Category: English blog posts

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Challenging cultures of rejection

Sanja Bojanić, Stefan Jonsson, Anders Neergaard, Birgit Sauer

In this article, Bojanic, Jonsson, Neergaard and Sauer present a synthetic overview of the five country cases included in the special issue that analyse the emergence of cultures of rejection since 2015. In general, they discuss the conceptual framework of ‘Cultures of Rejection’, elaborated throughout the issue as a more encompassing approach that is sensitive to the values, norms and affects that underlie different or similar patterns of exclusion and rejection in different contexts. These cultures are located in the everyday lives of people. The article, therefore, first identifies contexts, objects of rejection­—often migrants and racialized Others, but also ‘the political’ or state institutions—narratives and components of cultures of rejection that we label reflexivity, affect, nostalgia and moralistic judgement. The contrasting reading of the five cases shows that people struggle for agency under precarious and insecure conditions, and fight against imagined enemies. As Bojanić, Jonsson, Neergaard and Sauer conclude, cultures of rejection mirror ongoing processes of neoliberal dispossession, authoritarization and depolitization that culminate in a wish for agency and resovereignization. Second, and based on this overview, trends in cultures of rejection are detected against different national contexts as well as against common trends of social and economic transformations and crises, such as, for instance, the COVID-19 pandemic. This results, finally, in a discussion of ways of challenging the cultures of rejection towards more democratic and solidaristic societies. One starting point might be the ‘re-embedding’ of the economy in society, that is, a more equal distribution of resources and future perspectives.

Challenging cultures of rejection

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The diaspora vote in Bosnia and Herzegovina: Caught between efforts to reverse the political effects of ethnic cleansing and voter suppression through procedural disenfranchisement

Aida Ibricevic

This chapter contributes to the growing literature on external voting, viewed as a transnational practice of external citizenship. Our chapter adds to the debates on the legitimacy of the right to vote without residing on the national territory by focusing on the case of Bosnia and Herzegovina, a post-conflict society with a large, mainly conflict-generated diaspora. The case of Bosnia and Herzegovinian external voting is particularly interesting, because of a large disparity between its normative intention of reversing the political effects of ethnic cleansing and its actual implementation. The question we aim to answer is whether external voting in Bosnia and Herzegovina lives up to its normative claim. To explore this question, we conduct legal analysis of Annex VII and Annex III of the Dayton Peace Agreement, which respectively provide the constitutional basis for physical and “political” return. We next turn to legal analysis of the BiH Election Law and BiH Law on Residence to show how both these laws have moved away from the original intention of the Dayton Peace Agreement (DPA) the de facto acceptance of postwar permanent residence as the main basis for all voter registration, including external voting registration. Finally, we attempt to evaluate the normative claim within the DPA, the promise of external voting allowing for “political return” through the reversal of the political effects of ethnic cleansing. To evaluate this claim we present a brief historical overview of postwar elections in BiH, describe some notable initiatives for mobilizing the diaspora vote such as “Glasaću za Srebrenicu” (I will vote for Srebrenica), “Prvi mart” (March First), and “Moja adresa Srebrenica” (My address is in Srebrenica), and discuss some illustrative examples from the 2018 general and 2020 local elections, which could potentially be indicative of trends within BiH external voting.

LINK: The diaspora vote in Bosnia and Herzegovina