is
contingent upon more fundamental institutional and political change.
(Fagan 2006, 100–101)

To be sure, constitutional reforms as well as the much-debated electoral

reform in Mostar are needed to reframe the understandings and positionalities
of ethnic groups, mainly because these reforms could challenge and
delegitimise the ethnocratic system currently in place (see Chapter 1). Yet, it
is also important to consider that these changes alone will not reset
entrenched practices of segregation that became part and parcel of the
everyday. This is why it becomes crucial to look at initiatives and practices
that already subvert ethno-nationalist logics, and in so doing create spaces of
inclusion vis-à-vis the possibility of transformative social change. In this
way, I embrace Hardt’s call for ‘a practical political theory [that] begin[s]
where people are, and really existing people are primarily filled, so to speak,
by passions’ (Hardt 2015, 216). For instance, in 2005 a group of citizens who
lost their pre-war homes in Šantić Street in Mostar mobilised with the
purpose of putting onto the political agenda the reconstruction of their former
apartment blocks. This was an ethnically heterogeneous mix of families (29
Croat, 42 Bosniak and 23 Serb) who came together:

By fusing the power of the administrative category of Internally

Displayed Persons (IDPs) with an appeal to the notion of belonging to a
local community, the protest movement developed an integrative power
superseding particularistic as well as ethno-national divisions; based on
this inner cohesion it was then able to successfully confront the city
administration with its demands for reconstruction. Such prolonged
engagement and close contact with city authorities, as well as an
increased level of interaction and cooperation within the protest group,
opens up a new ground for the members’ self-construction as citizens of
Mostar with legitimate political claims. (Vetters 2007, 203)

This is not an isolated case, as the far larger protests of 2013 and 2014
demonstrate. In 2013, citizens occupied streets and squares to save the life of
a new-born who needed urgent medical care but could not obtain travel
documents because of the political impasse in Parliament, which could not
agree on how to assign new Identification Numbers, and thus suspending the
entire process as a momentary solution (Armakolas and Maksimovic 2013;
Keil and Moore 2014). In 2014, citizens mobilised again to protest against
the malfunctioning of the state, corruption, and unemployment, by initiating
self-managed groups whose intent was to propose viable and far-reaching
state reforms (Arsenijević 2014; Eminagić 2014; Murtagh 2016, Kurtović
and Hromadžić 2017). These are movements that transcend ethnic politics
and create networks of solidarities across the country that attempt to reframe
public discourses (Eminagić 2017). In other words, this chapter draws on an
understanding of the state as the ‘congealed’ site of civil society’s contending
groups and power capacities. If we suggest that ‘civil society’ is merely an
adjunct of the state, and whose ‘capacity’ to act is ultimately ‘contingent’ on
the transformation of state structures, then we are simply implying that the
prime mover in society is the state, rendering civil society actors merely
passive recipients of state-led initiatives. Instead, this chapter attends to the
ways in which the historically specific fragmentation process of Mostarian
society into antagonistic ethnic groups provided a powerful determination
over the city administration’s composition; external intervention merely
ossified these divisions to the point of constitutional legality, even if
subsequently reversed to little effect (cf. Robinson and Pobrić 2006). But the
very fact that civil society is itself composed of multiple groups of
contestations (Keil and Perry 2015, 22), mobilised around a plethora of
identities and goals, means that the final composition of the state is never a
settled matter and that civil society actors can create change that relationally
affect administrative infrastructures.

OKC Abrašević: More Than Two Decades of

Radical Activism in Mostar
Approaching the study of civil society actors in Mostar presents some of the
problematics of researching groups that operate at the national level or in
other cities across the country. Much of the critique of these groups regarding
their dependency from international funds or their slow progress in achieving
substantial milestones in the reconciliation process could be applied to
Mostar’s NGOs. An in-depth account of the interplay of civil society actors
in Mostar would necessarily need to account for the various fractures
between groups that may support one or the other ethno-national
communities, alongside groups that favour inter-ethnic dialogue. In this
chapter, I focus on organisations—Abart in particular—that resist ethno-
nationalist logics in Mostar through the reappropriation of urban space via art
practices. This supports a broader discussion on resistance as a spatial
practice by assessing the potential and limits of such initiatives.
Abart was a platform for art production and urban research founded in
2008 in Mostar. Anja Bogojević, Amila Puzić, and Mela Žuljević are the
three women behind the project. Since the beginning, the group found space
within the premises of the OKC Abrašević (Youth Cultural Centre Abrašević
; hereafter Abrašević), thus the name Ab(rašević)art. In fact, Abart became
one of the groups engaging with the wider project of the Youth Cultural
Centre in expanding its scope.
Abrašević existed during the socialist era as Radničko Kulturno-
Umjetničko Društvo (RKUD) (Workers’ Cultural-Artistic Society) where
folk music was played while people gathered after working hours. The centre
was one of many in the former Yugoslavia named after the poet Kosta
Abrašević (1879–1898), whose artistic work celebrated socialist ideas. The
centre’s premises were almost completely destroyed during the war due to its
position in the middle of the battlefield (the Bulevar). After the war, in 2002,
a group of local activists, artists, and international NGOs gathered on the
centre’s ruins to claim a space in which young people would be provided
with possibilities to be creative, and to sponsor intellectual freedom. A year
later, the owners of RKUD Abrašević donated the space to the newly formed
youth group, with the City Council granting official possession to the group.
Thanks to international support (Pro-Helvetia, German Embassy, and the
Spanish Government), the centre was partially reconstructed, and by August
2005 had officially registered as an NGO. It now consists of a café, a multi-
purpose concert hall, and several shipping containers (donated by the
Foundation In Defence of our Future) used as offices (see also Forde 2016,
474–476).
Abrašević is often described as a special place in Mostar. It is the only
cultural centre that vocally refuses to be identified along ethno-national lines.
The centre is a politically engaged actor that works towards the reunification
of the city by critically engaging with the legacy of war and post-war
dynamics. Abrašević’s activists form, in Mostar, a community-other in the
sense that they take a stand against divisive and nationalist logics in order to
reclaim a (political) space from which to operate: ‘In our space there is room
for the promotion of various social and cultural movements, [for the
development of] different thoughts about the world and our local community,
to engage with polemics, discussions and to sustain dialogue’ (Abrašević
Manifesto). Further, ‘our duty is extremely important because we are directly
involved in actions willing to articulate alternatives for a more democratic
decision-making process. We work towards changing the current
unsustainable situation and to raise awareness of, and oppose, segregation,
nationalisms, fascist and racist political attitudes’ (Abrašević Manifesto). The
centre has attained visibility within and outside of Mostar by organising
concerts, reading groups, theatre performances, exhibitions, and various
trainings in the fields of music and media activism. In particular, the centre
speaks through its news portal (www.​abrasmedia.​info), which helps to
promote their critical stands (see also Laketa 2016, 670–671). Laketa (2017)
writes that, among the young people she met, the few who have friends from
both sides tend to gather here. Hromadžić identifies the centre as the place in
which young people from mixed marriages meet, ‘protected by the mixing
friendly center’, which, she reports, does not please ‘numerous Mostarians’
who view it suspiciously (2015, 148–149). More specifically on this topic,
Matejčić (2009; cited in Hromadžić 2015, 149), writes, ‘you enter Abrašević
as if entering a marked space, as if you are going to the meeting of some
despised sect, so that you have to check carefully before you sneak inside…
[there are] generally suspicious types who want to revive “brotherhood and
unity”’. As with many other close-knit clubs, Abrašević might look
intimidating in the sense the ‘strangeness’ it evokes in the eyes of some may
itself convey a form of exclusion. In this way, Abrašević is also a place of
marginalisation. In the wider space of the city and social dynamics, it does
not attract many people (although it is very popular among foreigner
travellers). Yet this marginality is strongly felt as more than a site of
deprivation but rather as a site of radical possibility (cf. hooks 2004).
Abrašević is part of several networks of similarly engaged cultural actors
in the region of former Yugoslavia and it is also known internationally thanks
to the (mainly) international donors that financially support the existence of
the centre (see also Kappler 2014, 173–174). Since 2003, it has worked as an
umbrella organisation for the associations working within its premises. 3 In
fact, the various partner groups apply for funding and keep their financial
accounts through Abrašević, which also provides a working and meeting
space.
Clearly, Abrašević is politically positioned in the spectrum of left-wing
politics. The refusal of ethno-nationally managed politics has to be
appreciated as the active engagement with (broadly) socialist ideals. Here, I
met anarchists, socialists, and revolutionaries, but also people who are not
interested in politics but meet here because it is a non-ethnic (exclusionary)
space. As an example, while I was in Mostar, the Antifa Festival was hosted
by the centre, which gathered antifascist groups from all over Europe—not
without tensions in the city.
Kappler describes Abrašević as a place of nostalgia, where ‘Yugoslav
holidays are still celebrated… this is not limited to a nostalgic and passive
consideration of the past, but it represents an attempt to deal with the past in
its intersections with the present and future’ (2012, 216–217). For instance,
she explains how the centre is still frequented by elder groups of people, thus
creating a space in which cross-generational encounters are made possible.
Hence, the centre provides (and creates) a space for the past (elders) to meet
the present (youth), and to explore ‘the benefits of the past as they may be
used to creatively construct the present and the future on the one hand, or
deconstructing those elements of history that impede the construction of the
present and the future on the other hand’ (ibid., 217). It could be said that the
politics of the centre critically engage with nostalgia as a reflective tool. It is
not the kind of nostalgia typical of post-revolutionary moments, when—after
upsetting history—there is a felt desire for returning to the normalcy of the
past (Boym 2001, 49) but rather the aspiration to ‘mediating the passage of
time’ itself (ibid.). In fact, ‘reflective nostalgia ’ collects fragmented
memories and displaces them to forge affective bonds with the past, often in
ironic and humorous ways. In Abrašević, the celebrations of Yugoslav
festivities recreate bonds with ‘the idea of Yugoslavia’, which is ‘[the]
example of how a shared vision, based on ethnic and linguistic proximity and
inspired by a united purpose, could bring together cultural, religious and
regional differences to create a single, united polity’ (Djokic and Ker-Lindsay
2010, 1). Thus, the celebrations of the Day of Youth, or the Day of Workers,
become a route to celebrating the togetherness of a (lost) time when (where)
people were able to negotiate their differences and share, rather than be
separate.
To be sure, many in Abrašević are too young to remember what
Yugoslavia was, or what it meant to live ‘as a Yugoslavian’ at the time, but
this is exactly the reason behind their commitment to the Yugo-idea(l).
Palmberger captures this tension by comparing the stories of two women in
Mostar, both asked to elaborate on the significance of Yugoslavia. There is
an important age difference between her interviewees; the first spent her
childhood and adolescence in Yugoslavia, while the second was born shortly
before its collapse. While the older woman is nostalgic of the carefree years
of her youth, the other employs nostalgia to express her political views;
‘nostalgia for Yugoslavia is a tool for overcoming the troubled relationship
between Bosniaks, Croats, and Serbs in her country. She uses memories of
Yugoslavia and a good co-existence as a “guiding star” for the future’
(Palmberger 2008, 366). The younger woman is able to select from the past
what she thinks could contribute to a better future—the possibility of being
peacefully together—whereas the first woman’s memories are grounded in
her own past—lost and distant. Lindstrom, who also explores the categories
of restorative and reflective nostalgia in Yugoslavia, comes to similar
conclusions: ‘the audience for these more reflective incarnations of
Yugonostalgia is largely made up of young people; a generation who came of
age when Yugoslavia was disintegrating’ (Lindstrom 2005, 241). To
remember and celebrate Yugoslavia becomes the way to commemorate the
(idealised) past where peace and tolerance were still possible, but it is also a
way to articulate the desire for a different future. In fact, the future is
constructed upon ideals of tolerance, peace, togetherness, commonality,
solidarity, and mutual understanding that are foundational to Yugonostalgia.
In this sense, nostalgia becomes a critical tool to envision a different future
(and fight for it).
While living in Mostar, I spent the majority of my days observing and
interacting with people in Abrašević. The fact that my data comes from
engaging with such a distinctive layer of the population certainly requires
further critical reflections. I should clarify that the group of people I am
referring to does not represent a statistically relevant sample for the
population of Mostar, and therefore should be acknowledged as such. While I
frequented the centre (2009–2010), I could identify around 30 people forming
the stable crowd gathering here daily. The centre can host over 300 people
but this happens only on special occasions such as for music concerts. In a
sense, the number of events the centre promotes is even more astonishing
considering the small size of the core team of organisers; in the year of my
fieldwork (2010) there were more than 100 events from movie nights to book
launches, concerts, art exhibitions, and stand-up comedy nights.
I certainly developed more than an academic interest in Abart and the
activities implemented by Abrašević. There are several reasons for the
personal attachment I felt towards the centre. I was moved (affected) by the
unrelenting passion shown by these politically engaged actors, especially in a
city where political engagement is controversial and politics equated with
corruption. I observed their constant willingness to impose themselves as an
alternative voice, and I joined their efforts (in only the small way I could),
driven by my personal commitment towards urban justice. The exposure to
everyday conversations and practices among this segment of the population
made me conscious of the necessity to shine a light on their presence in
Mostar and to account for their operative aspects both to understand how they
interact with divisive practices, as well as to explore the reasons why they fail
to attain more visibility. I strongly believe that their numerical inferiority is
balanced by their highly vocal engagement—especially in a city where silent
immobility becomes normalised. More generally, it is the guiding principle of
this book to single out moments of disruptions, which in their own terms are
creating spaces of difference. Thus, the fact that I am exploring quasi-
invisible or less visible actors is consistent with the idea of challenging the
dominant ‘visibility’ of Mostar as a divided city. Yet, my attachment to the
centre also complicates the discussion of the material I have gathered and
produced. My participation in Abart’s activities went beyond more
accustomed participant observations in the sense that my presence was not
that of a spectator, but of an actor (cf. Carabelli and Deiana 2017). I co-
authored projects and reports, I proactively discussed future strategies for the
group, and I participated in the production of written material to accompany
exhibitions. I am aware of the everyday battles, the tensions, and the
difficulties encountered while these projects were taking shape. I was part of
countless negotiations and mediations between what we imagined could be
possible and what we could actually do.

