The View from the Back of the Warrior: Mobility, Privilege and Power during the International Intervention in Bosnia-Herzegovina

Abstract

This chapter shows how spatial practices of security and intervention, as well as the spatial implications of post-socialism discussed elsewhere in this book, have produced novel mobilities in Bosnia-Herzegovina since the outbreak of war in 1992 and the beginning of international intervention in the same year. Within and around a site of international intervention such as Bosnia-Herzegovina, movement across space is deeply structured by power and privilege. Their structuring effects are all the more visible because of the restrictions placed on movement by the military geographies that emerge from conflict and the political geographies that may develop in response to it: the blocking of transit routes by checkpoints, the laying of mines to deny movement to an enemy, the fortification of elements of the built environment, such as schools or factories, that had previously served public purposes, the political division of territory, exacerbated by forced migration, the visa restrictions imposed by powerful states on the country’s nationals who may previously not have been subject to them. While some of these factors are also manifested in spaces that are not sites of intervention, it is in post-conflict spaces where they are most visible.