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Scaling Humanitarianism:
Humanitarian Actions in a
Bosnian Town
a
Čarna Brković
a
University of Manchester (currently: CEU Institute
for Advanced Study), Podgorica, Montenegro
Published online: 16 May 2014.

To cite this article: Čarna Brković (2014): Scaling Humanitarianism:

Humanitarian Actions in a Bosnian Town, Ethnos: Journal of Anthropology, DOI:
10.1080/00141844.2014.912246

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00141844.2014.912246

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 Scaling Humanitarianism: Humanitarian
Actions in a Bosnian Town

Čarna Brković
Downloaded by [Central European University] at 09:16 20 May 2014

University of Manchester (currently: CEU Institute for Advanced Study), Podgorica, Montenegro

ABSTRACT Through an ethnographic focus on humanitarne akcije in Bosnia and Her-

zegovina – a local form of raising monetary donations to people who need medical
treatments abroad – this paper explores humanitarianism and its understandings of
life. Ethnographically tracking the course of a humanitarna akcija organised in one
Bosnian town, this paper makes two related points. First, it ethnographically demon-
strates that lives of the ‘helpers’ and ‘helped’ in humanitarne akcije were understood
as immersed in the intense talk and gossip of the town and as exposed to the socio-
political environment troubled in the same way. Comparing this understanding of life
with the international humanitarianism, this paper suggests that the notion of ‘bare
life’ in international humanitarian projects in emergencies may be the product of
the separation of infrastructures, which enable and manage lives of the ‘savers’ and
‘saved’. Second, those who needed help through humanitarne akcije strongly criticised
the lack of organised health care and social security in Bosnia and Herzegovina that
pushed them to initiate humanitarne akcije. They criticised less how other people per-
ceived them (the terms of their sociocultural recognition) and more the shrinking public
health-care insurance, unavailability of medical treatments, unequal allocation of
medicines, tissues and organs, and so forth (the unjust redistribution of resources).
Their dissatisfactions imply that humanitarianism as an industry of aid can be criticised
for failing to intervene in the global regimes of unequal redistribution of resources in a
transformative way.

keywords Humanitarianism, humanitarne akcije, life, survival, recognition, redistri-

bution, Bosnia and Herzegovina

ethnos, 2014 (pp. 1– 26), http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00141844.2014.912246

# 2014 Taylor & Francis
 2 čarna brković

Introduction
etar and Milena Božović, a couple living in the town of Bijeljina, Bosnia

P and Herzegovina (hereon: Bosnia), have a five-year-old son Slavko who

has multiple developmental difficulties and has been diagnosed several
times with different results. Slavko stopped talking when he was two years
old, had problems walking and also suffered from hearing difficulties. Since
medical practitioners were unable to agree over his diagnosis, several different
predictions of his likely lifespan were made. The Božović’s took Slavko once
a month across the Bosnian state border to an institution for psycho-physiologi-
cal disabilities and speech pathology in Serbia, paying for these visits them-
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selves. The Božović’s were not satisfied with the pace of Slavko’s treatment in
Serbia, and in 2009 they decided to try an experimental treatment at a
Moscow clinic. They started a humanitarna akcija (literally: humanitarian
action; plural: humanitarne akcije), a form of raising monetary donations to
people who need medical treatments abroad. When they made their first call
for help, which they printed on a piece of paper and placed on buildings
throughout the town, their neighbours made a joint donation to Petar’s bank
account. Petar, highly educated and working in construction, quit his job in
order to dedicate all his time to raising humanitarian aid, while Milena, a
music teacher in the local elementary and high school for music, supported
the family. In the course of the following months in 2009 and 2010, the Božo-
vić’s managed to raise tens of thousands of euros from friends and family, neigh-
bours, acquaintances, public actors, school children, workers at local businesses,
the municipal government and other state actors, non-governmental organis-
ations and so forth.
During my fieldwork year in 2009 – 2010 in Bijeljina, three such humanitarne
akcije were successfully completed. What makes such actions possible, even
necessary, in post-war, post-socialist Bosnia and Herzegovina? And what
does attending to this specific form of humanitarian practice have to tell us
about humanitarianism more broadly? In this paper, I will detail the conditions
of possibility for a successful humanitarna akcija, and in doing so will show that
compassion flowed through the state institutions, homes, private firms and
workplaces in humanitarian attempts to ensure the survival and well-being of
particular people in Bijeljina.
Bijeljina is a Bosnian town on the border with Serbia. The shift in political
and economic organisation in Bosnia from socialist self-management to elec-
toral democracy and the free market was concurrent with the war, which in
Bijeljina resulted in a massacre in 1992 and the forced expulsion of persons

ethnos, 2014 (pp. 1 –26)

 Scaling Humanitarianism 3

marked as Muslims, as well as a large influx (throughout and after the war) of
displaced persons marked as Serbs (Human Rights Watch 2000). Today,
Bijeljina has a large number of Serb refugees, and Janja, a village in the munici-
pality of Bijeljina,1 has a very high percentage of Bosniak (Muslim) returnees.
Humanitarne akcije emerged as a mechanism through which relations were
reproduced in the middle of the restructuring of a shattered political space,
whose partial character they illuminate (Bougarel et al. 2007). If the health-
care system of the Socialist Federative Republic of Yugoslavia (hereon:
SFRY) provided virtually universal access to a wide spectrum of services
(World Bank 2004), including specialised medical treatments abroad, the
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post-war neoliberalisation of health-care insurance laws left more than 20% of

Bosnian citizens without any public health-care insurance and significantly
limited the availability of medical treatments (Salihbašić 2008). The pre-war
health-care system was centralised at the level of the republic of Bosnia and
the SFRY citizens had free access to health care across Yugoslavia. Post-war
health care in Bosnia is divided into 13 health-care systems, which significantly
limit access to health care for many. The health-care reform was conducted
through a change in insurance legislature, the reorganisation of health care
into a three-tier model, with an emphasis on the importance of ‘gatekeepers’,
and the privatisation of various health-care services. Humanitarne akcije
emerged amidst such changes as a form of protection in which the state,
market-driven entities, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), families,
friends and many other actors could collectively determine the survival and
well-being of a single person. Similar practices of raising money for medical
treatment abroad for a single person exist across post-socialist countries.2
Although these practices have largely evaded the attention of anthropologists
so far, I contend that they are not synonymous with charity, if charity means
offering help outside of the state institutions and from ‘above’ (the wealthier)
to ‘below’ (poorer people). They rather seem to be a partial, not quite informal,
mode of protecting people whose survival was uncertain because of the gaps
created by changes made to the health-care system they depended on.
In Bijeljina, humanitarne akcije lasted a couple of months and consisted of
a number of smaller, one-off events, such as, but not limited to, those listed
below.