The Festival of Arts in Divided Cities

As a platform, Abart wanted to produce new research about Mostar that could
inform creative projects that (spatially) reappropriated the city. In the
previous chapter, I discussed how the everyday contains multiple and
contradictory forces, and how:

To study the everyday is to bring its confusion into the light of day and
into language; it is to make its latent conflicts apparent, and thus to burst
them asunder. It is therefore both theory and practice, critique and
action. Critique of everyday life encompasses a decision and precipitates
it, the most general and the most revolutionary of them all, the decision
to render ambiguities unbearable, and to metamorphose what seems to
be most unchangeable in mankind because it lacks precise contours.
(Lefebvre 2008, 226)

This could read as Abart’s manifesto. Abart’s research projects wanted to

bring attention to how the facts of the urban division downplayed other
processes that were equally important. Abart’s practice wished to use
creativity to explore the complexities of the city so that it could be given back
to the citizens (rather than fragmented among antagonising groups).

We will point to the fact that there are various forms of ‘borders’ that
divide the city in physical and in spiritual ways. Besides the obvious
 division on the national and religious basis, we will point to divisions
within the ‘homogeneous nationalist constructions’, which are
dissolving under the influence of new neo-liberal ideologies, so they can
be further manipulated for profit interests. We will try to improvise
architectural and artistic solutions – bridges on land – which can act as
non-conflict passages between the parts of the city, and which are more
essential today than the reconstructed bridges over the river Neretva.
(Application for funding to the European Cultural Fund for the Festival
of Arts in Divided Cities, 2009)

The project Festival of Arts in Divided Cities was Abart ’s first

internationally sponsored event at Abrašević, which provided a wide
visibility to the project platform. It started in August 2009 and received
financial assistance from the European Cultural Fund (ECF). The idea was to
engage with artists and researchers from other divided cities to better
understand how art practice is challenged by the contested nature of their
urban settings. After the first exhibition, illustrating the modes of divisions in
Beirut, Berlin, Kosovska Mitrovica, and Mostar (hometowns of the
participating artists and researchers), the project consisted of two main
events. One exhibition with local artists, and one internationally designed
open air festival.
For the art exhibition, Interspace—I am there, there where I am not
(December 2009), Abart invited three artists from BiH to comment on the
theme of borders and divisions. Among the sculptural pieces presented,
Sinancević recreated the space of a living room by assembling abandoned
furniture. Before the exhibition opened, the artist had cut each wooden piece
into half so that, despite the inviting atmosphere of the living room, the
fractures inflicted on the sofas and chairs made it impossible to sit and relax
(Fig. 4.1)—a metaphor for everyday life in ethno-nationally divided cities
where, despite the end of the war, people cannot settle and ‘relax’. But also, it
conveyed a strong comment on the uselessness of infrastructures that do not
work because they remain (politically) fractured.
Fig. 4.1 Demis Sinancević (2009). Photo by the author

The exhibition space attracted mainly actors from the local cultural scene
(intellectuals and artists) who were convinced by and appreciated the
metaphorical values of such interventions. The local media were invited and
they also reported about the opening with positive or neutral comments.
Surely, despite advertising the event widely across the city, public interest
was limited. By setting up the exhibition in Abrašević, Abart wanted to
strengthen the profile of the centre as a cultural actor in Mostar, yet such an
exhibition needed a venue that was supportive of anti-nationalist discourses,
which the city significantly lacked. To be sure, Abart was never interested in
attracting big crowds, but rather in gathering and reinforcing bonds among
people who already refuse ethno-national logics. In this sense, this exhibition
did not seek to become a transformative space or a platform to educate or to
convince that the ethnic segregation adversely affects the city, but rather to
forge a meeting point for the existing (small) community of people in Mostar
who do not oblige ethnic politics.
Later in spring, the international group of artists and cultural actors 4
participating in the project gathered in Mostar to design and produce a week-
end long festival, the Festival of arts in divided cities (14–17 April, 2010).
This time, the activities planned took place both indoors (in Abrašević) and in
public space, including outdoor games (for instance a gigantic version of
Twister in Spanish Square) and a walking tour.

Lažne Priče iz Historije Mostara (False Stories

from Mostar’s History )
Abart ’s members designed a walking tour to present an alternative version of
Mostar’s history. Existing guided tours have selected key monuments such as
the Old Bridge and the Old Town, the Catholic Church and Cathedral, the
Orthodox Church, the Bulevar, the statue of Bruce Lee in the city park, and
the Partisan cemetery among the focal points that serve to introduce the city.
Tourists are brought to these monuments to get a glimpse of how the city
changed through the conflict and its existing division. Abart’s tour guided the
convened crowd across the city to unexpected monuments; there were sites
under construction, shelled buildings, new and ruined department stores, and
streets. The selected sites were not aesthetically pleasing nor known for their
historical importance. Rather, they were chosen because they could tell
another story about Mostar. They did not engage with the pre- and post-war
city to explore ethno-national dynamics. Rather, through these sites, Abart
pointed to the complex, socio-political present of the city: the process of
privatising public space after the collapse of socialism that is never accounted
for in main political debates, the illegal construction sites that reflect on how
corruption became part of the post-war rebuilding process, and the contested
legacy of international interventions in the contemporary city. Each
monument’s story was narrated through allegories, which sounded absolutely
surreal, but at the same time (and indirectly) targeted real issues and
formulated critical assessments of the city. The stories written for each
monument were engraved in aluminium plaques and glued, on site, with a
small ceremony (see Fig. 4.2). For instance, participants were taken to one of
the new shopping centres—Piramida (Pyramid)—where we heard this story,

The role of this pyramid represents the final decisive step in the
evolution of the Third Capitalist Dynasty in the Valley of Neretva. […]
It provides a connection between the private owner and the eternal
cosmic order through a direct connection with the supreme deity of
 Stock Market. (Abart 2010, 42)

Fig. 4.2 Aluminium plaque left at the Piramida Shopping Centre. Photo by the author

The department store was addressed as a pyramid, the monument-tomb of

a capitalist monarch who created a powerful connection between Mostar (the
city of river Neretva) and the global market. The clear invective was directed
against rampant neo-liberalism and the ways in which the introduction of the
market economy changed the urban fabric of the city. In fact, within Mostar
—a partially destroyed and medium-sized city with high levels of
unemployment—there are seven new shopping malls (the seventh, Mepas
Mall, was inaugurated in April 2012 and brought to Mostar its first
McDonald’s fast-food outlet).
Another chosen site was the so-called Staklena Banka (Glass Bank): a
heavily damaged building dangerously overlooking Spanish Square. This
building—now also a favourite spot of street and graffiti artists—became a
monument designed by Hollywood actor Steven Seagal and commissioned by
the Spanish Knight De Sade for the United Spanish Emirates on the
Mostarian Archipelago. In this case, the story sarcastically referred to how
this square, known under socialism as Brotherhood and Unity square, was
renamed ‘Spanish’ after King Juan Carlos I of Spain consecrated a monument
to commemorate the loss of Spanish soldiers who intervened to end the
conflict. The decision to rename the square was never discussed, but it was
rather imposed by the Spanish Embassy who promised in exchange to take
care of its reconstruction. Quite tellingly, the collapsing glass bank
overlooking the square became the monument to the (failing) international
intervention.
The aim of the tour was twofold. On the one hand, the tour reflected on
the selective nature of storytelling and how mainstream representations of
Mostar always emphasise the facts and genealogies of the divided city but
rarely assess other interconnected economic, political, and social processes
that inform its conflicts. The tour leaders were showing how the entire city is
struggling with the inconsistencies and contradictions of the post-war
economic transition, incidentally highlighting what brings the city together:
its problems. The tour erased the usual characters of Mostar’s stories such as
the war, the ethno-national groups, and the territorial division to expose how
ethno-national tensions and diatribes have also been manipulated to hide and
silence other problems such as the difficult transition to a market economy. 5
But also, the fantasy level in which stories took shape allowed for the authors
to express their critiques outside the public/political arena. They played with
names, and architectural and global history to recreate bizarre stories, which
became (temporarily) true for the audience. The very authority of the
storyteller was being questioned—who has the right to validate history?—and
how the writing of history becomes a contentious issue in contested cities
such as Mostar and the other cities within the project. But also, the stories
required the audience to be vigilant and ready to filter what they had heard in
order to read between the lines and to decipher hidden contents. In this sense,
the tour had an educational value because it aimed to shape critical discourse
that transcended ethnic boundaries. Surely, those less acquainted with
Mostar’s contemporary politics needed additional explanations to interpret
the allegories, but locals quickly translated the sarcastic interventions. In
other words, the walking tour reappropriated the city to create a space in
which critical discussion about the present and the future of Mostar could
take place, by pointing out that discourses against nationalist and divisive
practices not only create fractures in the city but also prevent citizens from
coming together to reflect on issues that affect them all.
Interestingly, despite not having permission to intervene in these public
and private spaces, there was no incident with the police. On the contrary,
when approached by security officers patrolling the private space of the
shopping centre Piramida, they seemed more curious than hostile and quickly
left with a festival leaflet having possibly assumed that an art intervention is
nothing harmful. I am unsure whether the security guards read through the
leaflet or what they made of it. Certainly, the fact that nobody stopped the
walking tour from gluing aluminium plaques on private and public walls was
strange to me, but not for the locals who seemed confident in the fact that
nobody would care. In fact, art interventions would be perceived as
innocuous; behind the idea of engaging with art as a tool of change, there was
for Abart the intuition that to discuss politics through art would not be
perceived as politics at all, but ‘simply’ art. Thus, this space of creativity
would have allowed making more radical political statements without
entering the (proper) arena of politicians (unapproachable, corrupted, and
distant).

Re-animating the City: The Ephemeral (and

Contradictory) Art of Festivals
The main goal of the festival at large was to reanimate the city. The
organisers felt that the cultural life of Mostar was moribund, and that the
festival (and the initiative in general) may reinvigorate urban life. People
could experience something different and playful. Yet, as opposed to many
contemporary urban festivals, this one had a sour political twist engraved in
the dispirited title: Festival of Arts in Divided Cities. It is certainly
uncommon to gather and celebrate the contested nature of cities, especially in
consideration of their associated violence. Indeed, the playful reunion wanted
to celebrate the possibility for these cities to imagine a different future, as
well as contemplate the potential of art as a tool to support such change. Yet
the choice of hosting a festival could be seen as problematic for two main
reasons. Firstly, urban festivals became part of what Lefebvre called the
commodification of leisure on the global scale (Lefebvre 1991, 383).
Secondly, festivals are ephemeral in nature; how do they (if at all) effectively
contribute to social change?
Lefebvre reflects on how leisure-spaces might appear free from the
control of the established order, constituting counter-spaces that are liberated
from the burdens of daily duties and commitments (1991, 383). In reality, this
illusion is crafted by the state itself (and its bureaucratic apparatus) to
reinforce its hegemonic power. Evidence for this more critical stand could be
found in the proliferation of festivals as instrumental to urban regeneration
processes worldwide. As Quinn observes (2005, 927), festivals have been
burgeoning since the 1980s to accompany processes of urban renewal and
gentrification. Ultimately, festivals became a way to boost flagging
economies and to create jobs within the field of culture, rather than creating
moments of disruption that reflect upon radical change.
In post-conflict areas, the promotion of cultural initiatives has been
widely embraced by international funding bodies as a way to support the
process of reconciliation, democracy building, and the transition to a market
economy (see Kappler 2014). For two years from February 2010, I had been
actively involved in the process of fundraising for Abart’s projects, and I
could tell how donors always emphasised the role of culture as a viable way
to create jobs, to boost the economy, and ‘celebrate the culture of minority
groups’. For instance, the calls for application I had processed 6 always
included specific requirements for potential projects that provide training
which could help the targeted group find employment in the cultural sector,
or to develop activities capable of fitting into wider (national and
international) cultural schemes that might lead to yet further funding and
become sustainable. From this perspective, art initiatives and cultural events
were imagined as ways to create profits, to support cultural actors, and
accompany them in the period of transition to a market economy. In contrast,
Abart believed in developing projects capable of sharpening analytical and
critical tools. Working in the cultural sector meant, for Abart, doing critical
research that engaged with the present in order to produce a space from
which one can think about a different future. It was an intellectual activity
rather than a business. The Festival of Art in Divided Cities was not meant to
sell, or accumulate profit. Rather, it was organised to have fun. The final tour,
for instance, presented ridiculous stories that made the participants laugh.
Lefebvre writes about peasant festivals to describe an exemplar of a possible
future free from alienation, which resonates well with Abart’s Festival:

