The tragedy of Dayton was that we created a state that was defined in terms of the people who created the war; and they defined the war ethnically; and they defined the state ethnically. And that, I donāt think, was the primary appellation ordinary Bosnians would use. (James OāBrien, [one of the Americans responsible to formulate the Dayton Accord], in Toal and Dahlman 2011: 164)
In 1989, while the Berlin Wall was being demolished, a famous comedic group from Sarajevo imagined the end of Yugoslavia and the division of the city of Sarajevo in two. In the episode āPodjela Sarajeva - Sarajevski Zidā1 (Divided Sarajevo-Sarajevan wall), a wall has been built in the middle of Sarajevo, dividing it into Zapadno Sarajevo (West Sarajevo) and IstoÄno Sarajevo (East Sarajevo), as had been the case in Berlin. Although it was recorded and broadcasted in 1989, the episode suggested that the action was taking place on 11 November 1995āa date when, indeed, representatives of the warring parties from Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) would later sit at the negotiation table in Dayton, Ohio (USA), along with leaders from the United States, France, Germany, United Kingdom, Russia, Croatia and Yugoslavia (now Serbia), to discuss precisely, among other topics, the division of Sarajevo.
Two of the main issues to be agreed upon by the parties during those 21 days of fierce negotiations were āthe new Bosnian mapā and the future of approximately half of BiHās population at that time (4.4 million people), who were driven from their homes,2 many through practices that have been denominated āethnic cleansingā.
What emerged from these negotiationsāthe Dayton Peace Agreementāwas an ambivalent response. On the one hand, the ethnic cleansing campaigns3 were sanctioned, when an internal Inter-Entity Boundary Line (IEBL) was agreed upon, dividing BiH into two entities and āconfirming a de facto ethnoterritorialization of what was once simply Bosnian shared space by allā (Toal and Dahlman 2011: 6). The division of BiH into two political entitiesāthe Federation of Bosnia-Herzegovina, to be divided into ten cantons between Bosniaks 4 and Croats, and the Republika Srpska for the Serbs 5āwas based on the territories conquered during the war by each group at the moment when the DPA was signed. Negotiations in Dayton thus operated āon the assumption that (ā¦) war could be ended by a cartographic fixā (ibidem: 149). The drawing of the IEBL and, consequently, the institutionalization of this ethnoterritorial logic, created several difficulties for those who suddenly found themselves living āon the other sideāāand were called āminoritiesā. The Dayton Peace Agreement reduced spaces and places to matters of ethnonational ownership (Campbell 1998: 115), and was followed, in the first months after its signature, by a renewed practice of āunmixingā of Bosnia and Herzegovina, this time led by āminoritiesā moving towards their āproperā entity. On the other hand, the DPA states that āthe early return of refugees and displaced persons is an important objective of the settlement of the conflictā and that āall refugees and displaced persons (ā¦) to freely return to their homes of originā (General Framework Agreement,6 1995, Annex 7).
Dayton, thus, provides a āschizophrenicā normative framework: while it foresees the re-mixing of Bosnian population, it also reinforces and legitimizes the drive for homogenization of spaces produced during the war. That ambivalence was for a long time reflected in the policies of returning refugees and internally displaced persons. While the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) has mobilized, since 1996, efforts to assure the returns, in the first years especially, returnees were often met with animosity and even violence by certain groups, especially in Republika Srpska, who wanted to maintain the recently achieved status quo. Sparks of violence led NATOās Implementation Force (IFOR) responsible for securing the DPAās Military Annexāto declare a halt to returns by establishing checkpoints in the IEBL and, thus, āgiving it materiality (ā¦) guarding Republika Srpska from āincursionsā and putting Annex 7 on hold for the first years after Daytonā (Toal and Dahlman 2011: 170).