1. Neighbours, friends and acquaintances of the family would make a

small payment to the bank account of the family member or organise
among themselves and make a larger collective donation.

ethnos, 2014 (pp. 1 – 26)

 4 čarna brković

2. A legal entity (NGO, religious charity) would open a ‘humanitarian tele-

phone number’ (humanitarni broj) for a family. This was a service provided
by the phone company. Every call had the same price (0.5 or 1
EUR+VAT). After one month, the money collected from the calls would
be paid to the account of the institution that had registered the number,
which would then transfer it to the account of a family member.
3. Employees of a private or state-owned company would make a collective
humanitarian donation (humanitarna pomoć) to a family. Each employee
would donate a couple of euros.
4. School pupils or students would make a collective humanitarian donation to
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a certain family. Again, each pupil would donate a small amount of money
and the donation would be made in the name of the class or, on some
occasions, in the name of the school.
5. An NGO, political party or some other form of civil association would organ-
ise ‘humanitarian concerts’ (humanitarni koncerti) to raise money for a family.
6. A group of students would organise a humanitarian sports game (humani-
tarna utakmica) in order to raise money for their friend’s travel to a hospital
abroad. The donations were raised from the tickets and given to a family
member after the game.
7. A municipality would make a one-off humanitarian donation to a family with
a specific need – that is, a monetary sum paid directly to the family’s personal
bank account.

In addition to these forms of help, humanitarne akcije also referred to online

appeals to Bosnians living abroad to donate funds to children in need in Bosnia,
as well as to collectively organised blood donations. Thus, humanitarne akcije in
Bijeljina involved all kinds of different forms of helping and a wide variety of
donors.
The three humanitarne akcije that were organised during my fieldwork year in
the town of Bijeljina enabled a young woman to get a bone marrow transplant
in Vienna, a baby to get a specialist eye examination and later possibly surgery
in Russia, and a boy to get an experimental treatment for his multiple develop-
mental problems, also in Russia. Many other humanitarne akcije were led that
year across Bosnia, raising money for all sorts of medical needs – from
urgent heart transplants to prosthetic devices – that could only be met by
health centres located abroad.
My aim in this paper is to highlight specificities of the humanitarne akcije
in Bijeljina in order to discuss two critical points regarding thinking about

ethnos, 2014 (pp. 1 –26)

 Scaling Humanitarianism 5

humanitarianism. Barnett (2011) argues that, throughout its history, humanitar-

ianism has had two large branches: an ‘emergency branch’, which focuses on
immediate relief and survival and an ‘alchemy branch’, which focuses on
post-conflict peace-building using a very specific idea that the rule of law,
democracy and the market economy have to go hand in hand. Exploring
how humanitarianism was enacted during humanitarne akcije, it becomes appar-
ent that both the universalistic concept of ‘bare life’ (Agamben 1998) that
humanitarianism aims to protect and its similarly universalistic ‘recipe’ for
post-conflict political transformation are historically and socially grounded
notions which appear from one particular viewpoint – that of the humanitarian
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industry. Humanitarne akcije illuminate avenues for critically reflecting on these

two branches, respectively.
First, throughout the humanitarne akcije, life was not perceived as bare but as
immersed in the intense talk and gossip of the town and as exposed to the same
social and political environment. People who needed humanitarian aid in
Bijeljina were not perceived as embodying bare life because they had to
manoeuvre complex intra-town relations in order to receive that aid: they
had to try their hardest to negotiate multiple roles, navigate various humanitar-
ian helpers, search for information, sometimes be refused help and pursue useful
contacts; sometimes they had to skip meetings and then go back, evoking
shared memories, invoking responsibilities in different ways, all in situations
where the decision over the continuation of their, or their loved one’s, existence
and well-being did indeed belong to someone else. Simultaneously, people who
provided humanitarian aid in Bijeljina often expressed a sense that the circum-
stances that made others vulnerable and in need of humanitarian protection
could easily affect themselves. ‘Fate’ could not be predicted – misfortune
could strike anybody – and being exposed to the same, or very similar,
health-care and welfare systems meant that, if ill fate strikes tomorrow, the
helpers may become those needing help. The key element here is that the sur-
vival of both helpers and those who needed help depended on the same socio-
political environment – on the health-care and welfare systems troubled in the
same way. If in humanitarne akcije lives were not perceived as ‘bare’ because lives
of both the ‘savers’ and ‘saved’ were exposed to the same sociopolitical environ-
ment, then the notion of ‘bare life’ in humanitarianism may well be the product
of procedures and techniques of the humanitarian industry. In other words, the
notion of bare life in the international humanitarianism may be the result of
the separation of sociopolitical environments which enable and manage lives
of the helpers and of those who need help. In humanitarne akcije, there was

ethnos, 2014 (pp. 1 – 26)

 6 čarna brković

no such separation because both those needing humanitarian aid and those
offering it were discussed in widespread town talk and gossip and because
both depended on the same kind of health-care and welfare systems. This
suggests that humanitarianism, which makes a distinction between lives
(between ‘political’ and ‘bare’ lives or between the ‘savers’ and ‘saved’), fosters
the politics in which the values of particular lives are calculable.
Second, listening to those who needed humanitarian help demonstrates that
humanitarianism as an industry of aid can be criticised for failing to engage in
transformative redistribution. People who needed humanitarian protection in
Bosnia often blamed the state for the situation they were in and criticised
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shrinking health-care insurance, limited availability of medical treatments, selec-

tive allocation of medicines, tissues and organs, and so forth. What these people
criticised was related to the inability of the humanitarne akcije to provoke a more
profound and just redistribution of health-care and welfare resources and ser-
vices. The same type of criticism can be directed towards the international
humanitarian industry. Using Nancy Fraser’s terminology, both humanitarne
akcije and international humanitarianism fail to intervene into the redistributive
injustices in a transformative way. For Fraser (2003), redistribution is an aspect
of justice which focuses on the political – economic structure of a polity. If the
relevant polity is defined in global terms, as is the case in the international
humanitarian industry, redistributive dimension of justice requires a focus on
global political – economic relations and practices. However, the ‘alchemy’
branch of international humanitarianism does not focus on sociopolitical and
economic relations that link people and places across state borders. Instead,
the focus of the international humanitarianism is on particular places in crises
with an aim to help them by following the dominant conceptual recipe in
which social transformation is to be achieved by installing the rule of law,
democracy and a market-based economy. In doing so, international humanitar-
ian industry reproduces the idea that the nation-state is the only viable political
framework to provide remedies for injustice. In the following section, I will
briefly discuss the anthropological literature on international humanitarian pro-
jects in Bosnia and beyond, in order to be able to demonstrate these two points
towards the end of the paper.