Peasant celebrations tightened social links and at the same time gave
rein to all the desires which have been pent up by the discipline and the
necessities of everyday work. In celebrating, each member of the
community went beyond himself, so to speak, and in one fell swoop
drew all that was energetic, pleasurable and possible from nature, food,
social life and his own body and mind. (Lefebvre 2008, 202)

The Festival urged people to break free from their everyday, which means
their understandings of Mostar’s dynamics, divisions, and politics. The
Festival produced a different space within the routinised quotidian; a platform
from which to experience new rhythms, where to pause, to listen, and to
reflect upon the problematic present beyond nationalist narratives. But also,
and importantly, it was a space to have fun together, to meet and mingle, love
and celebrate the uniqueness of Mostar (even if this uniqueness means often
dysfunctionality). The group of wandering participants materialised the
heterotopic attempt to counter the normalised production of space by
allowing time and space to form a critical front. The semi-fictional nature of
the stories told testified to the multiplicity of readings that Mostar holds. It
created a vibrant and joyful atmosphere where to find new sites of dwelling,
where to re-engage with collective and personal memories to map the city
and revealing it in new ways.
Talking about war-related dark humour in Sarajevo, Sheftel writes how
humour could be considered as political action: ‘humour is a way of
remembering and representing the past in a subversive manner; it offers an
alternative mnemonic paradigm that resists the ethnically divisive historical
narratives that plague the region’ (2011, 147). Humour is a way to produce,
discursively, counter-narratives of truth as well as avoid ‘open discussions…
[that are] dangerous and unproductive, compelling Bosnians to find new
ways to communicate’ (ibid., 149). In this case, jokes seemed to make more
sense than factual history. For instance, the group paused in Spanish Square
to pose a plaque on the poster announcing the construction of what-should-be
the Croatian National Theatre in Mostar. Why would Mostar have a Croatian
National Theatre? And how to make sense of the reterritorialisation of Mostar
according to ethno-national groups’ competition over space? Even if answers
could be figured—the ethnicisation of politics, the Dayton Peace
Agreements, the Division of Mostar—these are not fully satisfying answers
when attempting to make sense of the city’s war and post-war dynamics. As
such, sarcasm signals the breakdown of a system of symbolic sense-making
that needs restructuring, like in Mostar.
The Festival was the first event organised by Abart in public spaces.
Certainly, it introduced the platform to the city. Yet, if the long-term goal was
to create a different future and to defeat nationalist-induced urban
polarisation, how was a four-day festival supposed to contribute to this goal
with all of its temporal and spatial limitations? The event was consciously
designed to be ephemeral, to reanimate the city for a long weekend. Yet, as
such it could only gather a limited number of people for a short period of
time.
After the tour the crowd dispersed and by the end of the day none of the
plaques were left in place. Only the participants knew what happened during
the tour and—partially—those who stole its material evidence. The small
crowd was made of Abart’s supporters and partner-artists from other divided
cities (around thirty to forty people in total). From time to time, passers-by
stopped to listen and asked for explanations, but nobody joined the group
until the end of the tour. There are several interconnected factors to discuss
here in relation to public participation. Surely, the walking tour attracted,
again, people who were already familiar and supportive of Abart’s work. By
walking across the city and performing in public spaces, the tour gathered
people who joined spontaneously but did not seem interested in continuing
the tour. Those who stopped and listened to the stories laughed and walked
away. Few asked what was going on, curious and inquisitive. There was no
strategy for attracting people or communicating the goals of the tour. Rather
this was an experiment to assess what a walking crowd actually do in Mostar.
It became clear that people are well versed in sarcasm, that a crowd of young
people disseminating aluminium plaques is not viewed as a threat, but also
that such an activity might require further explanations and preparations in
order to become more inclusive.

(Re) collecting Mostar —Abart 2010–2011

Parallel to these events, the Abart team continued to plan for the future—like
all NGOs, Abart needed financial support. I was not part of the first
application round to fund the Festival of Arts in Divided Cities project but I
became well aware of the tensions within the group when plans for future
activities were made. There was no money for cultural projects in Mostar or
BiH (at that time even the National Museum in Sarajevo had been closed).
The only option was to continue fundraising internationally. Surely, there
were less money available for BiH than the previous decade, but there were
possibilities to explore. Abart had to negotiate internally between adopting
the NGO vocabulary and style to become competitive at the national level, or
else refuse to enter the ‘NGO national context’ and simply close down. This
discussion was never exhausted and, later, became one of the reasons why
Abart slowly ceased its activities in Mostar.
In 2010, preparing an application for a special funding opportunity for
cultural activities in BiH within the framework of the Culture for
Understanding project, sponsored by the Millennium Development Goals
Fund (MDG-F) , 7 the Abart team (myself included) came to learn the
meanings behind the multiple indicators of ‘social improvement’,
‘milestones’, ‘budgeting’, ‘indicators of success’, and ‘transparency’. We
mastered the new vocabulary by reviewing successful bids from other
cultural projects and strategised our goals to become more appealing
according to the donors’ explicit interests and goals in BiH. This meant
deradicalising our funding proposal from anything that might disturb
approved directives for peace-building; our cultural project needed to show
how we supported peace and reconciliation, and how the initiative could
foster a productive dialogue within the divided communities of Mostar. We
needed to find indicators that proved that such an ambitious target could be
met within twelve months. Specifically, we needed to quantify peace-
building by suggesting ‘how many’ people of each group we could gather
and what meaningful activities they could engage with to develop mutual
understandings. We needed to show that our project was sustainable so that
more funds could be raised for follow-up projects from other donors and to
maximise impact. We engaged in this process with humour, and this was
what convinced us that we could survive the fundraising period without
compromising our radical stands. Sarcasm got us through months of intensive
research and drafting. Having finally succeeded in our efforts, and obtaining
funds from the MDG-F, we began (Re)collecting Mostar—the project that
best represents Abart to this day.
(Re) collecting Mostar started officially in October 2010 with a call sent
to students from both universities in Mostar to come and collaborate with
Abart on a new urban project. The open call for participation was an adopted
strategy to enlarge the circle of Abart’s followers. Indeed, because Abart
worked within the premises of a Youth Cultural Centre, to involve students
was consistent with the main goals of Abrašević. In general, the new
initiative aimed to further Abart’s investigation into the status and usage of
public spaces 8 in Mostar. In particular, the project wanted to look at the
relationship between public space and public memories, and at the ways in
which memory and forgetting relate to the usage/neglect of (public) space.
(Re)collecting Mostar refers to the process of reassembling memories of the
city by recuperating moments and experiences that challenge the current
division. By collecting material artefacts and immaterial memories of the pre-
war city, Abart wanted to reflect on how along with the silencing of stories
about pre-war Mostar’s shared social life went the neglect of those spaces
that facilitated and supported socialisation practices in the city. Thus,
memory was understood as ‘a fundamental aspect of becoming… Memories
are like embers, for they retain a trace of fire’ (Jones 2011, 875). Abart
wanted to reignite that fire, as a ‘key wellspring of agency, practice/habit,
creativity and imagination, and thus of the potential of the performative
moment’ (ibid., 875–876)
An initial survey and related interviews revealed that the area connecting
Musala square in east Mostar to Rondo in west Mostar, crossing the Bulevar
at Spanish square, was the pre-war catalyst of social encounters before the
war (see Chapter 3). This section of the city became the central focus of the
project because it challenged existing representations of Mostar, which
always account for the city’s east and west sides—usually depicted in
antagonistic terms. Instead, the area under scrutiny was connecting two main
squares (and social nodes) in east and west Mostar revitalising the memories
of this area as a major public space.
 The project included four research periods (archival research and the
gathering of oral histories related to this section) each followed by one artistic
intervention in public space that related to the research process. The idea was
to share with an invited artist the main outcomes of the ongoing research to
design ad hoc performances in public space. The site-specific art works
would share the produced knowledge with the wider public (by reinterpreting
it) in order to create a joyful moment (and space) to reflect upon the
(problematic) present of Mostar. In this sense, the recollection of memories
‘not only informs/enables the performative moment, there is a creative
exchange between the two’ (Jones 2011, 877). All the material gathered
(collected and produced through the artistic interventions) would be
accumulated in the Archive of the City of Mostar . The Archive was
envisioned as a growing entity, which could have been augmented in the
future and it was to be made available to citizens and interested parties (for
instance other researchers) and hosted in the premises of Abrašević (it was
later digitised and made available online). 9 In this way, the project also
expanded Abart’s goal from animating the city though art into creating and
archiving knowledge through art-led research (Abart 2013).
In all, twenty-four students responded to the open call. They came from
both Mostar universities and several disciplines such as archaeology, fine
arts, sociology, and comparative literature. They seemed to be curious about
the project and especially thrilled by the idea of collaborating with
professional artists to design and develop art interventions in the city.
Certainly, the call attracted students who did not subscribe to nationalist
practises (no need to convince them) but it also created the possibility to form
a new cooperative platform for creative social change.
Four site-specific interventions were commissioned to professional
artists, while others were designed by the students participating in the
programme, along with individual research projects, seminars, and
exhibitions. Rather than detailing each event, I will account for a selection of
three works produced as part of (Re)collecting Mostar in order to give a sense
of what sort of interventions were developed and their spatial resonance. The
first is a performance in public space led by a professional artist. The second
is an art installation designed by one of the participant students. The third is
another performance conceptualised by a professional artist. This last work,
installed in the Partisan Memorial/Cemetery, will also give me the
opportunity to explore the ways in which Abart intersected its activities with
that of other organised groups of citizens countering divisive practices in the
city.

Art Intervention One: Repurposing Memories

Božidar Katić (Zagreb) was the first artist invited to collaborate with Abart
and the students. His site-specific intervention responded to the material
gathered about pre-war practices of socialisation in the city. In particular,
Katić reflected on the disappearance of the department store HIT from
Spanish Square and, with it, the erasure of the memory of this location as one
of the main gathering space in the city before the conflict. His intervention,
titled OpSjene.ver.1.0—When people should be walking upside down with
their legs lifted up in the air, 10 took place on March 12, 2011. The event was
organised in the space facing the one formerly occupied by HIT whose ruins
were removed to begin the construction of a new Croatian National Theatre,
which was soon stopped due to land disputes (see Makaš 2007, 309). As a
result, a banner announcing the construction of the (contested) theatre is now
left to guard an empty plot. This is a space of transit. People cross it on their
way across the Bulevar, but it is certainly no longer a place of gathering.
Katić, with the group of students and the Abart team decided to reflect on
how this area changed its function—from being a meeting place to the centre
of the battlefield and then a ruin after the end of the conflict. His site-specific
intervention wanted to reattach the memories of social life to this transit area
and make people stop here, again. In this sense, he used memory to fragment
space and time and to rebuild space from the reinterpretation of those
fragments (see Jones 2011, 880). He started by drawing and cutting the
shapes of people playing, cycling, and chatting. He then used the carved
paper foils as guidelines to draw on the pavement what resembled shadows of
people enjoying being together. In addition, and to recreate the atmosphere of
a lively public space, the artists played sounds recorded in a park where
children were laughing and playing, and burnt scents of flowers (Fig. 4.3).
Fig. 4.3 Božidar Katić, OpSjene.ver.1.0—When people should be walking upside down
with their legs lifted up in the air, Spanish Square, March 2011. Photo by the author

The result was extremely powerful. The empty space was resuscitated and
shadows of life put in place as a remainder of life itself. The intervention was
ultimately addressing the potential of a neglected space to host (again) life,
thus becoming public in the sense of being used by people. The site-specific
intervention produced a joyful atmosphere , a space of enjoyment and ‘a
space for the poetic reconstruction of situations in which wishes are present
—but wishes which are not so much fulfilled as simply proclaimed’
(Lefebvre 1991, 209). A curious crowd gathered to enjoy the multi-sensorial
performance, many of those crossing the Bulevar stopped to participate in the
joyful event. Indeed, the sounds and the flower scents also managed to attract
people here and to create a space of encounter in the centre of the (imaginary)
dividing line. In the days after the performance, I kept checking the space to
assess whether it had started other urban interventions such as graffiti or
vandal attacks. In fact, I only noticed people posing in front of selected
shadows for creative photo-shoots, initiating new practices of sociality in the
city.
Art Intervention Two: Reinhabiting Ruins
Boris Orenčuk (Mostar) was one of the students participating in the project.
As a contribution, he designed a site-specific intervention for a ruined
building on the Bulevar (across Spanish Square). The project, titled
Individualna Radna Akcija 1 (Individual Working Action 1), created a utopian
space of beauty and normalcy within a ruin. The artist spent days cleaning the
basement of the building from debris and garbage, then dressed an existing
window with red curtains and placed a flower pot in front of it (Figs. 4.4 and
4.5). In fact, the title of his project makes direct reference to what in
Yugoslavia was called radna akcija—working action—a collective and
volunteer effort to build infrastructures or clean public domains. 11 Young
people were normally involved in such activities for the good of society.
With the same intent (the good of the city) the artist polished the interior of
the decaying building, yet this was not a collective effort, but rather an
individual one. Accordingly, the artist brought attention to how the division
in the city affects the capacity of citizens to create alliances that are needed to
take care of Mostar, together. The result was visually uncanny, with the
installation creating a visual imbalance between the beauty and colours of the
curtain and flowers, and the dirtiness and ugliness of the premises. Yet, the
artist also suggested how beauty could resurface from ruins and debris thanks
to action.
Fig. 4.4 Boris Orenčuk—Individualna Radna Akcija 1—Bulevar, June 2011. Photo by the
author

Fig. 4.5 Boris Orenčuk—Individualna Radna Akcija 1—Bulevar, June 2011. Photo by the
author

Art Intervention Three: Confronting History

Gordana Anđelić-Galić (Sarajevo) was one of the two artists invited to
contribute to the final part of the project. The artist produced two site-specific
interventions. The first took place under the Old Bridge (Pranje/Washing)
and the second, which I will be discussing below, in the Partisan Memorial
/Cemetery of Mostar. Ovo nje moj mir (This is not my peace) was written on
a white sheet and hang on the top of the memorial to critically address the
state of abandonment of the monument and to make a clear polemical
statement against those allowing this to happen (Fig. 4.6).

