Social Activism and Governments’ Response in Bosnia-Herzegovina

Why social activism struggles to emerge in regions divided along national, ethnic and religious lines? This paper focuses on Bosnia-Herzegovina to answer this question. The 1995 Dayton Peace Agreement paved the way for a double hegemony involving both economic neoliberalism and nationalist rule. The post-war transition guaranteed stability, understood as absence of war, but at the cost of social marginalization, high levels of unemployment, increasing poverty and growing migration – especially towards the European Union. Citizens attempted to challenge both nationalist and neoliberal frameworks by putting forward alternative principles based on non-nationalist values, economic justice and the rule of law. They looked for different forms of political practice and struggled to advance, in Gramscian terms, a counter-hegemony focused on citizen needs and more coherent with global justice claims - but with little avail. Based on extensive field research, including more than 20 semi-structured interviews, this paper examines the two most important social movements which developed since 2017-18 called “Justice for David” and “Justice for Dzenan.” Following the death of two young men – David and Dzenan – their families’ demands for justice has grown into a broader challenge to nationalist rule. While these social movements reached some limited success in fostering some level of inter-ethnic solidarity, they also have shown the limits of this type of mobilization. The governments of both the Federation and Republika Srpska reacted to this unexpected social activism by loosening legal guarantees and attempting to demobilize activists. Drawing from Gramsci’s notion of hegemony and (counter)-hegemonic struggle, this paper sheds light on the potential and possibilities of citizen organizing in the context of divided societies. The movements for David and Dzenan, despite their limits, brought to the fore a critical and emancipatory spotlight on subaltern political claims against the power of the state. They directly addressed the question raised by Foucault of “how not to be governed like that, by that, in the name of this principle, in view of such objectives, and by the means of such methods”, which prompted the organization of this particular section.