Life in Humanitarian Discourse and Practice

Fassin (2007; 2009) suggests that, as it has developed since the Second World
War, humanitarianism presents a qualitatively different answer to suffering from
the one commonly offered by the institutions of a nation-state. International

ethnos, 2014 (pp. 1 –26)

 Scaling Humanitarianism 7

humanitarian industry does not focus on justice as a system but mobilises

empathy and invokes an imagery of a global moral community. If the aim of
biopolitics is the management and well-being of a population within state
borders, the aim of humanitarian projects is to save lives and contributes to
the well-being of human beings across the world. Humanitarian projects are
implemented globally by a diverse set of actors, including (wealthy) states, inter-
national agencies and (usually international) non-governmental organisations.
Thus, humanitarianism presents one of the forms in which social fairness
today is pursued beyond the framework of a nation-state.
As ‘an aid industry that effectively promotes and reproduces itself’ (Redfield
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& Bornstein 2011: 4), humanitarianism cultivates a concept of life which differs in
an important way from the ways in which human lives are treated in humani-
tarian practice. Ideologically, there is no distinction between the lives of the
‘savers’ and ‘saved’ because human life is conceptualised as an entity that
needs protecting in and of itself, regardless of the political and legal status of
a person whose life is at stake: human life needs to be saved irrespective of citi-
zenship, nationality, gender, age and so forth (Fassin 2012). However, as Barnett
(2011) shows, practices of humanitarianism have been largely paternalistic
throughout history, promoting as universal the values and ideas which were
grounded in particular socio-historical contexts and inserting and reproducing
distinctions within the universalistic concept of ‘human life’.
While individual humanitarian practitioners personally may strive to
approach people they are trying to save as socially located persons, rather
than as embodiments of ‘bare life’, the social context of the humanitarian indus-
try often restricts such strivings (cf. Bob 2002; Barnett 2011; Redfield 2012). Many
humanitarian projects are characterised by a strong tension between a personal
desire to help others and the ways in which the material set-up and procedural
elements of humanitarian industry shape this desire. Whatever may be their per-
sonal reasoning about the status of lives of those who need help, contemporary
humanitarian practitioners are often in a position where, if they want to be able
to help at all, they cannot treat lives as equal. Instead, they have to differentiate
lives through intertwined influence of nationality, geopolitics and compassion.
For instance, discussing the reasoning of the members of Médecins Sans Fron-
tières regarding their involvement in Iraq, Fassin (2009) shows that in order to
be able to operate, humanitarian organisations have to differentiate between a
life to be saved (that of the victim) and a life to be risked (that of the intervening
actor). Additionally, the practice of humanitarianism often depends on a dis-
tinction between lives of higher value (those of the ‘international humanitarian

ethnos, 2014 (pp. 1 – 26)

 8 čarna brković

workers’) and that of the ‘national staff’, which get limited respect and protec-
tion, especially in the case of abductions (ibid.).
Similar distinctions formed part of the international humanitarian projects in
Bosnia. A wide variety of international actors (military, humanitarian, develop-
mental, as well as governmental, inter-governmental and non-governmental)
were a constitutive part of the 1992 – 1995 war landscape. Humanitarian actors
remained part of the Bosnian reality well after the war, in its simultaneous
post-war and post-socialist transformation (Jansen 2006; Gilbert 2006). Coles
(2007a, 2007b) has found that the international workers in the organisations
charged with the task of building a democratic Bosnia constructed cultural,
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moral and economic boundaries between themselves and Bosnians through a

number of mechanisms, despite their nominal goals. These mechanisms
included separate identification cards, social welfare and health-care systems,
separate legal procedures, refusal to use the local currency, salaries ten (or
more) times higher than the average salary in Bosnia and so forth. According
to Coles, the humanitarian practitioners in Bosnia during and after the war pro-
duced hyper-Bosnia: ‘a separate and parallel structure for international aid and
relief workers than that used by Bosnians themselves’ (2007a: 256). If the inter-
national humanitarian actors conceptually strived to protect lives as such and
supported the construction of conditions for (a very specific idea of) dignified
human existence, in practice, their lives were regulated by ‘hyper-Bosnia’ and
thus clearly distinguishable from the lives of Bosnian citizens.

The Politicisation of Life in Humanitarianism – From Bare Life to Survival

Fassin argues that the concept of life in social theory should be politicised
and suggests the notion of survival as more analytically productive than that
of ‘bare life’. In Agamben’s (1998) framework, politically qualified life (bios)
includes language, communication, organisation and subjectivity and thus
differs significantly from bare life (zoe), which refers to nothing but itself, to
the pure fact of physical existence. Agamben suggests that a politically qualified
life depends on the exclusion of bare life from the boundaries of a polity, which
makes bios and zoe a fundamental categorical pair in Western politics. However,
what appears as bare life from one perspective, gains political subjectivity from
another. The notion of survival dissolves the separation of life into its biological
(zoe) and political (bios) dimensions by simultaneously acknowledging the fra-
gility of biological existence and sociopolitical struggles to maintain life. It
refers to a ‘life which has death as its horizon but which is not separated

ethnos, 2014 (pp. 1 –26)

 Scaling Humanitarianism 9

from life as a social form, inscribed in a history, a culture, and an experience’

(Fassin 2010: 83).
Barnett (2011) demonstrates that not only social theory but also international
humanitarian projects have politicised the concept of life since the late 1980s.
Over the past 30 years, humanitarian government (Fassin 2012) has been nego-
tiating a focus on ‘emergency’, where the aim is to save bare life, with a focus on
‘alchemy’, where the aim is to help to construct sociopolitical conditions for dig-
nified life after a crisis. Becoming more embedded in professionalised and
rationalised administrations, the humanitarian government has created new
and dangerous ways of politicising survival (Ticktin 2006). The alchemy
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branch of humanitarianism since the late 1980s was grounded in the idea that
there is a single sociopolitical and economic framework within which human
lives ought to be led and that it has to include neoliberal economy alongside
democracy and the rule of law. If the ‘emergency branch’ of humanitarianism
is grounded in the idea that ‘bare life’ ought to be saved – that it needs
protecting in and of itself, regardless of the political and legal status of a
person whose life is at stake – the ‘alchemy branch’ is grounded in the idea
that there is a single, Westphalian, political framework within which lives
should be led.
A similar shift can be tracked in Bosnia over the course of the past 20 years as
well. Agencies focusing on the immediate, life-saving relief (what Barnett
calls the ‘emergency branch’ of humanitarianism) operated in Bosnia during
the war and in the first post-war years. When the emergency dissolved,
many humanitarian actors in Bosnia turned to the ‘alchemy’ branch of humani-
tarianism, that is, to fostering post-conflict, peace-building, developmental
reconstruction. These international humanitarian, peace-building and develop-
mental actors heavily influenced the social and political landscapes of Dayton
Bosnia, fulfilling various governmental functions (Helms 2003, Helms 2013).
For instance, the Office of the High Representative (OHR)3 can enact laws
and remove elected officials with the aim ‘to ensure that Bosnia and Herzego-
vina evolves into a peaceful and viable democracy on course for integration in
Euro-Atlantic institutions’ (emphasis added).4 The international humanitarian
organisations still operating in Bosnia (such as USAID, UNHCR, the Inter-
national Organisation for Migration, the International Crisis Group, UNDP
and so forth) are today largely focused on the problems of development,
housing and migration. Along with the dominance of nationalist rhetoric in
Bosnian politics (Duijzings 2007) and the distributive role of clientelist networks
operating throughout state institutions (Grandits 2007), it was the presence of