Homogenization was, however, never achieved, and, as this book argues, it can never be achieved. Through the years, the returning process was resumed, although it is difficult to ascertain precisely the extent it has reached.7 For those who would find themselves as a āminorityā in the villages or cities where they were born or spent a part of their life, there were few incentives to āgo backā (Brubaker 2013; Halilovich 2013). Due to displacements and disruptions in the social fabric, many found themselves lacking in familiar bonds and connections, which are not only important for social life, but also in order to find employment, for example.8 Moreover, just as the Bosnian map has been reduced to matters of ethnonational ownership, many aspects of life were also āremadeā. The DPA has taken ethnonationality as the primary category around which to organize political life in BiH, and many services on the everyday life have been reorganized accordingly, such as the health and schooling system, universities and the media. That has represented a shift for Bosnians, who were used to categories such as religion and ethnonational affiliations being considered a personal matter and mainly relegated to domestic life. For the generations that grew up in Yugoslavia after the Second World War, ābeing Bosnian was growing up in a multicultural and multireligious environment, an environment where cultural pluralism was seen as intrinsic to the social orderā (Bringa 1993: 87). There were differences in how this multiculturalism and multi-religious society was organized and lived, according to each region and, also, from one village to another. This distinction, however, was sharpened in what concerned rural and urban areas. In rural BiH, Bringa (2002) suggests, kinship was the primary bond of loyalty. Because interethnic marriages are rare in rural areas, even before the war, ākinship overlaps with ethnicityā, although it is ākinship and not ethnicity that held the primary emotional appeal and is the mobilizing factorā. In the cities, especially among āmixed familiesā9 and those who considered themselves communists or Yugoslavs, ethnonational categories would barely make sense10 and people would live intermingled, dwelling in the same buildings, attending the same schools etc.
There is something very personal and intimate about the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina, and part of it relies on what it takes to āunmixā people who live together. Employing a strong image here, we could say that war in BiH called its victims by something as personal as their names, in the sense that, most of the time, someoneās name is the only way to distinguish between Serbs, Croats and Bosniaks.11 A myriad of accounts describes how people would recognize neighbours, colleagues or ancient teachersāfamiliar facesāamong their tormentors. Thus, during and after the war, many marriages, friendships and neighbouring ties were reconfigured (MaÄek 2009) and the enactment of boundaries in Bosnia and Herzegovina became strongly related to spheres of life understood as private or personal.
Another episode from Top Lista Nadrealista deals with this question. In 1991, the group produced a sketch that would become symbolic in the years to come, named āRat u familiji Popuslicā12 (War in Popuslicās family). In the video, a building in the city of Sarajevo is on fire, and there is a āwarā going on in one of its apartments. A couple is about to divorce due to their ādifferencesā. The woman, standing behind the trenches and holding a rifle, says she has conquered āthe kitchen, the big room and a smaller roomā. She then yells to her future ex-husband, who is behind the trenches from the other side of the apartment, that she has āhistorical rights, historical rightsā on those āterritoriesā. As in the metaphor of the divided apartment, āeveryday placesā have become more visibly politicized and contested.
However, it is also in the everyday life that we find cracks in this segregation and homogenization logic. Toal and Dahlman (2011), in their monumental effort to provide a portrait of this process of āethnicization of spacesā in BiH, suggest, in their conclusion, that:
Ethnic cleansing (ā¦) has been the most powerful force in the remaking of Bosnia over the last two decades. Contemporary Bosnia has an ethnoterritorial structure it previously never had. Formerly entwined human geographies have largely been uprooted and destroyed. Ethnically mixed communities with strong neighborhood identities have been transformed into far more homogeneous communities characterized by divisions among locals, displaced settlers, and returnees. What was previously a marginal spatial form on the palimpsest of Bosnia-Herzegovina ā so-called ethnic enclaves ā has become the dominant pattern. Examine the details, however, and traces of a more complex human geography are visible. (p. 307, my emphasis)
Here, I decided not only to āexamine the detailsā, but to look elsewhere, in order to understand how boundariesāwhich will be treated here as a process and dependent on enactmentsāare not only produced and reproduced, but, especially, subverted and destabilized. I turn to the everyday as an onto-epistemo-methodological choice, by claiming that the lived space of the everyday is full of contradictions, and those contradictions are precisely where we must look in order to capture alternative practices that provide for a different narrative of post-Dayton Bosnia and Herzegovina and, ultimately, post-conflict societies. As Gupta and Ferguson (1992) suggest, āimportant tensions may arise when places that have been imagined at a distance must become lived spacesā (p. 11). Thus, one of the questions of this book might have been: What people āmake-doā of Dayton and its boundaries in their everyday lives? Such question, however, gives a false impressi...