Fig. 4.6 Gordana Anđelić-Galić—Ovo nje moj mir (This is not my peace). Partisan
Memorial/Cemetery, September 2011. Photo by the author

The importance of this intervention transcends the aesthetic qualities of

the performance. In fact, the decision to intervene in this highly contested
space served as a prop to support another on-going struggle to preserve the
monument from vandalism and decadence.
The Partisansko Groblje (Partisans’ Memorial Cemetery—hereinafter
Partisansko) uncomfortably sits on a large area overlooking the city from the
northern hills—a forest artificially planted in the 1960s (thanks to another
Radna Akcija ). Despite an impressive surface of 79,248 m2, and although
being minutes away from the busy area of Rondo, it is now hard to locate for
those less acquainted with the city. No signs indicate the route to its entrance
and nothing signals (from the outside) its presence from the street. Indeed, for
the entirety of my fieldwork, the memorial was fenced off, impeding (or at
least making more difficult) entrance to its premises.
Partisansko was inaugurated by Tito in 1965 and designed by renowned
architect Bogdan Bogdanović as part of a monumental series celebrating the
partisan victory over fascism across Yugoslavia (see Kirn and Burghardt
2012). The grand park soon became one of the main attractions of Mostar
(along with the Old Bridge). In fact, the site was often acknowledged in the
already presented survey about pre-war socialisation areas as a friendly
gathering space. The site was damaged by the war and forgotten by the
authorities of the new-born nation-state. Certainly, this monument is more
than a landmark of the 1960s, and therein lies the main problem. In fact, it is
the materialisation of the ideological propaganda of Yugoslavia, i.e. the
celebration of the heroes who helped forge the Socialist Federation.
Reflecting on similar themes, Lefebvre notes how:

Monumental space offered each member of a society an image of that

membership, an image of his or her social visage. It thus constitutes a
collective mirror more faithful than any personal one… Small wonder
that from time to time immemorial conquerors and revolutionaries eager
to destroy a society should so often have sought to do so by burning or
razing that society’s monuments. (Lefebvre 1991, 221)

In the aftermath of the war, its historical legacy became highly contested
and the monument seemed condemned to oblivion. Overgrown vegetation,
the scars of dynamite, and a general lack of maintenance had shortly
transformed the well-kept park into an unwelcoming forest. During the EU
interim administration, the monument’s area fell under the competence of one
of the three Croat-administered city areas. They thought to transform the
memorial into an amphitheatre and to host theatre performances in the
summer. Certainly, the suggestive location could have added force to the
envisioned programme. Yet, there was no time (or funding or both) to
complete the plan before the city became united and planning decisions were
to be collectively taken by the single City Council (personal interview with a
member of SABNOR). The Council of Antifascists and Fighters of the
Popular Liberation War in Mostar (Savez Antifašista i Boraca
Narodnooslobodilačkog Rata; SABNOR) started lobbying for the
intervention of the municipality to safeguard the monument as part of the
cultural (and historical) heritage of the city. As a result, in 2003, a
commission was formed (including then alive architect Bogdanović) to draw
up a conservation strategy. Thanks to international fundraising, and in
particular, donations from the Government of the Netherlands and the
Kingdom of Norway, all the tombstones were replaced by new ones and the
area cleared of garbage. In addition, a lighting system was placed and the
water system repaired (though the actual water pumps have not been replaced
and as such; the fountain does not work). The works ended during the spring
of 2005 (when the funding was terminated). In 2006, SABNOR made a case
to the national commission for the preservation of national heritage, after
which the monument was successfully inserted in the existing list. As such, it
is now the duty of the city, cantonal, and federative administrations to
preserve it.
I visited the Memorial for the first time in spring 2006 and the condition
of the monument were fairly good. Certainly, it did not seem a frequented
space; the water system—and all the connected fountains—was not working
and a few sentences written in black paint were altering the white surface of
the main wall (at the time I could not read the language at all, so I could not
make sense of what was written). It was a very hot day and I remember not
staying for long because there was no respite from the sun. After only four
years the situation had changed dramatically. The first time I entered again in
the (now fenced off) monument was February 2010. A friend of mine came
to visit and I was taking her around the city when I remembered about
Partisansko. We entered from a gap in the side part of the fence—obviously,
there was someone using the space despite its inaccessibility. The view was
poignant. The entire park had been transformed in an open-air dump. Empty
plastic bottles, bags, rotting food, syringes, and garbage bags were left to
cover almost the entire surface. The vegetation had grown back and took over
the human construction. We walked up to the top of the memorial to discover
that the tombstones had been destroyed or moved. A few had been thrown
into the upper fountain. Among the graffiti were visible nationalist claims for
a third entity and Fascist/Ustaša symbols. Others looked more like acts of
random signification (tags with names).
During the fieldwork, I often read and listened to people commenting on
the state of the monument. Abrašević organised a cleaning action in March
2010 to contribute to the maintenance of the site. Former partisans and
associations of the families of partisans are still gathering on the monument
on special occasions such as February 14, the day of Mostar’s liberation from
fascism. Yet, the city council does not have a clear strategy for the
preservation of the area. The mayor seems convinced of the fact that since the
monument has now been declared part of national heritage, it should be the
responsibility of the government to distribute funds towards its conservation.
The association of partisans has been expanded and it now counts on the
active participation of younger people who opened a Facebook fan page and
a Twitter account to give international visibility to their struggle. They also
archived existing information about the monument and made the material
available online with the intent of fundraising to carry out maintenance
works. 12 This group for the preservation of the Partisan Memorial/Cemetery
is not directly engaged in a struggle towards changing the present and the
future of Mostar, rather they hold tight to what remains from a memorialised
past to navigate the present (and the future). However, both Abart and
Abrašević did support the initiative as a way to create a common front against
nationalisms. Thus, the site-specific intervention presented here must also be
acknowledged to interfere in other spaces to create a heterogeneous platform
enacting alternative politics in the city.
The three artistic interventions presented address different topics: the loss
of public space understood as the place where encounters happened in the
pre-war (heterogeneous) city , the loss of a sense of solidarity and unity
among the citizens of Mostar that could save the city from a ruinous future,
and the erasure of the socialist past as a means of forgetting a shared history.
To be sure, all these works draw on a common sense of nostalgia for
Yugoslavia. As discussed above, this should be understood as a move
towards recuperating values of unity and solidarity that could create a more
inclusive environment for the future of Mostar. In this sense, recollecting
memories and reattaching them to the city through artist-led interventions, is
a matter of ethics, which ‘address sufferings and injustices, and how we live
with each other and each other’s past lives’ (Jones 2011, 882).
Importantly, these works reappropriated the existing infrastructures of the
city (a square, a building, and a memorial park) to create, even if temporarily,
new dynamics within these spaces. The act of recollecting invoked by the
title of the project must be understood as the critical reappropriation of the
memories of the shared past so that a more inclusive future could be
recreated. Surely, these site-specific interventions could not alone provide the
infrastructure to connect people across the many divides of the city. But they
were, in their own terms, spaces that offered the possibility to live
transformational experience, and to be affected by the atmospheres of joy and
excitement produced by creative labour and political action. People who
attended these events, as I said, where mostly Abart’s followers and
supporters. For them, to participate in these events meant to become visible
in the city and to occupy public soil to declare their desire for a different city
that could allow for people to be together again. But also, it meant the
possibility to direct their desires for change so that a platform could be
created, a heterotopic space where ethno-nationalism had been forgotten. For
those who accidentally joined one or more activities (or those who read about
the site-specific interventions in the local press), the project offered the
possibility to learn of the existence of groups who oppose the ethnic division
as well as the opportunity to enjoy a cultural programme that is delinked from
ethno-national propaganda (to become affected by the possibility that another
Mostar is possible).
After the summer vacation, by September 2011 only six students were
still participating—the majority blamed the heavy coursework for dropping
out, but many might have also lost interest along the way. Surely, many
remained in contact with Abart and continued participating as part of the
audience even after they left the project. A large amount of information had
been gathered and stored within the very small container/office of Abart
creating what was supposed to be the beginning of the Archive of Mostar. A
final exhibition displayed all the work done and invited the citizens of Mostar
to have a look. For the first time the exhibition space filled up quickly and an
atmosphere of joyful euphoria was clearly palpable. Despite the fact that the
events organised during the process (art interventions) always attracted a
crowd, there was no sign of new people willing to get involved in long-term
collaborations. Mid-term activities were advertised in local newspapers and
internet-based news-portals, but they were silently received (with no
discussions or comments initiated). The final exhibition gathered all the
people who took part in the project (also by sharing their memories). In this
sense, the participatory methodology adopted contributed to augmenting the
existing audience, which managed to gather a significantly trans-generational
audience.
Crucially, when walking around the exhibition space, I noticed how the
materiality of the Archive produced the envisioned (and virtual) platform for
discussion. People were talking about the city, what they remembered and
what they did not, what they thought was accurate and what misleading. In
fairness, after having collaborated on the writing of several applications for
Abart ’s funding (being unsuccessful most of the time), I had started to feel
insecure about the very concept of art as tool for change. I never doubted the
importance of creativity as a way to maintain and create criticality, yet I
began to think that writing proposals about how art exhibitions and
performances in public spaces could create a sound basis for political
discussion seemed, in fact, naïve. Until, of course, the moment I saw what
was happening that evening. It was incredible; people did not leave, they
stayed and talked, discussed, criticised (Abart too), made compliments,
laughed, drank wine, and eventually returned home. I cannot tell whether
they all discussed issues concerning the future of the city, but surely, they
came together in another space (not their usual cafe), with another crowd, and
experienced something (radically) different and joyful.
With the conclusion of (Re)collecting Mostar and the opening of the
Archive , Abart had demonstrated that art-led research could produce
important results. However, if the project had addressed the potential for such
initiatives to be conducive to change through educational and leisure
activities, it certainly did not address the political modalities required to
achieve change at the city-level. Abart’s intention to sharpen critical and
analytical skills through art practice was certainly valid, but what about the
system in which Mostar (and Abart) is embedded? Is it possible to neutralise
nationalisms when they are institutionalised and bureaucratised? Or, is it
tilting at windmills? Many conversations within Abart reflected upon the
ways in which a bigger crowd could be reached and involved in long-term
projects. In fact, Abart lacked a strategy to involve people in the long run.
There was a sense that event promotion and advertising would not be
effective because of the nature of Abart’s radical stance. Coercing people into
participating would not lead to the creation of a more inclusive environment.