ethnos, 2014 (pp. 1 – 26)

 10 čarna brković

such international agencies in the decision-making offices as much as on the

ground that produced a tenuous form of state sovereignty (Jansen 2013).
In Bosnia, as elsewhere, the international humanitarian projects almost never
attempted to challenge the Westphalian-based conceptual ‘recipe’ for the suc-
cessful post-conflict transformation (Sampson 2002; 2003; Feldman 2011). In
this way, humanitarian practitioners could focus on the transformation of a
crisis-stricken place but leave out the transformation of the conceptual
‘recipe’ and the ‘toolkits’ for what is seen as the normal unravelling of lives (Pan-
dolfi 2008). Those who need saving, on the other hand, often do not have a
choice but to endure their predicament and are often required to transform
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their ideas of what a normal unravelling of lives entails (Ticktin 2006; Maček
2009; Robins 2009; Venkatesan 2009). Humanitarne akcije in Bosnia suggest
that such a paternalistic relationship is not inherent to humanitarianism but is
the result of the history of international humanitarian projects.

Scaling Humanitarianism
Humanitarianism is a concept that exists on different scales, from that of a
personal encounter of two human beings to that of a global industry of aid.
However, similar to any other concept, such as the ‘Balkan’ (Green 2005) or
‘hospitality’ (Candea 2012), humanitarianism does not stay the same across
scales: it is grounded in particular socialities and specific procedures and mate-
rialities. Green (2005) argues that comparing things – concepts and practices –
across scales illuminates both relations and separations among different orders
of representation and experience, which reveals how things can be different,
while also staying the same. Taking a cue from this, I aim to show what
remains intact when comparing two forms of humanitarianism in Bosnia, and
what is changed.
In a scalar relationship, one idiom can be expressed through a different
idiom: ‘Thermometers are scales because mercury (an idiom) expresses
outside temperature (a different idiom)’. (Corsin Jimenez 2003). Looking at
humanitarne akcije through the lens of the international humanitarianism
allowed me to take their name seriously and approach them not as a form of
charity, but of humanitarianism. Although in humanitarne akcije, some people
go around the town they live in and ask others to help them, many other
things happen in the course of one humanitarna akcija. These other things
make sense only if humanitarne akcije are looked at through the lens of inter-
national humanitarianism, as an enactment of humanitarianism on a particular
scale.

ethnos, 2014 (pp. 1 –26)

 Scaling Humanitarianism 11

On the other hand, looking at international humanitarianism through the

lens of humanitarne akcije reveals some of its problematic aspects. Considering
how humanitarianism is enacted within socialities, procedures and materialities
of humanitarne akcije opens up an avenue to criticise humanitarianism more
broadly.
In an attempt to scale humanitarianism, I do not approach humanitarne akcije
as a ‘local’ and international humanitarianism as a ‘global’ practice. Furthermore,
I do not want to suggest that the ‘local’ form of humanitarianism was of greater
moral worth than its ‘global’, better financed but ‘colder’, counterpart. Rather,
my understanding is that specific socialities, procedures and materialities
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enable particular enactments of humanitarianism, which may coexist in the

same place. I will first briefly outline what remains similar when looking
across the two enactments of humanitarianism. I will focus on their differences
in the rest of the paper in order to make insights gained through ethnographic
research of humanitarne akcije speak to the international humanitarian projects.
The first similarity is that both enactments share the understanding of huma-
nitarianism as ‘a sense of responsibility for one’s fellow human beings that trans-
lates into the belief that one should help those who are in need’ (Feldman &
Steenbergen 2001: 660). Both forms are grounded in the idea of shared respon-
sibility for lives and the well-being of other people and a desire to help them.
Second, neither enactment of humanitarianism fits into the Westphalian fra-
mework and its state-based systems of social security and health care. This
makes both forms seem and to be highly heterogeneous and often chaotic –
exemplary cases of what Dunn calls adhocracy, ‘a form of power that creates
chaos and vulnerability as much as it creates order’ (Dunn 2012: 2). The West-
phalian framework of social protection cannot contain the not quite prescribed
(and often unpredictable) links among the state, donors, private businesses,
neighbours, kin and friends, which constituted both humanitarne akcije and
the international humanitarian projects.
Third, in both practices empathy, compassion and other moral sentiments
were deployed in the management of the life and well-being of a fellow
human (Fassin 2005). Both forms of humanitarianism entailed a complex
mixture of compassion, ethics and politics, inserting the impulse to give (Born-
stein 2009) in to official political procedures.
Thus, coming from a sense of responsibility and a desire to help others which
cannot fit into the Westphalian-based procedures of such help, both humani-
tarne akcije and international humanitarianism introduced moral sentiments
into the politics of the management of human lives.

ethnos, 2014 (pp. 1 – 26)

 12 čarna brković

We now turn to consider the Božović family, who organised a humanitarna

akcija for their son in 2009 and 2010.

