Resisting the Culture of Trauma in Bosnia and Herzegovina: Emancipatory Lessons for/in Cultural and Knowledge Production

Abstract

This chapter analyses some responses to specific technologies of culturalised governance of life in Bosnia and Herzegovina. It draws on the concepts of politics of witnessing to trauma and ‘terror as usual’ situated in the intersecting fields of knowledge production, art and social activism in the post-Yugoslav region. The privileged metaphors of the culture of trauma enacted as the politics of terror refer to the material remnants of human waste produced by political violence in the region—mass grave and ghetto. Drawing on them, one can map out the key narratives and technologies of governing contingency under various umbrellas—including the ‘transitional justice’ paradigm, or regime of knowledge and power. These narratives and technologies are challenged, repoliticised, resisted and transformed by emergent agents and practices within the overlapping spaces of publicity—education, theory, art, activism—which hold transformative potential for the politics of hope, solidarity and equality beyond the foreclosure of the horizons of possibility and plausibility in our political and everyday lives in Bosnia. This chapter brings into our field of political visibility some urgent and emergent ways of resistance to the regimes of culturalised governance in the security–development nexus universally. By insisting on critically important instances of knowledge production, social activism and art in the form of public platforms, classrooms and interventions, as well as drawing on their lessons, this chapter calls for further and more intense work on cooperative efforts that forge the means for critical knowledge production as a public good set against the culture of trauma as the politics of terror in Bosnia and Herzegovina and internationally.