Hunger & Fury: The Political in Bosnia and Herzegovina

This text is an attempt to (re)approach the process of political and social transfor-mation in Bosnia-Herzegovina (BiH) over the past century and a half through the prism of popular agency. The primary research question of this dissertation asks why given nearly uniformly catastrophic social indicators across virtually all socio-economic categories there are so few instances of overt popular dissatisfaction (e.g. protests and/or energetic voter turnout) with the prevailing political order in BiH? In addressing this question through an analysis that straddles political theory, international relations, and political economy literatures I focus on the role played by the specific local variant(s) of the nation-state form in essentially depoliticizing the majority of the population in this polity. My central argument is that rather than creating the conditions for rational-legal public administration and multi-party competition, the state in BiH has historically served to deny political agency to would-be citizens. The state in BiH has actively sought to eliminate civil society, in other words, and that therefore the defining political and social crises in contemporary BiH must be understood in the context of nearly two centuries of this particular and peculiar state (and nation) formation process. I argue that the historic evolution of the BiH polity has been characterized by a form of elastic authoritarianism; the process of seemingly persistent ideological mutation contrasted by static political and economic patterns. Uniquely persistent patterns marked in BiH primarily by oligarchic political and parasitic economic practices. Thus despite decades of international democracy promotion efforts in BiH since the conclusion of the war in the 1990s, it is these broader patterns of state formation (and perpetuation) that have suffocated attempts at genuine popular participation in the countrys politics.