Serbia

The current wave of protests and plenums in Bosnia and Herzegovina may thus represent the birth of true activist citizenship, and the profound politisation of a society over the most fundamental questions for any country, namely social justice and equality for all its citizens. What happens in Bosnia, will not stay only in Bosnia.

Framing the position of Romani minorities in terms of social exclusion usually remains undisputed. It is also not questioned that social exclusion sometimes alludes that Romani minorities are themselves to blame for their position and now the wider society as their saviours has to work out how to integrate them.  

In my terms, ‘perceived co-ethnics’ are defined as people who are recognised by the citizenship (or ethnizenship) conferring state as belonging to its main ethnic group although they themselves not only do not embrace that definition but have a distinct national project of their own. In other words, this imagined political community is seeking recognition in its own right under a different name and with different claims from that of the self-fashioned kin-state. However, the self-fashioned kin-state offers citizenship to them.

If feminist citizenship in SFRY has to be seen in the context of dissidence, while feminist citizenship in the context of nation-building needs to be assessed by its relationship to belonging and borders, then the post-Yugoslav feminist citizenship has to be understood in terms of political re-appropriation and re-politicization of Yugoslav socialist heritage. This re-politicization needs to be seen in the context of rigorous critique of socio-economic relations brought by neoliberal capitalism, but within the specific post-conflict and post-socialist circumstances. 

The weakness of all three states in the face of global economic competition has increasingly put pressure even on the revered model of citizen-soldier. In times of indebtedness and austerity, there is a greater competition for state resources and contestations of the current schemes of redistribution. The pressure to contribute economically is very much present, and the perfect citizen is no longer the soldier-citizen but the working and consuming citizen. The implications of this statement go much beyond the former Yugoslavia. In the age of corporate soldiers and wars fought by drones, there is a risk that states stop caring about the quality of their ‘stock’, adding yet another reason to shed state responsibility for their populations.