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of government have become central areas of activity. The international community's prolonged presence in BiH and its strategy of state-building have been heavily criticized for not allowing local ownership over the process of state-formation.
However, the debate on the legitimacy and sustainability of international intervention and state-building in post-conflict countries has remained curiously restricted to the field of international relations theorists and practitioners. So far, no detailed, in-depth ethnographic research has been undertaken as to the consequences of such state-building enterprises for newly evolving forms of governance in the affected societies themselves.
The combination of public administration research with an extended period of ethnographic fieldwork in the current project serves to fill this gap by probing the tension between globally designed projects of state-building and local responses in the specific case of the City of Mostar. |
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The reconstructed Stari Most (Old Bridge). Formerly, the Neretva River marked the city's division into an Eastern Bosniac dominated and a Western Croat dominated part. |
Nowadays being once again a unified legal entity of local self-government, this city is nevertheless still divided along ethno-national lines due to the experience of violent conflict between ethno-nationally defined groups within the city in the years between 1992-5, which had led to a complete breakdown of the local community and the establishment of two separate war-time administrations.
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Fieldwork in Mostar was carried out between July 2005 and July 2006 and focused on three groups of actors:
- the local inhabitants in their interaction with city authorities
- local administrators and city councilors
- members of international organizations active in the field of public administration reform
In order to be able to cover each of these groups adequately, sites for participant observation in this urban setting changed frequently. In the beginning I concentrated on local community offices which, stemming from the times of socialist self-management, still function as a contact point between city administration and citizens. Intimate knowledge of socio-cultural contexts gained in these neighborhood offices served as a valuable point of reference throughout fieldwork.
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A typical local community office |
Later on, participant observation shifted to a specialized department of the inner city administration, which had recently been relocated and physically re-unified. Here I was able to observe the inner workings of an administrative body as well as the emerging relations between civil servants from both sides of the city. Participant observation in an international organization took the form of an internship, thereby opening up insights into the complexity of a web of international actors with varying goals and strategies towards the city administration. Complementary to these phases of intensive stationary observation, I conducted interviews, paid regular informal visits to a variety of offices as well as homes of city employees, participated in a number of trainings for civil servants and attended public hearings as well as city council sessions.
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A public hearing in the Cultural Center regarding
the planning of a highway through an area of
Mostar where houses have been built illegally. |
The Mayor of Mostar meets citizens protesting
against the city administration's failure to
undertake post-war reconstruction of apartment
blocks in the inner city. |
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As a result, I now possess a differentiated body of data, including recorded interviews, field notes and protocols, but also project documents, training manuals, administrative records, archival material, legal texts and a limited amount of statistical information as well as cartographic material.
The up-coming inter-laboratory visit at the Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology at CEU will be spent working intensively on the interpretation of this field data. Finding a sound methodological approach to the incorporation of very different kinds of data into one interpretative framework will be one of the tasks I hope to undertake at CEU. Academic exchange and participation in anthropological PhD courses should also help me to situate my material more firmly in theoretical approaches to the study of post socialist societies and to gain a wider comparative perspective.
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One set of data: household
registers kept by the secretaries
of local community offices. |
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