Someone who Knows Someone Else

In order to take Slavko across the Bosnian – Serbian (and later Russian)
border to a health-care institution, the Božović’s needed passports.5 To get a
passport, they had to submit an application to the municipal government.
The procedure for obtaining a passport seemed straightforward and there
were no legal obstacles that they would have to face. However, the Božović’s
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pursued a veza (literally: a relation, a connection; plural: veze; another term

my interlocutors used was štela, which literally means a relation that needs to
be fixed) in order to obtain a passport. The way in which they navigated the
municipal services reveals the importance of the ‘someone who knows
someone else’ principle. This principle meant, among other things, attempting
to find as many veze (relations, connections) as possible throughout the town.
Milena, who was a music teacher, asked Branko, the parent of one of her pupils,
for help. Branko worked in the municipality but not in the department for issuing
personal identification documents. This resulted in Branko approaching his col-
leagues from this department and asking them to ‘take care’ of Petar’s application.
The word people frequently used to describe such situations was srediti, coming
from the root red (order), so srediti, also means ‘to put in order’ or ‘to make some-
thing ordered’. This ‘putting in order’ gave the Božović family a sense of security,
knowing that the process of issuing the documents would be easy. This example
suggests that local knowledge, in this case knowing the right people, was impor-
tant for navigating state institutions. More precisely, it was the knowledge of
where people were located in relation to oneself within the town: bureaucrats
issuing documents were able to locate Petar through Branko, as Branko’s friend.
Branko was able to locate Petar through the teacher–pupil relationship
between Milena and his child. In order to get official state identification docu-
ments, the Božović’s found people who were able to identify their social location
within the town. ‘To put in order’ in this example referred to knowledge about
local relations overlapping with knowledge of state institutions.
Such overlaps between institutional and personal knowledge of who people
were happened many times during the humanitarne akcije. For instance, when
Petar went to the local Red Cross and Red Crescent office, Djole, the president
of the office and his long-term acquaintance, turned out to be immensely
helpful. Petar described this to me as follows:

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 Scaling Humanitarianism 13

He [Djole] contacted people. That’s what he did, that’s the only way. Unfortunately,
we can’t do it another way. ( . . . ) And other people helped us in the same way. ( . . . )
it’s a system of someone who knows someone else in a way. There you go.

Through this ‘system of someone who knows someone else’, Djole put Petar
in touch with different schools and private and public firms. Pupils and teachers
from each school gave approximately 1 – 2E each and made a joint larger
donation to Petar’s bank account. The same mechanism for raising money
was used in workplaces. Given that many of the schools in the town came to
be involved, the number of people who heard about the action was large:
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many school pupils told their parents about it and the information about the
Božović’s problems and the humanitarna akcija travelled further afield. Most
of the donors I talked with claimed that they responded to the ‘impulse of phi-
lanthropy’ (Bornstein 2009) because they knew someone trustworthy who was
somehow linked to the Božović family. School teachers knew their head tea-
chers, who again, knew Djole and so on. The successful spread of information
throughout the town made the action longer and more diverse.6 Some money
was raised through classical music concerts and art exhibitions, and there were
many direct donations paid to Petar’s personal bank account. A local NGO
started a humanitarian number. The director of this NGO was Petar’s acquain-
tance and when approached by their mutual friend, she decided to help him out.
The humanitarian phone number alone generated 24,000 KM (12,000E). This
means that approximately 24,000 calls were made to this number. These
kinds of intersections reveal how local sociality occasionally imbued relations
of a different kind: in order for schools and NGOs to become donors involved
in a humanitarna akcija, the family needed to know someone who knew
someone else within the institutions.
Knowing a person in this local sense meant sharing stories about personal his-
tories – where people had lived; where they went to school; whether they
moved out during the war, and if so, to where, with whose help; who their
friends and relatives were and so forth. Being able to quickly locate others in
the town’s network of social relationships, sharing intimate stories about
others’ pasts and being able to contact them through other people entailed
being a part of the ‘world of people’ (svijet). Being a member of this ‘world of
people’ was not confirmed in any formalised way: there was no customary or
state ritual through which one would become a member of a particular world
of people; no number of drinks that needed to be drunk, no documents to be
signed or no special language register, food or verbal formulae that needed to

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 14 čarna brković

be used. Rather, one was a member as long as one remained knowable to others
and engaged in knowing others. Being a part of the ‘world of people’ meant
being there regularly, exchanging greetings in the same places, exchanging
stories about oneself and others and helping each other out in small ways.
This seemingly local way of relating ran through the bureaucratic apparatus
of the state, making bureaucratic knowledge an insufficient criterion for the
use of state procedures, resources and funds.
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The Partially Present State: Municipal Government as a Humanitarian

Donor
The municipal government of Bijeljina or, more precisely, the mayor,
decided to make a humanitarian donation of 750E to the Božović’s. Petar
claimed that his friend, a sculptor, ‘took care’ of that donation. The sculpture
in the central town square, in front of the main municipality building, was
made by his sculptor friend and Petar frequently mentioned this as a proof of
how close this sculptor was to the mayor.7 In another municipality, another
mayor – that of Brčko – helped another family who was raising money in
two towns, Brčko and Bijeljina, by covering almost two thirds of the bill for a
bone marrow transplantation. Additionally, this family obtained the infor-
mation about the hospital in Vienna not from doctors but from the mayor.
The third family which initiated a humanitarna akcija during my fieldwork in
Bijeljina did not get any help from Bijeljina’s mayor and the municipality, in
their opinion because they did not know the ‘right’ people.
The municipal governments were thus turned into donors, who decided when
to give municipal (state) money for a humanitarian purpose to a single person.
Most of my interlocutors did not find it strange that the mayor would make
the decision regarding whether or not to finance someone’s personal medical
treatment or offer information about medical centres abroad. Rather, they criti-
cised the lack of municipal and state help to the families in need, such as a
refusal of Bijeljina’s mayor to give humanitarian aid to the third family. In huma-
nitarne akcije, municipal governments occasionally acted like charitable organis-
ations which made a selection between worthy and unworthy recipients and
occasionally they acted like a bureaucratic system blind to the social positions
of its members. If we take into account that bureaucracies are ‘above all, instru-
ments of power’ (Heyman 1995: 488), it is not surprising that socialist and post-
socialist bureaucratic orders became imbued with the intimacy of clientelist
relations (Ledeneva 2006). The clientelist modality of power affected humanitarne

