Geopolitical intensities are not equally distributed: in some social formations, in some conjunctures, domestic developments are especially notably entangled with geopolitical dynamics. Contemporary supervised Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) is such a timespace, and it is recognised to be so by most of its inhabitants. This makes it particularly apt for the study of vernacular engagements with the realm of geopolitics. But how can we study such everyday geopolitics ethnographically, foregrounding not only sense-making by actors themselves, but also practice and social relations? Based on long-term research in BiH, this presentation will be organised around three main modalities in which we can approach everyday geopolitics as an ethnographic object: everyday geopolitical reasoning, geopolitical forms of affect, and geopolitics as infrastructure that sustains the everyday.
Stef Jansen is a social anthropologist. Based on long term ethnographic research in various post-Yugoslav states, his work has focused, amongst other things, on questions of home, hope, the state, borders, political subjectivity, social transformations and everyday geopolitics. He is Professor at the University of Sarajevo (Bosnia and Herzegovina) and Honorary Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Manchester (UK).
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