Conclusion: Conceptualising Resistance in

Mostar, Spatially
To frame resistance spatially is, in this book, strongly related to Lefebvre’s
theory of space production, in tandem with the notion that interfering with the
mechanisms of how space is produced socially could shape a different
understanding of what cities are and could become. Lefebvre envisioned the
urban revolution as a (joyful) festival, whose creative arsenal might be able to
change the city (and possibly the world) for the better. In this way, change
crucially passed through the creation and maximisation of differences. Thus,
‘heterotopias ’ become spaces reappropriated from the forces of capitalist
homogenisation and elite hegemony, where ongoing and engaged practice
formulates new ways of thinking in order to imagine what is not yet existing,
and pursuing its realisation. Certainly, to produce change , it is necessary to
have vision, which entails being imaginative and critical of the present, rather
than following routinised patterns. Further, as seen in Chapter 3,
revolutionary struggle requires a stepping out from the space of ambiguity
and to take a leap into the unknown (into the possibility that change would
work out favourably). Yet, Lefebvre is cautious not to capitulate to the
attractive (and disguised) promises of capitalism, so adept at the reabsorption
of revolutionary energy (see also Lefebvre 1991, 383). The revolution is non-
negotiable.
Lefebvre sets a clear line of division between revolution and reform. The
latter is to be avoided because they merely produce cosmetic change, and
thus reproducing the basic contours of power and domination. Lefebvre
envisions any collaboration with the state (and its administration) as a
connivance of capitalism. In fact, central to Lefebvre’s theory is the notion of
autogestion , the idea that societies could regulate themselves without any
bureaucratic apparatus to constrain individuals’ freedom of choice.
Lefebvre’s future flirts with anarchy as the space for radical self-
determination. This line of thought has had an impact on some contemporary
radical thinkers about the efficacy of non-statist approaches to revolution (see
Holloway 2010; Shirky 2009). Yet Lefebvre’s theory of autogestion was (as
with all his writings) far subtler than is usually recognised, and subsequently
led to ‘a great outburst of confusion’ over its meaning (Brenner and Elden
2009, 15). It was a notion that became highly malleable in the hands of its
advocates, who embarked on a number of ‘antistatist and statist political
projects, antiproductivist and productivist visions of modernisation, and
grassroots and liberal-parliamentary reforms of political participations’
(Brenner and Elden 2009, 15). The problem lay not in any one of these
elements per se, but in the separation of these elements from one another, in
treating the contradiction between an element and its ‘anti’ as something to
be avoided, rather than actively pursued (see also Lefebvre 2009, 148). There
was no single goal to be achieved, but a continual process of grassroots
change that would rage on all levels of social life. His invocation of this
strategy rested on the idea of a ‘practical struggle that is always reborn with
failures and setbacks’ (Lefebvre 2009, 135), which contains the implicit
possibility that even a series of reforms might at some critical point lead to a
fuller realisation of society’s creative impulses. As he argued:

Certain Yugoslavs committed the error of seeing in autogestion a

system, and therefore a model, that could be established juridically and
that could function without clashes and contradictions, in a sort of social
and political harmony. Instead, autogestion reveals contradictions in the
State because it is the very trigger of those contradictions. The
democratic nature of a State or any other apparatus can be evaluated in
terms of its capacity to avoid snuffing out contradictions by restrictions
or by formalism; it should not only allow their expression and allow
them to take shape but should also directly provoke them. This does not
happen without real struggles. Autogestion must continually be enacted.
The same is true of democracy, which is never a ‘condition’ but a
struggle. (Lefebvre 2009, 135)

While Lefebvre highlights the stifling nature of State power, in its use of
formalism and circumscription, he also illustrates the perpetual nature of
political struggle. None of this implies the absolute rejection of the State as a
target and site of struggle. The passage above suggests that the perception of
‘harmony’ among Yugoslav citizens is perhaps what robbed them of their
transformative agency in the struggle against the wielders of state power. The
socialist tragedy of the twentieth century derived from the perception of the
State as the ‘final’ goal for revolutionary action. Yet State institutions were
not a fiction to be ignored, but an active site of contestation that must be
imbued with the ideals of autogestion itself: ‘In a broader conception the
modalities of autogestion may be proposed and imposed at all levels of social
practice, including the agencies of coordination’ (Lefebvre 2009, 148). Thus:

With the State unable to coexist peacefully alongside radicalised and

generalised autogestion, the latter must submit the former to ‘grassroots’
 democratic control. The State of autogestion, which is to say the State at
whose core autogestion is raised to power, can only be a State that is
withering away. Consequently, the party of autogestion can only be the
party that leads politics toward its termination and the end of politics,
beyond political democracy. (Lefebvre 2009, 150)

The corollary being that to alter the state, to reform and transform it, one
must first confront it in order to lay the necessary steps, not for a final
conclusion to struggle but for the continuation of struggle from a stronger
position (cf. Chandler 2004).
In BiH, the realisation of a socially democratic subjectivity, and therefore
transformative agency, is made difficult by the absence of clear legislation
and the existence of a fragmented citizenry and state. In the case of BiH,
revolutionary action must take the necessary first step of confronting the state
in the struggle for its reform. In fact, social justice and reconciliation cannot
happen without the guarantee of people becoming legally empowered as
political subjects free of ethno-national categories and the fractured social
spaces that go with it. The majority of my respondents in Abrašević seemed
to be in agreement with this. To be an activist means, for those I met, to work
towards the creation of a more democratic system, which could assure
equality and justice. Yet little progress could be made without a qualitatively
different state, which could coordinate claims for policy reforms.
The understanding of radical change is, for Lefebvre, a way to interrupt
the existence of capitalism in order to produce novelty. And despite a
fascination for pre-historical times when Nature was harmoniously creating a
united space (Lefebvre 1991, XX–CC), Lefebvre suggests the future as
totally different—indeed, as an interruption. My case study, in contrast,
shows how the future is imagined by selecting memories from the past—the
pre-war society were ethno-national differences could be negotiated rather
than exacerbated. Certainly, to deal with a post-conflict area brings to the fore
a completely different dynamic. The past has been lost by a sudden traumatic
accident, a wound to be healed. Accordingly, different strategies to deal with
the vanished past (and its uneasy connections to the present) are engaged. In
the case I presented, reflective nostalgia (Boym 2001) was engaged with as a
tool to navigate a (now) distant past in order to create and imagine the future.
Thus, the revolution will not erase history or to cancel the present, but will
modulate the present on the memories selected from the past. This revolution
is a process, a slow route leading to change supported by the affective
attachment to the idea(l) of justice.
Certainly, the activities of Abart have demonstrated the importance of art
interventions and exemplified the ways in which art could become political.
The contents of Abart’s interventions are political in the sense that they touch
(directly and indirectly) upon sensitive topics to participate in and create a
debate. In this sense, Abart helped nurture the notion and practice of
encounter, where:

Active affects somehow replace passive affects; people start to recognise

a ‘singular essence’… As people find one another, they start to piece
together common notions: they universalise, make more coherent what
seems, on the face of it, only specific, lived experience. What appears
particular is in fact general; our plight is that of many people… Affinity
becomes the cement that bonds, perhaps only for a moment, but a
moment that lingers, a lasting encounter, of people across frontiers and
barriers. (Merrifield 2011, 108–109)

From this perspective, the site-specific art works reviewed in this chapter
created a space that opposed the main spatial practices and mindless
reproduction of division, the routinised rhythms of the divided city. The
production of a space-otherwise was achieved through brief interventions in
public space, as well as through the marking of the urban space by leaving
traces of the interventions. Abart challenged the existing representations of
Mostar-divided by producing a counter-space that voiced the desire for the
city to be transformed. Difference was produced in three main ways. Firstly,
Abart resisted normalised practice of rendering identities as a matter of ethnic
politics by refusing to engage with the citizens of Mostar primarily as ethnic
subjects. All the projects engaged with the population by inviting citizens to
collaborate (or be part of the audience) without addressing their ethno-
national belongings. Further, the planned activities took place in Abrašević or
in spaces that have not been appropriated by a specific group (the Bulevar,
Spanish Square, various spaces of consumption) in order to claim back these
places for the citizens at large. As Laketa argues ‘emancipatory politics in
BiH need to be understood as a radical reconfiguration of the way bodies
“make sense” of the world, in ways that build upon and expand the post-
structural concept of change through discursive resignification’ (2016, 680).
In this spirit, by occupying the city through walks, performances, and
gatherings, Abart wanted people to experience new ways of inhabiting and
using the city, which are conducive of reimagining its future as more
inclusive. This also meant to alter the normalised rhythms of the divided city,
which instructs patterns of mobility confined (mostly) within the two,
separate, sides. Abart invited the citizens of Mostar to engage with Mostar
differently by stepping out of their daily routines and reflect on the potentials
held by the city—for example, in hosting cultural activities in collaborative
and creative ways.
Secondly, Abart ’s projects disrupted the process of crafting new histories
for Mostar that restart with the event of the war and erase completely the pre-
war social dynamics. As in many other contested cities, the writing of history
is a highly contentious topic, which is far from settled. Proof lies in the fact
that students do not address contemporary history during compulsory
education. Abart did not want to write the history of Mostar but rather strived
to create a space in which many conflicting stories could be confronted. In
this sense, the Archive of Mostar was proposed as an expanding space that
could collect memories without attempting to rectify, order or silence them.
The goal was to show how all these memories could co-exist because the act
of writing one official history for the city would, forcibly, neglect the
existence of many counter-histories. Abart decided to recollect memories of
the pre-war city without idealising the socialist past. Rather, this was an
attempt to show how the rhythms of the pre-war city worked to enhance the
shared nature of public spaces despite the felt differences among the
population whilst wondering how (and whether) this could become possible
again, in the future.
Thirdly, Abart used sarcasm as a means to create a critical distance from
the past and the present that made clear how many post-war dynamics do not
make sense to the entire population, transforming the post-war rebuilding
process as alien, dysfunctional and corrupt. Abart’s interventions made
visible processes that are downplayed within the more present discussions
about the city’s divisions, such as the privatisation of public spaces that are
side-effects of the restructuring of the state but are not accounted for as
problematic. Abart’s critical engagement with the process of fundraising also
shows that the mechanisms highlighted by Jeffrey (2013) among others (the
gentrification of civil society) are indeed very clear to many civil society
actors, who are often presented with the dilemma of conformity for the sake
of survival, yet who simultaneously employ parody by deviating from
established models of action. Abart mimicked international discourses in
order to gain trust, legitimacy, and money while being critical of the
‘international guidelines for democratisation’ at the same time. Overall, my
argument is that NGOs could still express dissent even when they resign
themselves to becoming instruments of mainstream discourses. In fact, as in
the case of Abart, they were able to manipulate the international demands for
peace and reconciliation built on inter-ethnic dialogue by developing
activities that produced markedly different results form that specified in their
official proposals. Surely, new languages have been learnt, and new skills
have been acquired to become more competitive in the donor market, yet
Abart also successfully learnt how to take advantage of such circumstances in
a rather cynical way. Accordingly, to write projects adhering to certain
political strategies could also conceal disruptive intent.
Overall, Abart enacted resistance to the logics of the divided city by
reappropriating space for other-than-divisive projects. The experience of
Abart was fruitful, engaging, and exciting for those who participated. Those
interested in art could enjoy creative cultural programmes otherwise
inexistent in Mostar. Others, less interested in art performance, but supportive
of Abart’s radical stands, were still energised by being part of projects that
create something different in Mostar showing that change was indeed
possible. And it was by creating and inhabiting these atmospheres of excited
joyfulness that Abart created the possibility for transformative experiences.
To think about how a movement towards change could be enacted means to
engage with agency affectively and to rethink agency not as a property or a
privilege of the sovereign subject, but as located in encounters, ‘registering
the constitutive co-implication of the many bodies that make worlds’
(McManus 2011). Affective agency challenges the individualising power of
the neoliberal subject by exploring how ‘affect spaces’ become foundational
for the (be)coming together of protest movements (Kluitenberg 2015). It
allows us to explore the relationships between the individual and the group,
the micro-politics of everyday resistance and the macro-politics of the state. It
also accounts for how affect produces spaces in which this subjectivation
becomes politically activated (Arena 2015). Reading Spinoza with Hardt, I
am addressing the power of what brings us joy as the catalyst for
transformative politics: ‘a political project, though, must not leave it to
hazard but instead discover how to make last and repeat what is good, that is,
what brings us joy. Joy is the increase of our power to think and act, and
sadness is the decrease.’ (Hardt 2015, 219). To experience joy in Mostar
through encounters expresses the possibility to be affected by the power of
memories, experiences, and sensorial stimulations, and the realisation that
being together could be exciting and moving.

When [criticality] works, a transference relation takes hold that allows

both for the figuration of the familiar and the non-relation that is always
there at the start of a genuinely original encounter. A comfort zone
meets an alien one and a drama develops about what kinds of repetition
and change can be borne. Then, there are all the exterior pressures
interfering with focus that want us to hazard wild explanations and
connections because we sense we see something but can’t tell quite what
it is. (Berlant 2015, 273)

Here Berlant evokes the same criticality invoked by Lefebvre in the

analysis of the everyday: the vigilant practices that disentangle the rhythms of
the city in order to uncover what could be reimagined, re-encountered, and
recreated. Abart promoted this attitude by recollecting public memories that
rendered existing relationships with the city’s complex, multidimensional and
non-linear fabric, and revealing the possibility for the creation and experience
of a non-ethnicised space. Abart’s project did not focus on the needs for
reunifying the city, rather they produced and enacted the desires for living in
Mostar differently.
For those working in Abart , besides the excitement for the projects, there
were also great challenges. Firstly, there was the financial insecurity coming
from working on short projects that never ensured continuity. Secondly, there
was the question of whether this could become a career, or could be done
alongside more standard jobs to ease the feeling of not planning wisely one’s
future life. Thirdly, there was the fatigue generated by working for small
groups of followers without having a sense of the impact that these projects
had in the city. Abart stopped producing new projects in 2014. Reflecting on
her role in the platform and the legacy of Abart, Amila Puzić says she felt as
‘there was always a kind of resistance’ (personal communication, October
2017). The resistance she felt translated into poor attendance and the
difficulties to involve new people in Abart’s projects. This reflects the
difficulties in altering the cemented rhythms of the city that has been shaped
along ethno-national lines. But this was also what propelled Abart to continue
developing new projects, as Puzić states ‘It felt great to do a pioneering job…
when I read what I wrote then, it feels as if I was on fire! I can remember the
feeling…’ (personal communication, October 2017). Ultimately, she
continues,

