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3 An NGO activist looking at Bogdan Bogdanovi´cBogdanovi´c's The Partisans' Memorial Source: Author.
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Yugoslavia, as its name — “the country of South Slavs” — suggested, was a country whose very existence was based on the ideal of the value of diversity. Different South Slavic peoples and other ethnic groups living among them were to be equal constituents of the country. Despite this narrative, the country collapsed amid the tragic Yugoslav wars of...
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Railway infrastructures and services in former Yugoslavia countries have been in a downward spiral ever since the country began to dismantle in the early 1990ies. Even if there have been scattered initiatives and investments to lift provided services to appealing levels after the war, a continuous downward trend can be identified in all important p...
The paper includes an analysis of the distribution of HDTV channels in the countries of the former Yugoslavia: Serbia, Montenegro, Croatia, Slovenia, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Macedonia.
An overview of the number of channels is made based on the different types of distribution: DVB-T, DVB-S, DVB-C and IPTV. Furthermore, the presence of the HDTV ch...
Citations
... Within a transition from a the post-conflict period began while fighting was not over, in Bosnia and Herzegovina, the conflict stopped almost immediately after the Dayton Agreement of 1995 (Bougarel, 1996), although occasional flare-up of violence still occurred, especially in the neighbourhoods occupied by the Serb-Bosnian army during the siege and re-incorporated to the city of Sarajevo 2 during 1996 (Martín-Díaz, 2021). Reconstruction then rapidly started under the firm supervision of the international community (Goldstein, 2015;Gül, Dee, 2015;Pobric, Robinson, 2019;Martín-Díaz, 2021), and liberalisation of the economy resumed. The destruction of large parts of the city by bombings during the siege also accelerated the economic transition, freeing spaces for construction or capitalist valorisation. ...
This article focuses on the transformation of post-socialist cities through the prism of consumption with the case of BBI Centar, a shopping centre located in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina. This paper attaches great importance to long-term analysis and retraces the evolution of this place from the construction of the first mall in 1974 to the construction of the current one in 2009. This manuscript’s aim is to discuss the notion of post-socialism through consumption, focusing on the place of private actors in the socialist and post-socialist cities and on the relationship between private investors and public authorities in a context of privatisation
... Whereas the possibility for Mostar to changeto grow and prosperis not dismissed, it seems unworkable as it depends on the willingness of political elites to collaborate (OHR, 2018). And exactly because the collaboration between international and local political actors has always been problematic, internationally-led strategies to produce change (i.e. to move forward with the state-building and peace processes) have steadily moved towards the nurturing of civil society as an alternative political protagonist (Goldstein, 2015;Jeffrey, 2013;Kappler, 2014;Keil & Perry, 2015). Accordingly, since the end of the conflict, many international and local NGOs settled in Mostar to work on education, dialogue, and reconciliation. ...
This article reflects on the meanings and possibilities of social change in Mostar, a city more often associated with the seeming impossibility of eradicating ethno-national divisions and corruption that paralyses it. It focuses on the under-researched politics of grassroots activism by drawing on Hardt’s and Negri’s work on the political potential of ‘love’ to shape and propel radical politics. Overall, the article reveals the lack of a cohesive agenda of grassroots politics in Mostar, and asks whether love (that creates and sustains political movement) can educate, patiently, to the revolution.
... If we take cosmopolitanism as, first of all, appreciation of (national) cultures other than our own, then calling the 'bridge building' practices in the postwar Western Balkans 'cosmopolitan' is likely to obscure the nature of these practices rather than explain them. For in the area in question, unlike in the Western Europe, 'building bridges' is often about appreciation of a local culture which has been hybrid for centuries, rather than of 'new hybridities' (Beauregard and Body-Gendrot 1999;Binnie et al. 2006), of well-known rather than of unknown (for my short discussion on this see Goldstein 2015). While Nava (2002) tells us that 'ordinariness and domestication of difference are the distinguishing marks of vernacular cosmopolitanism in urban Britain today' (ibid., 94), talking of 'domestication of difference' in Western Balkans would be inappropriate, if not for anything else, for that it would be hard to say which of the cultures would be domestifying and which domestified. ...
Active citizenship in the post-war Western Balkans has traditionally been studied in the context of either Western-style (and usually foreign-funded) Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs) or, more recently, protest movements. This chapter highlights a wider range of better- and lesser-known forms of civil society in the contemporary post-Yugoslav space. It shows how interest associations, student unions, religious groups and online communities can all contribute to vibrant civil society, even if their work seems distant from the post-war area’s current problems. This civil society, the chapter argues, creates an environment in which the people of the western Balkans can enact their citizenship and, little by little, ‘build bridges’, across ethnic lines and beyond.
Activism is typically associated with work within charities/NGOs or participation in social movements. This essay highlights activism different from these forms in that it happens without funding or mass mobilisation. Instead, it is powered by the longer-term perspective and day-to-day efforts of ‘activist citizens’. Based on interviews and participant observation in bookshop-cafés and other donor-independent initiatives in Novi Sad, Serbia, the essay argues that such ‘everyday activism’ is significant not only because it supports the development of other, more visible, forms of activism, but also in its own right, as a counter-space contributing to social change. © 2017 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