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 Scaling Humanitarianism 15

akcije as well, allowing compassion to easily enter into a relationship with state
politics.
The resilient clientelist networks, coupled with the strong influence of the
international agencies on local politics, opened up places within the state appar-
atus governed by the humanitarian reasoning and its mixture of compassion,
ethics and politics. For example, most, if not all, municipalities and other
state institutions in Bosnia had bodies that autonomously redistributed funds
to individuals in urgent need of welfare support. In the entity named the Repub-
lic of Srpska,8 the Public Fund for Children’s Protection had a Committee that had
provided this sort of humanitarian aid up until the municipalities took it over.
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The Fund, and later the municipalities, had humanitarian funds to which
people could apply to pay for medicines, rent and heating bills, food and so
forth. In the entity of the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, there was a
Solidarity Fund, which helped people to sidestep health-care insurance rules
according to which people could gain access to health care only in the
canton9 in which they resided. The Fund’s aim was to make access to health
care more evenly distributed across the territory of the Federation, administra-
tively split into 10 cantons.
Legally, patients had the right to public support to health care abroad. The
public fund for health-care insurance formed Committees that made decisions
about each case separately. However, it gave refunds and there was no guaran-
tee of whether the refund would be approved or not. Even if it was approved,
the refunds were restricted in most cases to 30% of the price of the medical treat-
ment and people also needed to pay for the visas, travel of the patient, and
sometimes an accompanying family member, post-treatment care and so
forth.10 Many people in such a situation decided to initiate humanitarne akcije.
The sum they needed could be anywhere between 2000 and 3000E – to
100,000E or more, while the average monthly salary in Bosnia in 2009 and
2010 was between 350 and 400E (Institute of Statistics 2012).
Officially, pleas for municipal humanitarian help in Bijeljina had to be sub-
mitted to the Komisija za jednokratnu pomoć (Committee for One-off Support).
Potential applicants had to obtain information regarding the application
process by word of mouth. The applications consisted of a formal, usually hand-
written, plea and appropriate medical or welfare documentation, which con-
firmed their urgent need. After reviewing the applications, the Committee
gave up to 200E to the successful applicants. The mayor made the decisions
about the applications for larger sums, usually made for the medical treatment
abroad. For this reason, the Božović’s submitted their plea directly to the mayor,

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 16 čarna brković

rather than to the Committee. The members of the Committee told me that
they knew most of the applicants from previous years or through ‘someone
else’. The Committee was a municipal body that distributed money from
state funds, but it was also perceived as a charitable humanitarian donor and
the principle of ‘someone who knows someone else’ was implicated in its work.
Both humanitarian donors and recipients expected the state to provide full
health care because of the ‘Bosnian common sense that health naturally con-
cerns the state and that medicine ought to be submitted to scrutiny’ (Jašarević
2011: 112). The fact that the municipal money was transformed into a humanitar-
ian donation was understood as an extension of this principle – many of my
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interlocutors commented that the state should make a humanitarian donation

and thus demonstrate that it cares for its citizens, if it could not provide the
required medical treatment. In other words, the Committees, Funds and
other parts of the state apparatus that were guided by the compassion of the
humanitarian reasoning were perceived as ‘patches’ provided by the state in
the lack of better organised health-care and social security systems.

The Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement and Humanitarian Aid
During the War
The distinct contemporary understanding of humanitarianism in Bosnia was
shaped by two historical moments – humanitarian practices in socialist Yugo-
slavia and during the 1992 – 1995 war. During socialist Yugoslavia, the term
‘humanitarianism’ referred to Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement practices
of going from a state institution to a private firm and asking for a small donation
for someone else. Although charities which existed prior to the Second World
War were considered to be unnecessary with the formation of the SFRY (since
the state was usually the provider of specific welfare aid), the International Red
Cross and Red Crescent Movement were active in many parts of the country.
This is not surprising if we take into account that the state investment into
the development of the field of social work in the SFRY was ‘to a large
extent, a product of the cold war equilibrium’ (Zaviršek 2008: 738).11 Bijeljina’s
local Red Cross office was opened in 1937. It had a number of volunteers
before the 1992 – 1995 war and it was through their activities that the everyday,
local meaning of humanitarianism was forged. After the harvesting season, the
volunteers regularly went to peasants’ homes who gave small donations of grain
(mjerica žita), which activists then distributed to people in need. The volunteers
also asked directors of larger enterprises for monetary donations and owners of
small businesses for donations in clothes, shoes or other items they were

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 Scaling Humanitarianism 17

crafting. Moreover, international humanitarian aid was delivered to the SFRY

after the earthquakes in 1963 and 1979, but it was the redistribution of resources
within the country from those who ‘had more’ to those ‘in need’ that shaped the
local understanding of humanitarianism. Recalling practices of the SFRY
period, the word ‘humanitarian’ continues to be used today to denote situations
in which people organise themselves to help people living in their vicinity with
matters of health and social security.
The understanding of humanitarianism was also shaped by the war experi-
ence.12 From 1994 to 2003, the same Red Cross and Red Crescent office organ-
ised a ‘humanitarian pharmacy’ (Humanitarna apoteka), which redistributed free
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medicines and sanitary materials from the international humanitarian organis-

ations to Bijeljina’s inhabitants, ‘regardless of whether they had the status of
refugee or internally displaced persons or whether they were socially threa-
tened’, that is, whether they were formally eligible for social welfare aid (N/A
2003).
During the 1992– 1995 war and afterwards, a number of international huma-
nitarian organisations increasingly directed their work at people living in
Bosnia. Once the humanitarian aid arrived in Bosnia, it was distributed to indi-
viduals according to a variety of criteria. The UNHCR was perceived as a ‘reli-
giously and politically neutral party’ and, therefore, its aid was at first ‘longed for
and welcomed’ until it became evident that ‘its quality was poor and quantities
meagre’ (Maček 2009: 67). One criterion for distributing humanitarian aid was
religion or nationality. There were many organisations helping exclusively
members of one nationally defined group (for example Kolo srpskih sestara, i.e.
the ‘Circle of Serbian sisters’), but as there were such organisations helping
Bosniak Muslims, Croats and Serbs, humanitarian aid in fact addressed most
people in Bosnia. People associated with all three nationally defined groups
living in Bosnia received humanitarian help – even though not necessarily
from the same sources. Thus, war-related humanitarian activities shaped the
meaning of ‘humanitarian aid’ into objects of small value and strengthened
the understanding that more or less anyone can find themselves in need of
humanitarian aid, regardless of their nationality, gender, profession, lifestyle
and other identity-based criteria.