I think that we – we as a team – got tired of being invisible… At the end

Abart was a big challenge itself and it managed to produce critical art
and knowledge about the city – its history as well as its contemporary
dynamics… A great thing is that Abart’s online archives actively serve
as a platform for researches, curators, artists interested in what we did in
Mostar… This means that all the efforts were worthwhile’. (personal
communication, October 2017)

Surely Lefebvre would empathise with this sentiment:

Any revolutionary ‘project’ today, whether utopian or realistic, must, if

it is to avoid hopeless banality, make the re-appropriation of the body, in
association with the re-appropriation of space, into a non-negotiable
part of its agenda. (Lefebvre 1991, 166–167, emphasis added)

This book sheds light on the existence of people who have reappropriated
the space of Mostar to produce different narratives about the city. They did so
by reclaiming their bodies and subjectivities from ethnic politics and
nationalisms. Their position is also non-negotiable (like the one of those
embracing more nationalist narratives and practices) and as such they live,
use, and engage with the city differently resisting the production of Mostar as
divided.
I visited Mostar again in summer 2015 with a group of twenty
postgraduate students willing to learn about grassroots initiatives in the
divided city and how they related to processes of reconstruction and urban
planning. 13 Interviewing a young woman who was a member of a local
student organisation, the students asked her about the future of the divided
city. Appearing somewhat defeated, she exclaimed:

Please don’t ask me about the war and ethnic divisions. I have been told
about reconciliation and dialogue all my life…I am tired of this… can
we talk about what I am doing here in Mostar? [Can we discuss] the
 projects I do for the city to make it more liveable? I am sorry if I sound
like this but… there are people like me who are normal…we disengage
from ethnic-politics… they don’t belong to us… (fieldwork diaries,
September 2015)

Frustrated with how outside observers constantly approach the city from a
preconceived understanding of its present (and future), the young woman
instead proclaimed her own urban reality to be the normal one—a reality that
is not simply defined by division, and thus towards a mode of urban life that
does not require ‘rescuing’ from the outside, because the possibility of living
in an other-than-divided space is already an immanent possibility from
within. This is why this book engages with the activities and projects
produced within circles that reject ethnic politics in Mostar. These groups are
surely less numerous, but they surely exist, and to make their projects visible
is a crucial step to challenging the idea of Mostar as an immobile city where
nothing could ever change. Yet the crucial question still stands: how to
transform change into (revolutionary) transformation? And how do these
experiences and different notions of Mostar as more-than-divided affect the
overall process of rebuilding Mostar? Authors like Hromadžić have
approached the topic of inter-ethnic solidarity, but ‘with some reluctance
because these broader, cross-ethnic articulations of narod have been
dismissed as apolitical, nostalgic, invented and over-romanticised visions of
Bosnianhood and as reflections of “impaired insights” on the side of
“subjective’ academics”’ (Hromadžić 2013, 261). What my examples show
in contrast is that, in Mostar, there are pockets of radical change in which the
discourse has moved beyond inter-ethnic dialogue as the only alternative
foundation to resolve the dilemma of post-war reconciliation. The next
chapter will discuss this topic further by enquiring into whether change in
Mostar could happen through the conscious act of engaging with the past as a
radical basis towards reimagining Mostar outside of ethnic politics.

Notes

1. For instance, the Mostar-based NGO Croatia Libertas (Croatia freedom)

lobbies for the referendum in favour to the creation of a third (Croatian)
entity within the borders of BiH.
2. The Constitution of BiH, written as part of the Dayton Peace
Agreement, was a temporary document that should have been redrafted
within the process of state-building.

3. At the time of this research in 2011, there were Zelena Glava

(environmental campaigns), Abrašmedia (media activism), Abart (art
production), and a group promoting sexual education in schools.

4. The group was formed by Rani Al-Rajji (Studio Beirut, Beirut), Antje
Engelmann, Sonya Schonberger (independent artists, Berlin), Tanja
Vujišić, Ivana Miličević, and Danica Milenković (journalists, Kosovska
Mitrovica).

5. On post-war political economy and frictions between economic

interests of global elites vs. domestic actors, see Pugh (2002). In
particular, the scholar argues that the implementation of neoliberal
mechanisms in post-war BiH was favoured both by international and
local actors eager to profit from the process of post-socialist
privatisation. This, the author argues, ‘has hardly alleviated a grim
social and economic situation that differentiates markedly between
participants in the entrepreneurial economy and the excluded poor,
unemployed, and welfare dependent’ (2002, 468). It has to be said that,
as Pugh has also noticed, there has been a limited research on ‘the
dysfunctional aspects of neoliberalism in peace-building’ (2002, 468).

6. Culture for understanding, MGD-F (2010: implemented by Abart);

International Fund for Cultural Diversity, UNESCO (2011:
unsuccessful); Gender Integration, USAID (2011: unsuccessful); Youth
Leadership Development, USAID (2011: implemented by Abrašmedia);
Youth Interethnic Exchange, US Embassy in BiH (2011: unsuccessful);
Conflict Mitigation and Reconciliation, USAID (2012: unsuccessful).

7. MDG-F “is an international cooperation mechanism whose aim is to

accelerate progress in the Millennium Development Goals worldwide”
(MGD website, http://​www.​mdgfund.​org/​aboutus). The Fund was
 established in 2006 thanks to a donation of the Spanish Government.
The Millennium Development Goals comprise eight goals to improve
the lives of the world’s poorest people. They were set by the UN in
2000 with a target achievement date of 2015.

8. I am aware of the fact that the very concept of public space is contested
and various are the possible understandings of what is public. In
particular, the discussion about what is/was public and what is/was
private becomes of crucial importance when considering the Socialist
past of the city. The project understood public space as shared in the
sense of being used by the population at large. In this sense, the project
looked at how from being a space of encounters, the area became
abandoned and neglected also in relation to urban polarisation.

9. The Archive is available online at http://​abartarhiv.​blogspot.​de. Last

accessed October 31, 2017.

10. The title is a quote from the novel The Island of the day Before written
by Umberto Eco in 1994.

11. The art intervention in the building and, in particular, the reference to
Yugoslavia could be also understood as a way to employ reflective
nostalgia as a critical tool.

12. Relevant addresses are www.​herojisaneretve.​blogger.​ba (Blog); https://​

www.​facebook.​com/​groups/​147730451916207/​ (Facebook page);
http://​partizanskispome​nik.​oneworldseepartn​er.​org/​ (Website of the
Association). Last accessed July 27, 2012.

13. DPU summerLab 2015, Mostar Common Grounds. Summer School

developed by Giulia Carabelli and Mela Zuljević in collaboration with
the Development Planning Unit at University College London. More
information about the project: https://​www.​ucl.​ac.​uk/​bartlett/​
development/​programmes/​summerlab/​2015-series/​mostar.
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© The Author(s) 2018
Giulia Carabelli, The Divided City and the Grassroots, The Contemporary City,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-7778-4_5

5. Conclusion
Giulia Carabelli1
(1) Max Planck Institute for the Study of Ethnic and Religious Diversity,
Göttingen, Germany

Giulia Carabelli
Email: carabelli@mmg.mpg.de

The central concern of this book has been to engage with the urban
polarisation of Mostar, particularly in relation to its post-reunification phase
(2004), to discuss how the city becomes divided. By attending to the multiple
(and conflicting) factors that affect the production (and reproduction) of
Mostar as a contested urban environment, the book argues that static
representations of this city as polarised obscure much more complex social
dynamics. Instead, this book sheds light on processes of contestation and
reappropriation of the city to suggest that Mostar is more than its division.
This is not just a matter of rectifying existing portrayals of the city, but rather
to suggest that a critical engagement with its socio-political complexities
(instead of flattening them) could inform new approaches to the study of this
(and other) divided cities. In fact, by unsettling the representations of Mostar
as simply divided, this book locates the possibility of social change within
extant contradictory dynamics and in the existence of counter-spaces where
nationalisms have been neutralised. Thus, the book also infers that Mostar is
not a city characterised by inertia whereby change (political and social) can
only be imposed by external forces. Rather, the possibility of social change
emerges from the intensification of the contradictions of the real, which also
produce heterotopic spaces in which ethno-national subjectivity and
antagonism have been largely challenged and transformed.
The concept of social space has been adopted to account for not only the
formation of physical infrastructures but also the ways in which social actors
encounter, interpret, utilise, and appropriate these spaces. Only by engaging
with social space as an ensemble of relations was it possible to fulfil one of
the central goals of this book, namely, to analyse the social production of
identities and how they are impacted by (and impact upon) social space. As a
way of critically accounting for these processes, this book has reappropriated
the theoretical framework used by Henri Lefebvre to investigate the
production of (divided) space, particularly with reference to Lefebvre’s core
construct, the spatial triad . This framework envisions the production of
(social) space as resulting from the dialectical interaction of three moments:
representations of space, representational spaces, and spatial practices. From
this perspective, I have presented an account of Mostar that reveals how its
space—as conceived (representations of space), (representational spaces)
lived, and perceived (spatial practice) does not take place in any
straightforward manner, as if each moment can be exclusively ascribed to any
particular class or group. Rather, as noted in Chapter 1, the spatial triad offers
the necessary tools to analytically distinguish the social content of each
moment, while at the same time understanding how any class project or
strategy is informed by a specific combination of all three.
This choice of theoretical approach necessitated a focused examination of
the modalities in which everyday life and its constituent practices reconstruct
space as a social product. Hence, ethnographic material sheds light on the
ongoing rehabilitation of material infrastructures alongside a committed
investigation into the everyday life of the city. This was also supported by a
critical engagement with more-than representational theories, which consider
practices and affects, not just as products of discourses but as constitutive
parts of world-making processes (Lorimer 2005). The intellectual challenge
has been to disentangle the complex socio-political dynamics that produce
(and reproduce) space in Mostar as divided and more-than-divided by
accounting for multiple actors, strategies, and practices that inform a more
complex account of Mostar.
Overall, my findings suggest that Mostar is not an utterly divided city,
though it is far from a united and organic entity. Instead, this book argues that
engaging with Mostar in its contradictions sheds light on the difficulties of
living in the divided city, and on the existence of spaces in which ethno-
national logics have been substantially challenged. In framing Mostar as
more-than-divided, I have offered a critical engagement with what lies
beyond this division: practices and affects that create ambiguity, and which
facilitates the emergence of both spontaneous rebellions and organised
counter-spaces. By accounting for the initiatives designed and developed by
Abart , a grassroots platform for art production and urban research, this study
has revealed the potential of art and creativity as tools for reclaiming Mostar
from nationalist-driven territorial competition.
By way of a conclusion, I will offer a critical review of the main points
raised by the book. Firstly, I will re-engage with the three moments of space
production to discuss how they relate to each other in relation to the
production of Mostar. Here, I will point to the contradictions emerging from
the production of space by paying attention to the notion of ambiguity and
heterotopia as the moments that signal the specificity of contingent aspects of
resistance, as opposed to organised political contestation. Secondly, I will
reflect on the contributions made by this book in terms of its novel
application of Lefebvre’s framework to the analysis of divided cities as well
as the contribution of ethnography and participatory observation to the
understanding of Mostar’s dynamics. Lastly, I will delineate avenues for
future research, and suggest how the material so far collected and analysed
could initiate further investigations.

