Introduction
‘They Took In a Refugee Family. But Families Don’t Have Borders’. This was the title of an article in New York Times that I read one Sunday morning in 2018. The article traced a refugee journey of Hajj family from the moment they fled Syria, through their sheltering in Lebanon and final settlement in Canada. Their journey, and ultimately their integration into Canadian society, was sponsored by a group of Canadian citizens. The article documented Hajj family’s continuous communication with their extensive family who were left behind and sponsor’s on-going struggle to divert family’s focus to their present life in Canada. The problem was that despite the help that Mouhamad al-Hajj and Wissam al-Hajj had received for successful resettlement in their new hometown of Toronto, they kept strong connections with home, and a significant part of their daily lives was dedicated to nurturing those family relationships via internet and phone. This was frustrating for their Canadian sponsors who were hoping that with their help within a year Hajj family would be enjoying an independent new life in Canada, leaving behind those relationships from home.
Reading the article made me realise couple of things. It confirmed how little has changed since the Bosnian1 refuge movement of 1990s. Despite decades of research in a number of disciplines such as sociology, anthropology and psychology, and others that have portrayed and discussed a complexity of refugee experiences, refugees are still largely viewed in binary terms in a sense of having a past and a present, an old and a new home, a former and a new resettled life. Reading the article has also confirmed how valuable it is to continue in-depth studies of refugee experiences so that an accurate understanding of long-term refugee needs can be generated. This is very important as the world is witnessing the highest level of displacement on record. There are 68.5 million forced migrants in the world including 25.4 million refugees, half of whom are under the age of 18. There are estimates of 10 million stateless people with no access to basic rights such as healthcare, education and freedom of movement, and currently one person is forced and displaced from their home every 2 seconds (UNHCR 2019).2
By introducing a new concept of post-refugee transnationalism to explain Bosnian refugee and post-refugee experiences over the past two decades, the aim of this book is to contribute to the body of research on refugee needs and to disrupt the binary way refugee lives are understood. The book develops a new concept of post-refugee transnationalism to describe experiences of Bosnian refugees who settled in Ireland, 20 years after they fled the conflict in Bosnia, and explores their ambivalent relationship with their host and home countries, Ireland and Bosnia. Post-refugee transnationalism is characterised by Bosnians dividing their time between the two countries rather than permanently settling in either and their involvement in a number of transnational activities. The book proposes post-refugee transnationalism as different to other instances of transnationalism by stressing its enforced origin provoked initially by the conflict in Bosnia, but later also by the Dayton Peace Agreement, and by the treatment of Bosnian refugees in Ireland. Though enforced the book also highlights a positive side of post-refugee transnationalism theorised as a space of possibility and a grey zone of potentiality . This positive side involves summer migrations to Bosnia and diasporic affiliations and interconnections.
This book applies three theoretical lenses in order to understand Bosnian post-refugee experience: theories of transnationalism , Goldberg’s (2002) racial state theory and Foucault’s concepts of biopolitics and governmentality. Theories of transnationalism facilitate the understanding by situating Bosnian migratory experiences as grounded between two states, Bosnia and Ireland. Goldberg’s racial state theory captures the influence of the state and the involvement of the state in policies of homogenisation and racialisation. Foucault’s theorisations of biopolitics and governmentality capture the modus operandi of homogenisation and racialisation in two different settings.
The book mobilises this cluster of theories in relation to both nation states, Bosnia and Ireland. It positions Bosnian post-refugee transnationalism as grounded (Smith and Guarnizo 1998) between these two states. In addition, the book theorises both states as racial states but argues that they operate via two different regimes of governmentality. In Ireland, the regime of governmentality operates through the Irish interculturalism where ethnic homogenisation is inherent to the way diversity is managed in the state. The Bosnian regime of governmentality, enabled by the Dayton Agreement, is responsible for the currently divided society of post-Dayton Bosnia—plagued by ethnic reification, increased nationalism and an extreme religiosity. Both states operate practices of racialisation and homogenisation, albeit in biopolitically specific ways. Overall, the book argues that Bosnian refugee experiences cannot coexist along these regimes of governmentality. Not fitting into either, Bosnian migrants3 are forced to negotiate between the two. This transnational existence grants them with a space of possibility (Morokvasic 2004). While originating out of necessity, this space of possibility provides them with an arena for building new connections and new futures.
The book is based on 30 semi-structured interviews conducted with Bosnian former refuges (now citizens settled in Ireland) in 2008, 2009 and 2015. These interviews were conducted both in Bosnia and in Ireland. Some interviews were conducted in people’s own homes and some in public places or Bosnian Community Development Project (see sections below). Some interviews were one to one, while others were with the whole families. Both men and women participated, and age varied from 20 to over 60. It is also based on a number of unofficial conversations and my observations of post-Dayton Bosnia during the number of ethnographic stays in Bosnia and Herzegovina between 2007 and 2018. In addition to the ethnographic stays in Bosnia, the knowledge behind this book is connected to author’s own positioning. The author was born in the former Yugoslavia and knows the place, its history and culture well. This meant that entering the fieldwork, getting access to participants and understanding the situation in Bosnia were not problematic for the author. Being a native speaker of the language meant that the author can understand the nuances in meaning during the interview process which otherwise could have been missed. Overall, the author’s own positioning has equipped her with tacit knowledge about the subject of the study which has enriched both data collection and data analysis.
Before moving on to discuss the Bosnian migratory story, there are two points that are in need of clarification. They relate to the issues of ethnicity and racialisation and to the concept of post-refugee.