ABSTRACT
The editorial introduction puts forward the concept of flux as an analytical heuristic that, in contrast to widely used tropes like stuckedness, immobility, and frozenness, directs attention to the primacy of movement and multiplicity. In this edited volume, we consider these dynamics essential for understanding lives in Bosnia and Herzegovina as a starting point for developing analytical sensibilities and conceptual work to the connections and juxtapositions of socio-material upheavals in the semiperipheries of the post-Cold War world. Beyond reassessing the dominant epistemological-cum-ontological frames that have shaped much of the knowledge production on Bosnia and Herzegovina over the past three decades, we argue that the country should be reconsidered as a spatio-temporal coordinate of larger post-Cold War developments. Bosnia and Herzegovina, in this sense, can serve as a lens for examining these world-wide reconfigurations. To explore this, we propose belonging, caring, and reckoning as three key instances of flux to elucidate with ethnographic and historical sensibility what makes life possible in circumstances where the end of hope seems to become the prevailing horizon of expectations. Through these analytical lenses, we address questions regarding the sovereignty and agency of polities that emerged from the violent aftermaths of the Cold War and became both targets and laboratories of international intervention and governmentality.