Mostar’s Space Production—A Post Scriptum

This section reads as a post scriptum to the previous analyses (Chapters 2–4).
On the one hand, to draw conclusions seems to be somewhat inconsistent
with the idea of social space as continuous process; it is impossible to
simplify the (ongoing) process directed and constituted by contradictory
dynamics as a means of proposing a simple argument, or even a new
representation of Mostar. Yet conclusions are also crucial—in a very
Lefebvrian fashion—to understanding how and why change might be
produced at all. Accordingly, this section focuses on the contradictions
emerging from the process of space as becoming, which situates both the
analytical lines of force constitutive of any process of spatial production, and
the social, historical and geographical specificity overlaying this generative
process.
Representations of Space/Representational Spaces: The
Cosmos of Capital and the Nomos of National Identity
Lefebvre argues that the moment of the representations of space are dominant
in capitalist societies, so much so that the resulting
homogeneous/homogenising space appears to contain no contradictions—as
if the spatial practices and representational spaces it dominates were in fact
produced harmoniously. Instead, he reflects on how this abstract space
imposes itself violently, and thus silencing its own contradictions, which
nevertheless cannot be eliminated fully. Thus, the project of un-doing social
space requires a critical engagement with the present in order to create the
possibility of a different future beyond the confines of alienated urban life.
Chapter 2 assessed the moment of the representations of space in Mostar
by discussing the plans to restructure the city after the wars. Here, it became
clear that there exist competing visions. The international supervisors (the
OHR) drafted a series of guidelines that could restart the city to function
according to European standards. Their vision for Mostar, as a reunited city,
drew on the abstract category of the European ‘ideal’, which loosely refers to
ideals of western cosmopolitan and capitalist practices. Local elites engaged
with the imposition of the abstract space by translating it into local political
contexts, which produced an important contradiction. In fact, despite
welcoming the promise of capital investments (and the integration of Mostar
and BiH into the global market), they could only make sense of this abstract
space through their own specific representational spaces constructed upon
ethno-national sense-making categories. If they all agreed that Mostar could
be reunified, at least for the sake of moving toward the road of European
integration , they could not agree on the ways in which this might take place,
and how the city could function a ‘rational’ political entity, all of which led to
the refusal of rectifying the guidelines of the OHR. For instance, the parallel
institutions were reformed and reintegrated only on paper, leaving two
separate administrators supervising the eastern and western sides of the city.
Once this contradiction came to light, the international supervisors
reprimanded the local councillors for not being able to make decisions
because they were stuck in antagonistic positions depending on their ethno-
national differences, but to no avail.
The contradictory strategies pursued by international and local elites
cannot be reduced to the operation of the representations of space (abstract
space ), but must be understood as complicated by their co-constitution with
representational space (absolute space). As outlined in Chapter 1, while
abstract space has come to dominate, absolute space continues to live on
beneath the surface. Indeed, as Lefebvre noted on the first instances of proto-
capitalist ‘rationalism’: ‘The property principle, by dominating space… put
an end to the mere contemplation of nature, of the Cosmos or of the world,
and pointed the way towards the mastery which transforms instead of simply
interpreting’ (1991, 253). Hence, the cosmos of capital embodied not merely
an ethereal space in which the world was situated, but rather constituted the
space of capital through which the world would be moulded in its image:
‘this secularized space was the outcome of the revival of the Logos and the
Cosmos, principles which were able to subordinate the “world” with its
underground forces’ (ibid., 263). While the logic of universalism (the Logos
and Cosmos of capital) unfolded, various underground forces continued to
shape the form of this ‘rationalism’. Indeed, as Schmitt pointed out, the birth
of European power was underpinned by a constant process of geographical
appropriation, the creation of a fragmented nomos in which land and people
could find political order. Yet while Schmitt’s understanding of the nomos
was relatively empty from socio-political content—it was, after all, merely
the expression of the intensification of politics, and the irreparable stand-off
between friend-enemy (Shapiro 2008, 41)—every political space was, during
the epoch of abstract space, informed by the nomos of ‘nationalism’. Thus,
the homogenising, abstract space of quantifiable elements and sovereign
statehood was simultaneously formed by the fragmented, specific spaces of
nation-states, which helped to ground the commodification of social relations
through the absolute space of blood, soil, and language. It is only by
appreciating this contradictory fusion of representations/representational
spaces (even while the former remains dominant) that we can begin to
understand the differentiated strategies between elite actors in Mostar. For
European elites, disembedded from their ‘own’ national contexts (within
which they surely mobilise a whole host of symbolic, historical, and national
formants), arrived in Mostar in order to help the city become integrated into
the European (i.e. capitalist) Cosmos. In other words, it was a strategy shot
through and through with abstract space. For Mostarian elites, meanwhile,
things were not so simple. On the one hand, they engage with the city
discursively as united and multi-ethnic (in public speeches and official
interviews), which reflects their relative affinity with the idea of becoming a
‘normal’ European city. On the other hand, contending elite groups are only
willing to implement the abstract space of a normal city as long as it is on
their terms, and for their ‘people’. The idea of the abstract space of the
nation-state (or any political space) in which the homogenised field of market
relations is ordered and underpinned by the absolute space of a specific
people, culture and language ceases to make sense in the presence of several
competing claims to sovereignty and authority. Called to design a set of
spatial practices that could produce Mostar as (re)united, they offered up the
pretence of unification whilst finding ways to keep the city functioning as
two separate entities. Accordingly, whereas spatial practices might create a
sense of cohesion in cities, Mostar’s everyday life responds to the planned
production of a segregated environment. In Chapter 2, I discussed how the
provision of the electricity depends on ethnic boundaries. In Chapter 3, I
looked at how people socialise in the city, which reflects the effect of
designed processes of ethnic segregation through the educational system ,
which then affects practices of befriending people only within ethnic circles.
Yet, Chapter 3, in exploring the everydayness of Mostar, also discussed how,
despite territorial segregation, people in the city tend to attach or detach from
the absolute space of ethnic categories according to contingencies in ways
that often prove contradictory and fluid. I discussed how individuals who
define themselves according to ethno-nationality reproduce nationalist
discourses but I have also presented cases in which their actions are informed
by wider and more complex considerations that depend on life contingencies
and needs. Relatedly, I discussed the difficulties of living in a deeply divided
society generally, and specifically for those who do not wish to identify with
an ethno-national group.

The Production and Contestation of Scales

Clearly, as discussed in Chapter 1, even if Lefebvre focuses on cities as vital
sites in which citizenship could be reinvented as independent from the
authority of the nation-state, his emphasis was on the production of scales —
the global, the national, the urban, and the family as interconnected and
relationally produced levels of analysis. Thus, to study how space is produced
in Mostar cannot be separated from the macro-scale of the state and micro-
scale of personal interactions.
Chapter 1 offered an account of how the Dayton Peace Agreements ,
welcomed for ending the violent conflict, enabled the fixture of ethnic
identities to territorial units, creating homogeneously ethnic spaces that
needed to be freed from pre-war ethnic mixing, and whose consequences are
traceable in internal mass exodus and internally displaced people.
Accordingly, the division of Mostar is not just an urban phenomenon
resulting from the conflict between Croats and Muslims at the urban scale,
but rather the consequence of larger processes of space production, which
impose the absolute space of ethnic segregation at the national scale, and
cascading down to lower levels to shape representational spaces and spatial
practices. As Lefebvre explains:

there is a sense in which the existence of absolute space is purely

mental, and hence imaginary. In another sense, however, it also has a
social existence, and hence a specific and powerful ‘reality’. The
‘mental’ is ‘realized’ in a chain of ‘social’ activities because, in the
temple, in the city, in monuments and places, the imaginary is
transformed into the real. (Lefebvre 1991, 251)

And this is how the contradictory fusions between abstract/absolute

spaces—as the project to forge a homogenous state space, on a specifically
nationalist basis—transform into the social practice of contending, mutually
exclusive nationalist projects that significantly shape the politics of the
everyday. As seen in Mostar, the materialisation of ethno-national differences
is facilitated by the design of spatial practices that keep the city divided, but it
also becomes reality though individual performances and reproduction of
ethno-national identities, and through patterns of urban navigation, affective
attachments, and selective socialisation practices.
The representations of space in Mostar thus contain convergent and
divergent elements that are the manifestation of political contestation along
different scalar levels. As in Chapter 1, the difference of scale here
corresponds to the ‘distance’ with which actors relate to their socio-spatial
environment, where the actors most removed from on-the-ground
developments (international) will tend further towards representations of
space (abstract/distant), while local elites occupy a problematic middle
ground between abstract conceptions and more local concerns articulated by
representational space. Thus, on the one hand, the HR has never ceased to
describe Mostar as a problem: ‘[t]he situation in Mostar is increasingly
volatile, with rising tension manifesting itself in escalating rhetoric, including
threats to boycott elections, a deadlocked City Council, boycotts of
ceremonial events by councillors and one shooting incident’ (OHR 2012).
The formal acceptance of unification by local elites is simultaneously rejected
at the urban level. They describe the city as one, to avoid confronting the
legacy of the war and the resultant urban polarisation; for instance, in the
parallel school curricula which is explained as the liberal guarantee of equal
rights for ethnic groups. The accent is put on the safeguarding of minority
rights to obfuscate nationalist discourses, and thus creating, supporting, and
reinforcing the need for a separated education system. Paradoxically, the very
imposition of a united abstract space became instrumental to preserving the
division. In fact, to plan a united city meant—for local administrators—
ignoring that the city was divided in the first place, and in need of being
reconciled through ad hoc spatial practices:

The [functional] State and [‘its’] territory interact in such a way that they
can be said to be mutually constitutive. This explains the deceptive
activities and image of state officials… They seem to administer, to
manage and to organise a natural space. In practice, however, they
substitute another space for it, one that is first economic and social, and
then political. They believe they are obeying something in their heads –
a representation (of the country, etc.). In fact, they are establishing an
order – their own. (Lefebvre 2009 [1978], 228)

The Production of Fear

In Chapter 2, I reflected on how ethno-national space is imposed, becoming
perceived (and accounted for) as ‘normal’ insofar as it safeguards particular
values, heritage, and practices, and in the same register justified by elites as a
means to guarantee peace and safety. I related the production of fear in the
city to the nomos of ethno-national boundaries that produce the ‘other’ as the
ultimate enemy. Empirical evidence shows how people from both sides
associate the ‘other side’ with danger (Chapter 3) even if they cannot explain
why. The fear of the other has become part of local sense-making practices,
which goes largely unquestioned. I also connected the production of fear to
political projects of domination, and I recalled the numerous times in which
local politicians draw on the absence of conflict not as a sign that people in
Mostar could live together peacefully, but rather as the effect of their invasive
campaigns of securitisation. This has two main consequences. Firstly,
political power is created and maintained through regimes of fear (biopolitics
), which strip citizens of political power, transforming them into the
‘deserving’ recipients of benevolent elites. Secondly, the materialisation of
security strategies means that the city’s public spaces have become
controlled, often losing their capacity to act as social connector or catalyst
(see Chapters 2 and 3).

The Contradictions of Everyday Life as the Conditions of

Transformation
Chapter 3 discussed the micro-politics of everyday life. Here I reflected upon
the ways in which representational spaces both reproduce ethnic division,
cementing the lines of the divided city, but also subvert divisive dynamics
that create spaces of ‘confusion’. I defined these movements that disrupt the
rigid logics of national territorialisation as spontaneous rather than planned
because these acts do not correspond or provoke the emergence of organised
movements against ethno-national territorial sovereignty. Rather, their very
spontaneity responds to the inherent ambiguity of contradictory space. I
associated this ambiguity with the non-exclusive existence of contradictory
political projects (within and outside ethnic subjectivities) in which benefits
might be gained from both positions. I discussed this attitude in relation to
empirical evidence that shows how decision-making processes involve
tactical thinking (as a survival strategy) rather than all-encompassing
ideologies and political orientations. Here again, it is possible to trace the
contradictions and tensions between the scale of the state (where ethno-
national categories are institutionalised and normalised), the scale of the city
(where these same categories are embraced or refused according to political
projects of segregation) or unity, and the scale of the individual who chooses
to perform ethno-national identities according to contingent need.

Stasis (The Civil War), Immobility , and Ambiguity

Aristotle explains that antagonism (opposed to agonism, which is the cypher
of democracy), occurs when citizens lose their capacity to negotiate their
political identity. The city becomes immobile (stasis) and the citizens
mindlessly reproduce those pre-arranged practices that are required to
perform their identity (see Chapter 1). In Chapter 3, I discussed how the
perception of Mostar as an immobile city in which change cannot happen
became part of many narrative registers. At the international level, the OHR
often circulate calls or warnings to the administration of Mostar’s councillors
to stop keeping the city hostage of their political antagonisms (Chapter 2). At
the local level, the planning institute, for instance, argues that the city’s
stalemate depends on the difficulties attracting sponsors (locally and
globally) whose capital could revamp the city’s infrastructures and expand
governance capacity (Chapter 2). Citizens associate immobility with the lack
of political progress since the reunification of the city (the fact that, for
instance, there have not been elections since 2008). I have also described the
sense of stagnancy by attending to the everydayness of Mostar, reflecting the
widespread sense that nothing ever changes. I recalled my time in Mostar to
illustrate how the repetitive rhythms of the city create an atmosphere of
stillness that is aggravated by the uncertainty of the future (significantly
determined by the precarious economy and high unemployment rates). Thus,
planning the future becomes a constraint, so much so that many dream of
escaping Mostar to relocate to a more ‘normal’ environment (Chapter 3).
Accordingly, I discussed how, despite the fact I could register oppositional
movements to the making and practice of ethno-nationalisms, these could not
be considered counter-movements as such, but products of the atmosphere of
ambiguity. I drew on Berlant’s work to discuss how the fluidity of the
everyday depends on experiencing situations of hardship that require citizens
to be inventive, alert, and ready to navigate such complexities, which often
does not translate into the desire for change. Rather, it promotes small and
never definitive moves as a survival strategy because change may well
exacerbate an already fragile situation.
Taken together, the three moments produce space in Mostar as
ambiguous, where contradictions are blunted, producing an atmosphere of
uncertainty and confusion. This also creates the possibility for individuals not
to choose one political project over others. Thus, while citizens do counter
the absoluteness of ethno-national spaces, they do not necessarily do so as
part of an organised or intentional political programme. In other words, even
if differences are produced in the everyday, these are minimal differences ,
which do not contain maximal differences necessary for the production of
revolutionary paths. Surely, because of historical contingencies (the existence
of BiH as a specific state formation based on consociational arrangements),
the production of space as ethno-nationally divided is currently overpowering
the formation of counter-spaces, which nevertheless remain visible both as
spontaneous and organised.