What do Humanitarne Akcije Suggest about Humanitarian Government

more Broadly?
Humanitarianism is increasingly articulated in terms of securing the dignity
of human life: it presumes that there is a bare minimum of protection that all

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 18 čarna brković

human lives need, regardless of their legal and political status. International
humanitarian practitioners may personally strongly believe that all human
lives have the same value; in practice, however, the way in which humanitarian
industry is organised often forces them to make calculations concerning the
value of particular lives, where geopolitics and nationality often sneak in. The
humanitarne akcije in Bijeljina were also directed towards the protection of
the dignity of human life through compassion filtering into politics and
through state institutions. However, when international humanitarianism is
looked at through the terms of humanitarne akcije, two differences become
obvious.
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Exposure to grids and the concept of life

The concept of life was different in the two forms of humanitarianism. In huma-
nitarne akcije, lives that needed saving were not perceived as bare, but as consti-
tuted from and constitutive of social relations in which they existed, just like the
lives of those who offered help. In Bijeljina, in 2009 and 2010, people who pro-
vided humanitarian help expressed a strong sense that their lives and the lives of
potentially anyone they knew could be threatened by the inability of the health-
care grids to offer certain treatments.13 They expressed the sentiment that places
could easily be switched and that humanitarian helpers could find themselves
needing medical treatments abroad. This sense of a significant potential to
move from the position of ‘saver’ to that of ‘saved’ made the terms of their
relationship more equal. Thus, the very possibility that life may become a
matter of mere survival was an incitement to action both by those needing
help as well as those giving it. Humanitarne akcije set in motion the creation
and navigation of a network of dense social relations of obligations, which
were not clear-cut relations of inequality. In other words, the possibility that
life could be rendered a matter of mere survival was productive of social
relations. This points to a politics of life in which there was no immediate,
clear-cut differentiation between people who needed saving and people who
save, just as there was no set ‘recipe’ of saving. Differentiation into classes of
people (savers and saved as in international humanitarianism or citizens and
non-citizens as in biopolitics) ceded its place to multiple ways of establishing
a relation in all possible directions.
I do not want to suggest that, simply because they were exercised ‘locally’ –
among people who knew one another – the humanitarne akcije were more just
than international humanitarianism. Less than two decades ago, knowing
people did not mean life would be evaluated in the same terms (Sorabji 1995,

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 Scaling Humanitarianism 19

Bowman 2003). The war camp for the non-Serbs (largely Bosniak Muslims) in
Batković, a village in the municipality of Bijeljina, and similar war horrors across
Bosnia attracted so much attention partly because many occurred among
neighbours and townspeople, people who knew one another or through
someone else (Human Rights Watch 2000). Knowing people personally did
not mean much in the evaluation of life.
Similarly, the understanding of life as constituted from and constitutive of
social relations in Bijeljina in 2009 and 2010 was not the result of the local,
non-bureaucratic character of humanitarne akcije or the fact that people knew
one another. Rather, I would suggest that such an understanding of life
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emerged because the humanitarian actors were exposed to the same social
context – from the health-care grids troubled in the same way to the same
kind of talk and gossip of the town. There was no need to conceptually differ-
entiate the ‘savers’ from the ‘saved’ because the lives of most humanitarian
actors were managed by the same legislature, funds, hospitals, medical prac-
titioners and health-care insurance system. There was no ‘hyper-Bosnia’,
which regulated the lives of the ‘savers’ and ‘Bosnia proper’, which regulated
the lives of the ‘saved’ (cf. Coles 2007b). It seems to me that for this reason huma-
nitarne akcije were not a case of ethics and politics that had to make calculations
with the value of life in order to be able to operate.
This difference in the understandings of life implies that when ‘bare life’ pre-
sents a valuable category, as occurs in the humanitarian crisis situations, the
value of life can be determined: in order for bare lives to count, they have to
be countable.14 It also suggests that the international humanitarian projects
produce the idea of ‘bare life’ through their procedures and material and organ-
isational set-ups. The notion that only some lives are ‘bare’ may be the result of
constructing separate grids for the ‘savers’ and ‘saved’. What (or, rather, who)
appears to be ‘bare life’ from the perspective of the humanitarian industry in
emergencies, from other perspectives has political subjectivity and social
location. Humanitarne akcije suggest that international humanitarian projects
should pay attention to how their grids – procedures, organisational set-up
and materialities – enable particular ideas about life.

From recognition to transformative redistribution

Although humanitarne akcije enabled relatively equal understanding of life of all
those involved, people who needed help criticised the situation they were in.
Their criticisms reveal that humanitarne akcije have failed to reorganise and

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 20 čarna brković

redistribute health-care resources in a more just way. The same point can be
made about the humanitarian industry, which fails not only to recognise the
complex subjectivities of people who need help but also to correct redistributive
injustices in a transformative way.
Fraser (2003) distinguishes recognition and redistribution as two analytically
distinct paradigms of justice, which have emerged from specific social move-
ments in the West. Recognition is cultural and symbolic injustice rooted in
the patterns of representation and communication which constitute certain
actors as inferior or invisible partners in social interaction. Redistribution is
socio-economic injustice rooted in the political – economic structure of a
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polity, embodied in exploitation, economic marginalisation or deprivation.

Fraser also makes a distinction between affirmative and transformative remedies
for injustice. Affirmative remedies for injustice correct the consequences of
unequal social arrangements “without disturbing the underlying framework
that generates them” (Fraser 1995: 82), while the transformative remedies for
injustice correct the consequences of unequal social arrangements precisely
by “restructuring the underlying generative framework” (1995: 82).
Fassin (2012) criticises humanitarianism for failing to recognise people who
need humanitarian help beyond ideas of suffering and compassion – for afflict-
ing injustice in terms of recognition. He suggests that this means a failure to
understand subjectivities and political positions of those who need help
under their own terms. Rajaram makes a similar criticism of the project Listening
to the Displaced conducted by Oxfam Great Britain, arguing that

Oxfam fails to consider that its interests as a humanitarian/development agency lead

to the filtering of a particular sort of voice of the displaced. ‘Listening to the Dis-
placed’ does not succeed in providing refugees with a means to speak for themselves,
but rather results in a de-politicized and de-historicized image of refugees. (2002: 247)

Arguing for the just cultural – political recognition of those whom humanitar-
ianism aims to help is an important caveat (see also: Malkki 1996). However,
dissatisfactions voiced by those who needed help during humanitarne akcije
reveal that humanitarianism should be criticised for failing to engage with the
redistributive dimension of injustice as well. People needing humanitarian
help in Bijeljina actively negotiated the terms of their recognition, since they
largely had to be known and knowable to those who helped. People had to
be visibly located within the sociopolitical relations of the town in order to
get humanitarian help: the state, various organisations and the townspeople

