IMU Walnut Room

A cultural anthropologist with research interests in the anthropology of international policy in the context of peace-building and democratization, Azra Hromadzic is the author of Citizens of an Empty Nation: Youth and State-Making in Postwar Bosnia-Herzegovina (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), which examines the polarizing effects of everyday ethnic divisions in the wake of the devastating Bosnia-Herzegovina conflicts. Her talk will address the unintended consequences resulting from the consociational (power-sharing) model of postwar state inserted into Bosnia and Herzegovina, including the inability of its citizens, especially youth, to knit their society back together after the war. The principal focus of her remarks will be the discourses and practices at play in the reconstruction of the highly symbolic Mostar Gymnasium in the deeply divided town of Mostar, a context that vividly exposes the international diplomatic visions, local ethno-nationalist projects, and ethnicization of everyday life that have congealed to produce an empty nation in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

 Sponsors: Russian and East European Institute, Institute for European Studies, Department of Political Science, Department of Slavic and East European Languages and Cultures.

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