engleski

Material Enactments of Shifting Hierarchies: Emic Perspectives on Humanitarian Aid in the 1990s War in Sarajevo

This chapter focuses on the local perceptions of the effects of humanitarian aid, conceptualised as a specific realm of global interconnectedness. As an aspect of global moral and political order, humanitarian aid has multiple concrete implications on the developments on the ground – from saving bare life to redefining hierarchies of power and effecting, with uncertain outcomes, the existent local socio-cultural orders. My empirical focus is Bosnia- Hercegovina, a country that, due to the four-year war in the 1990s, attracted one of the largest humanitarian operations of that decade, involving all most significant international organisa- tions. Based on fifteen interviews conducted in 2013-14 with people who lived in Sarajevo in the course of the 1990s war, this paper suggests that war events are by no means ‘forgotten’ but have a staying effect on the perceptions of multiple hierarchies, local and global, that people have been immersed in because of living in Bosnia-Hercegovina. Three fields of concern emerge as important from the emic point of view, namely (i) the negotiation of the position of a generic ’other’ in the global hierarchy of peace and conflict ; (ii) the negotiation of the locally embedded socio-cultural order ; (iii) the resistance to the negotiation of the moral order. These fields of concern indicate the local perceptions of and the modes of acting within the shifting hierarchies, here analysed with regard to their material enactments and in relation to the inter- sected spatial, socio-cultural, and moral frameworks.

Humanitarian Aid ; Bosnia-Hercegovina ; Emic Perspectives ; Hierarchies ;

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