The Inheritance of Militarization: Toxic Gifts, Furtive Critique, and Survivance in Post-War Bosnia

Abstract

To think of Bosnia is to think of war, but militarization precedes and exceeds war, as socialist Yugoslavia located much of its military industry here. The toxic gift of socialist militarization enables people in a small industrial town to survive and stay home at the same time as unfiltered toxic waste makes this home less habitable, poisoning their beloved river. The residents, this article shows, are equally people of the military factory and people of the river, and have to reconcile this dual inheritance. Historicizing the gendered inheritance of socialist militarization and contextualizing neoliberal dispossession and deregulation, this article examines how residents articulate a furtive critique of industrial toxicity in the extended domestic sphere, by which I mean the intimate gatherings in people’s yards and on neighborhood walks and riverside benches that comprise the interstices between public and private where much of Bosnian life is lived. Ethnographically, the article attends to the felt embodiments of dual riverine and militarized inheritance, illuminating furtive complaints of toxicity and poignant fragments of memory told in passing in the extended domestic sphere. Here, residents reclaim their inheritance of the river, planting seeds of dissent and survivance.