The Local Workforce of International Intervention in the Yugoslav Successor States: ‘Precariat’ or ‘Projectariat’? Towards an Agenda for Future Research

Catherine Baker

doi:10.1080/13533312.2014.899123

Abstract

The international organizations involved in peacebuilding, democratization and peacekeeping in the Yugoslav successor states have employed thousands of locally recruited workers as project officers, language intermediaries and support staff. This makes them a distinct employment sector within these post-socialist and in several cases post-conflict economies, most significantly in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo. This paper evaluates arguments in favour of regarding this workforce firstly as a group of workers suffering precarity and secondly as a privileged social elite. While there are good grounds for recognizing them as a distinctive social group, this distinctiveness has not led to a widely expressed social identity based on the commonalities of their employment.

Highlights

Since 1991, the nature of the break-up of Yugoslavia, the course of the conflict and the structure of the international interventions in the Yugoslav successor states during and after the wars have brought a number of new social groups into being
The locally-recruited language intermediaries and project workers working in the ‘international organization’ sector in Yugoslav successor states do not appear as tropes in popular representations of the conflict to the extent that veterans, refugees and other such figures have been depicted in post-Yugoslav fiction and cinema, and where they do appear they are supporting characters rather than protagonists whose transformation is the focus of the narrative
That the local workforce of international intervention in the Yugoslav successor states represents another social group to have emerged from the break-up of Yugoslavia, perhaps even a novel social class

Summary

Introduction

Since 1991, the nature of the break-up of Yugoslavia, the course of the conflict and the structure of the international interventions in the Yugoslav successor states during and after the wars have brought a number of new social groups into being.

Results

Conclusion