Discourse and Affect in Postsocialist Bosnia and Herzegovina

"Speaking from and about the periphery that Bosnia-Herzegovina has become, Danijela Majstorović theorises the affective entanglements of Bosnians’ responses to peripheralization with a decolonial commitment and an intimate understanding of what it has meant in her own material and social worlds between protests for civic justice and the ‘third wave’ of postsocialist migration from Bosnia-Herzegovina emplacing and displacing ‘peripheral selves'."

-Catherine Baker, University of Hull, UK


This book examines the making and breaking of peripheral selves in and from postsocialist Bosnia in an empirically rich self-reflexive account of politico-economic and ideological developments. Through world systems and postcolonial theory, historical and new materialist optics, discursive and affective analytical registers, and various qualitative methodological choices, the author analyzes peripheral subjectivity in connection to global proletarianization, as well as past andpresent resistance via social and personal movement(s). She refers to past Yugoslav socialist and anticolonial struggles as well as more recent ones, including the social justice and feminist collective, engaging with workers’ and women’s struggles in postwar Bosnia and the Justice for David movement. Finally, she analyzes the lives of new third-wave Bosnian migrants to Germany post-2015, placing them in juxtaposition with non-European migrants in Bosnian reception centers and exposing labor and race, border struggles and market as new variables for studying selves in this particular context. Writing about “situated knowledge” and “politics of location,” the author stresses the importance of strong affective ties within researcher-researched assemblages urging for deeper coalitions and solidarity among various peripheral, power-differentiated communities. This book will be of interest to readers with backgrounds in linguistics, sociology, post-Yugoslav history, cultural studies and anthropology.


Danijela Majstorović is Professor of English Linguistics and Cultural Studies in the English Department at the University of Banja Luka, Bosnia and Herzegovina. Her research interests involve qualitative social research, critical discourse analysis, critical theory, feminism and postcolonial theory. She has published extensively on postwar Bosnia’s postsocialist transformation, the role of the international community and local ethno-nationalist elites, youth ethnicity, women’s struggles, social movements and migrations.