Heterotopias and the Subversion of Abstract/Absolute

Space
Drawing on the analyses in Chapters 2 and 3, Chapter 4 focused on
heterotopias in Mostar. These are spaces that accentuate existing
contradictions to produce a completely different space that contains
revolutionary potentials. I accounted for the artistic and research practice of
Abart, a grassroots platform, to illustrate the motives, strategies, and
challenges of those who have already taken the leap and decided to create
spaces that could accommodate citizens who do not comply with ethno-
national systems of power. Abart, as a platform, produced space in Mostar
that refused to become ethno-nationalised. Of course, it is always possible to
identify people’s ethnic background, yet ethno-national memberships was not
assumed as a making-sense category. In this way, Abart (and the OKC
Abrašević ) are actors in Mostar who are already producing a heterotopic
space in which the absolute category of ethno-national space is countered and
refused. By drawing on the work of Nicole Loraux and Giorgio Agamben, I
attempt to explain the radical rejection of ethno-national spacing as an act of
amnesty.
Loraux wrote extensively about the concept of stasis (the civil war) in
ancient Athens, which ‘unsettles established models, as well as their assuring
certitudes’ (Loraux 2002, 24–25). It pushes families, friends, and neighbours
one against the other, paralysing the polis. Following Aristotle , she explains
how the solution to stasis is amnesty , which depends on the agreement that
the memories of the conflict shall be rejected: ‘The question of memory in
Athens takes the form of a prescription and an oath. A rejected memory, but
still a memory’ (ibid., 146).
As noted by Agamben (2015), stasis is not about a new beginning (a
revolution), but a reform. According to Aristotle, not to engage with stasis
(civil war) is politically unacceptable so that amnesty (to forget about the
civil war) becomes a political duty (see also Agamben 2015, 1–33; Loraux
2002, 145–171). Amnesty does not mean to erase the memory of the conflict,
but rather to avoid making a bad use of that memory (Agamben 2015, 28–
29). Amnesty in Athens is not the invitation to forget the past, but rather the
invitation not to use memories to do further damage to the polis. This is
because stasis cannot be forgotten or erased—it needs to remain in the city,
but it should not be mobilised to provoke resentment. Thus:

By swearing not to recall previous misfortunes, the Athenian citizen

affirms that he renounces vengeance; to place himself under the double
authority of the city that decrees and of the gods who punish, he also
asserts that he will maintain control over himself as a subject. (Loraux
2002, 158)

The attitude embraced by groups such as Abart , which refuse to engage

with ethnic politics, could be explained along these lines. Whereas the
memories of the conflict cannot (and should not) be erased, these groups have
enacted amnesty and its implicit rule that memory shall not be used to
damage the city. On the contrary, pre-war memories are recollected to create
new bonds (bridges) between the city prior and after stasis . This is not to
erase the conflict (to pretend it did not happen), but to reinforce the notion
that the future could still be in continuity with the past rather than in absolute
opposition with it. Accordingly, the practice of remembering becomes a
creative tool, which could produce difference in the city.
The notion of difference is, for Lefebvre , crucial in understanding the
possibility of social emancipation and urban change:

Repetitions generate difference, but not all differences are equivalent. …

Under the reign of historical time, differences induced within a given
mode of production coexist at first with produced differences promoting
the demise of that mode. A difference of the latter kind is not only
produced – it is also productive. (Lefebvre 1991, 372)

Lefebvre is pointing to how the production of space , characterised by a

dialectical movement, tends toward the homogenisation of space , yet the
contradictions existing in society result in the concomitant production of
differences, which might incubate revolutionary paths. In order to apprehend
such revolutionary possibilities, Lefebvre assigns to creativity the political
power to imagine (and then produce) a (completely different) space, which
also entails leaving spaces of ambiguity in order to produce counter-spaces:
‘Contradictions are creative. They give rise to problems and this to a set of
possibilities and to the need to find a solution and therefore to the need to
make a choice’ (Lefebvre 2008, 209). Crucially, these creative spaces are
characterised by a state of pleasure and joy,

An architecture of pleasure and joy , of community in the use of the gifts

of the earth, has yet to be invented. When one asks what agencies have
informed social demands and commands, the answer is much more
likely to be commerce and exchange, or power, or productive labour, or
renunciation and death, than enjoyment and rest (in the sense of non-
work). (Lefebvre 1991, 379–380)

Here Lefebvre refers to the production of heterotopia as the space in

which individuals could regain power over their bodies and experience pure
pleasure in a harmonious relationship with the earth and nature. In Chapter 3,
I discussed Lefebvre’s association of emancipatory spaces with joy along
with Hardt’s reading of Spinoza whereby political action depends on the
experience of joy (as the capacity to act). In Chapter 4, I reflected on Abart ’s
projects highlighting their capacities to produce spaces of excitement and joy,
which lead to experiencing Mostar as a completely different space. I associate
these interventions to Abart’s political project of creating other (radically)
different spaces for those who refuse ethno-national politics. In this way,
using site-specific art interventions forms a foundation for reappropriating the
city to make new memories and attach new experiences to the urban
environment. Indeed, Abart’s and other groups’ projects remain confined to
specific (and liminal) spaces in Mostar such as the OKC Abrašević, but as
Lefebvre suggests,

In the end the invention of a space of enjoyment necessarily implies

going through a phase of elitism. This elite of today avoid or reject
quantitative models of consumption and homogenizing trends. …
Whatever the outcome of the elitist quest for community, however, …
the production of a new space… can never be brought about by any
particular social group; it must of necessity result from relationships
between groups – between classes or fractions or classes – on a world
scale . (Lefebvre 1991, 380)

Mostar Is More-Than-Divided
Throughout the book, I have mobilised the notion of Mostar as more-than-
divided to account for what exceeds the facts of the division. The concept
was shaped by readings within non- (and more-than-) representational
theories even though this book’s theoretical framework was largely inspired
by Lefebvre’s theory of space production rather than non- or more-than-
representational theories. Yet, there are ways in which the two theoretical
frameworks speak to and enrich each other. Thrift argues that:

non-representational theory arises from the simple (one might say

almost commonplace) observation that we cannot exact a representation
of the world from the world because we are slap bang in the middle of it.
We think about processes of meaning-making as occurring within
action, context and interactions rather than solely the representational
dimensions of discourse and structures of symbolic orders. (Thrift 1999,
296)

Thus more-than-representational theories pay attention to the everyday as

the vantage point to observe how practices and routines shape life without
becoming the product (or performance) of discourses (Lorimer 2005, 84).
Lefebvre also engages with the everyday as the site in which the balance
between the three moments of space production is reached or threatened. This
is because through (spatial and temporal) practices, abstracted notions of
space are accommodated, refashioned, or rejected by space users (the urban
dwellers). I borrow the idea to look at what exists beyond narrative and visual
representations to challenge the normalisation of Mostar as a divided city . I
do so by bringing attention to experiences, affects, and practices that both
prove and challenge the division as an all-encompassing entity. To attend to
Mostar in this way does not negate the entrenched division, nor does it
devalue its representation. Rather, it uses the representation of Mostar as
divided and reunited as generative to contrasting spatial practices in the city,
which are traceable in the everyday. But also, and by attending to affect and
affective understandings of agency, this book wishes to posit the question of
how radical political projects such as Abart hold the potential to affect the
present and the future of the divided city by offering the possibility to
experience alternative ways of being in the city that depart from the absolute
space of ethno-nationalism.

The Ethnography of Everyday Life

The choice of conducting a year-long ethnography gave me the privilege of
becoming part of the city’s narratives and, as such, gaining a vantage point
over (seemingly) detached observers. Certainly, the process of settling in was
not easy and it took me time to find my way through the fieldwork. Yet, by
living the everyday of the city, I could understand its rhythms and, crucially
to this project, its atmospheres. Further, to reflexively engage with the very
difficulties of the fieldwork (to become an individual rather than one of the
foreigners) illuminated processes of identity-formation and showed how the
other is always a dialogical construction, rather than ontologically existing a
priori.
To work with a local grassroots organisation proved useful in many ways
and, I believe, it should be recommended to those approaching the study of
this geopolitical area. In fact, my foreignness provoked resistance and it
could have greatly affected the results of this project (I may not have been
able to gather information about the everyday in the ways that I did). On the
contrary, to develop professional and personal relationships with Abart ’s
members facilitated and supported my exploration of the quotidian as well as
neutralising my presence as the other in the eyes of people to whom I was
introduced. To work within Abart also meant that my engagement with
heterotopias became more concrete as I participated in the creation of its
(counter)space. Further, my position as a researcher for (Re) collecting
Mostar meant that I could access (and produce) novel bodies of evidence; for
instance, designing two small surveys presented in Chapter 2 investigating
cultural production became crucial to conceptualising the infrastructures of
socialisation. It also allowed me to access interviewees conducted within the
process. I am aware of the criticism from those who believe that a researcher
should maintain an appropriate distance from her case study in order to
observe with a greater level of impartiality. Yet, I do not believe that being
impartial exists at all. I think there are ways to exercise criticality to control
the selection and analysis of data. And, in this respect, to engage with a
reflexive account of my fieldwork and the findings proved consistent with the
idea of highlighting the limits of the researcher vis-à-vis the unfolding of the
fieldwork. More importantly, I believe that academic research should engage
the reality outside academia in order to contribute, with the knowledge
produced, to the improvement of what has been studied. This could take the
form of policy documents, but could also become an engagement with art
production, as it was in my case. As such, this project (the account of Abart
’s initiatives) is another way to support ongoing struggles to obtain a more
equal system of representation, in both academia and political life generally.

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Index
A
Abart
Abrašević
Absolute space
Abstract space
Activists
Affective agency
Agamben, Giorgio
Alienation
Ambiguity
Amnesty
Anđelić-Galić, Gordana
Antagonism
Anti-nationalist practices
Archive of the City of Mostar
Aristotle
Atmosphere of immobility
Autogestion

B
Berlant
Biopolitics
Borders
Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) seceded from Yugoslavia
Bulevar

C
Change, idea of
Citizen(s) of Mostar
Citizenship
City as a single entity
City park
Civil society
Coffee
Commission for Reforming the City of Mostar
Complexities
Consociational (power-sharing) system
Constitutional law
Constitutional reform(s)
Contemporary BiH
Contradictions
Cosmos
Creativity
Croatian language
Cultural programmes

D
Dark humour
Dayton
Dayton Peace Agreements
Desire
Dialectical reading of social space
Difference
Diffuse unemployment
Divided city(ies)

E
East Mostar
Educational system
Electoral constituency(ies)
Electoral system
Electricity
Elite interviews
Ethnically divided societies
Ethnic politics
Ethnocracy
Ethnographic accounts
Ethnographic project
Ethnography
Ethno-national
Ethno-national categories
Ethno-national identities
Ethno-nationalism
Ethno-national membership
Ethno-national quotas
Ethno-national space
EUAM. See European Union Administration of Mostar (EUAM)
European city
European integration
European powers
European Union Administration of Mostar (EUAM)
Everyday
Everyday life
Everydayness

F
False stories from Mostar’s history
Federation of BiH, The
Festival
Festival of Art in Divided Cities
Flat affect
Foucault
Frustration
Fundraising

G
Grassroots activism
Grassroots initiatives
Grassroots organisation

H
Habsburg heritage
Hardt, Michael
Heterogeneity
Heterogeneous city
Heterotopia(s)
Heterotopic spaces
HIT
Homogeneity
Homogenisation of space
Homogenous
Humour

I
Imagination
Immobile city
Immobility
Individualna Radna Akcija 1
Inertia
Infrastructures of socialisation
International organisations
Internationals

J
Jouissance
Joyful atmosphere
Joyful euphoria

K
Katić, Božidar
Komunalno
Korso

L
Larger protests of 2013 and 2014
Lateral agency
Lefebvre, Henri
M
Marx, Karl
Maximal differences
Memorial
Millennium Development Goals Fund (MDG-F)
Minimal differences
More-than-representational theories
Mostar as more-than-divided
Multinational system

N
Nationalisms
Nationalist narratives
Neo-colonialist logic
Networks of solidarities
New administrative headquarter
Nomos
Non-sectarian groups
North Camp

O
Office of the High Representative (OHR)
OKC Abrašević (Youth Cultural Centre Abrašević)
Old Bridge
Orenčuk, Boris
Ottoman history

P
Partisan Memorial
Pastoral power
Peace Agreements
Permanent crisis
Permanent partition
Pleasure and joy
Political impasse
Political reductionism
Political struggle
Position of immobility
Post-war city
Post-war infrastructures
Practices of socialisation in pre-war Mostar
Pre-war
Privatisation of public spaces
Produce change
Production of space
Promenade Lenin
Public space

Q
Quotidian practices

R
Radna Akcija
Reappropriating space
Reductionism
(Re)collecting Mostar
Reflective nostalgia
Remembering in a post-conflict city
Representational space(s)
Representations
Representations of Mostar as divided
Representations of space
Republika Srpska
Resistance
Resistance spatially
Restructuring of the education system
Revolutionary tool, art as the
Rhythm(s)
Right to the city

S
Sarcasm
Scales
School curricula
Secure past
Sejdić-Finci case
Site-specific art works
Site-specific intervention(s)
Social change
Socialisation
Social life
Social safety
Social space
Space as a productive process
Space as becoming
Space as process
Space is always political
Spaces of fear
Spanish Square
Spatial discomfort
Spatial practice(s)
Spatial triad
Special Commission for reforming the City of Mostar
Spinoza
Spontaneity
Stasis
State
Survival strategy

T
Territory
To cross to the other side
Trans-ethnic narod
Two schools under one roof
Two water providers

U
Unpopular areas
UN Urbanism research
Urban, the
Urbicid (urbicide)

W
West Mostar
Widespread corruption

Y
Young/younger people
Youth Cultural Centre Abrašević
Yugonostalgia
Yugoslavia