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 Scaling Humanitarianism 21

had to learn about their situation, biography, medical and financial needs as well
as to establish a personalised link with them in order to give various forms of
humanitarian aid according to various criteria (Although those needing help
did find exhausting the whole ordeal and often conflicting expectations
placed upon them by all those various helpers). Indeed, negotiating recognition
was the ground on which people could save their, or their loved one’s, life and
well-being.
Despite this, people who initiated humanitarne akcije expressed dissatisfac-
tions and criticisms of the whole ordeal they had to go through. The Božović’s
and other people who initiated humanitarne akcije criticised the state for lacking
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not only resources but also the will to systematically cover all health-care treat-
ments, in the country as well as abroad. The lack of well-organised health care
and social welfare was extensively criticised by humanitarian helpers as well.
People throughout Bijeljina blamed the state for all sorts of things. One scorch-
ing August afternoon, a young woman has said to me: ‘Fuck the state in which it
is this hot!’. After I asked her to clarify, it turned out she was mad at the relevant
state officials for failing to provide air conditioners in all state institutions, as well
as for failing to run the country in a way that would enable all owners of the
pubs and restaurants to have air conditioners installed. In terms of health care
and welfare, people criticised dispersed and marketised forms of protection.
They blamed the state for behaving in what they saw as a ‘contradictory
fashion’, that is, for offering some forms of protection to some people, but
not all. Jansen (2014) argues that people’s war and post-war intense criticisms
of the poorly organised Bosnian state reveal that they yearned for predictability
in their everyday life and for certainty of survival.15 What these criticisms of the
state also reveal is a desire for a more just redistribution of resources: better
health-care insurance laws, increased availability of medical treatments, wide-
spread allocation of medicines, tissues and organs, and so forth. People criticised
the state for failing to redistribute resources in a way that would prevent the
need for organising humanitarne akcije in the first place. In other words,
people whom humanitarne akcije were supposed to save were not only just
looking for recognition of their subject positions in their own terms but also
for a transformative – more systematic and just – redistribution of resources
(cf. Fraser 2010).
The same criticism can be directed to the international humanitarian pro-
jects. The main obstacle in this is misframing.16 While the reach of humanitar-
ianism is international, its projects are focused on particular locales in crises
scattered around the world. The ‘alchemy’ branch of humanitarianism attempts

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 22 čarna brković

to transform the crisis-stricken place, rather than sociopolitical relations, which

create injustices across state borders. In other words, although international
humanitarianism is a form of globalised protection of people, humanitarian
actors never attempt to intervene into the global regimes of redistributive
inequality and exclusion. The framework from which the humanitarian help
comes has moved beyond Westphalian, state-based forms of social security:
it is dispersed among various heterogeneous actors (governments, international
bodies, NGOs and so forth). However, the framework to which the help is
directed is imagined as a particular locale in crisis, where people need to be
saved and, after the crisis has passed, stable institutions need to be built follow-
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ing the Westphalian framework of protection. Although humanitarian industry

itself does not fit into the Westphalian framework in which redistribution, social
security and care for other people are nationalised at the state level, it repro-
duces this underlying framework as the only viable politics of protection in
(post-)conflict settings.
Thus, the implication of criticisms voiced by those who needed help during
humanitarne akcije is that humanitarian industry does not attempt to reorganise
unequal redistribution on a global scale in a transformative way. Such a reorgan-
isation would mean transformation of the border and citizenship regimes as
well as the reconstruction of social justice beyond the framework of nation-
states and its Westphalian-based politics of care. Placing such demands upon
humanitarianism, which has grown into a whole industry of aid after the
Second World War, does not seem unreasonable.

Acknowledgements
I am grateful to people in Bijeljina who were involved in humanitarne akcije, as well as
to Stef Jansen, Sarah Green, Jonathan Mair, Elissa Helms, Ainhoa Montoya, Andrew
Hodges, Vanja Čelebičić, and Prem Kumar Rajaram for their valuable feedback on
earlier versions of this article. I also wish to thank the anonymous reviewers.
Support for research and writing of this article was provided by the Leverhulme
Institute and CEU Institute for Advanced Study, whom I also thank.

Notes
1. A municipality is an administrative unit of local self-government in Bosnia. The
municipality of Bijeljina consists of the town of Bijeljina and several villages in its
proximity.
2. Personal conversation with Zane Linde-Ozola and Elżbieta Korolczuk, at the con-
ference Health in Transition, Warsaw, June 7 –8, 2013. See also: Lukić Krstanović 2013.
3. The Office of the High Representative is an international institution responsible for
overseeing implementation of the Peace Agreement in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

ethnos, 2014 (pp. 1 –26)

 Scaling Humanitarianism 23

4. Available at: http://www.ohr.int/ohr-info/gen-info/default.asp?content_id=38519

(Accessed 24 October 2013).
5. Only an ID (lična karta) was required for adults crossing the border. However, to
take a child across the border, both parents and the child had to have a passport.
6. The families who initiated humanitarne akcije, or people close to them, used social
networks such as Facebook to spread the information. However, very few of my
interlocutors mentioned social networks as the way in which they found out
about a humanitarna akcija and none as an incentive to help the family. Further-
more, there were only three or four donations made by people completely
unknown to the families. In humanitarne akcije, internet-based social networks
were largely used as one more means of communication among people who
already knew the family personally or through someone else.
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7. The sculpture represents Petar I Karadjordjević (the king of Serbia at the beginning
of the twentieth century) on a horse, and it includes a nationalistic inscription which
aims to present as historically important the mayor’s party, Serbian Democratic
Party, a right-wing nationalist populist party which played a leading role during
the 1992–1995 war.
8. The state of Bosnia and Herzegovina consists of two entities, the Republic of Srpska
and the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Each entity is responsible for the
finance and delivery of healthcare and social security on its territory. Furthermore,
there is Brčko district, a unit of local self-government which officially belongs to
both entities.
9. An administrative unit in the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina.
10. The public health-care insurance could refund 100% of medical expenses only to the
hospitals with which it had already signed a special agreement.
11. Zaviršek (2008) writes that education of social workers in the SFRY was established
in the 1950s and that social welfare institutions were developed with the help of
experts from the USA. The place of social work in the SFRY was linked with its geo-
political position of a mostly visa-free socialist country and one of the founders of
the Non-Aligned Movement, as well as with an official ideology, not of state social-
ism, but of workers’ self-management.
12. I have no insights into whether and how humanitarne akcije might have influenced
international humanitarian projects in Bosnia.
13. Regarding the notion of grids, see: Jansen (2014).
14. It is not an accident that bare life is imagined as somehow always belonging to an
individual who ends up exposed to the skin, to a single human being understood as
cut off from social and political relations.
15. This yearning for the stability, predictability, and certainty is not the same as yearn-
ing for the Westphalian framework of social security and health care, although they
have been historically closely related in Bosnia. Stability, predictability, and certainty
do not have to be provided through the Westphalian framework of social security
and health care, so desiring one does not necessarily mean desiring the other.
16. Misframing is a term Fraser coined to capture the situation in which grids of social
protection have been constructed through the framework of nation-states, while the
injustices happen beyond this framework, on a more global scale, through the econ-
omic and political practices that go well beyond nation states (Fraser 2010).

ethnos, 2014 (pp. 1 – 26)

 24 čarna brković

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