The Inheritance of Militarization: Toxic Gifts, Furtive Critique, and Survivance in Postwar Bosnia

To think of Bosnia is to think of war, but militarization precedes and exceeds war, as socialist Yugoslavia located much of its military industry here. The toxic gift of socialist militarization enables people in a small industrial town to survive and stay home at the same time as unfiltered toxic waste makes this home less habitable, poisoning their beloved river. The residents, this article shows, are equally people of the military factory and people of the river, and have to reconcile this dual inheritance. Historicizing the gendered inheritance of socialist militarization and contextualizing neoliberal dispossession and deregulation, this article examines how residents articulate a furtive critique of industrial toxicity in the extended domestic sphere, by which I mean the intimate gatherings in people’s yards and on neighborhood walks and riverside benches that comprise the interstices between public and private where much of Bosnian life is lived. Ethnographically, the article attends to the felt embodiments of dual riverine and militarized inheritance, illuminating furtive complaints of toxicity and poignant fragments of memory told in passing in the extended domestic sphere. Here, residents reclaim their inheritance of the river, planting seeds of dissent and survivance.

socialist militarization, military industry, toxicity, neoliberal dispossession, rivers, inheritance, dissent, survivance, feminist ethnography

In Konjic, a mountainous Bosnian town wrapped around the curving Neretva River, I join the nightly throngs of people catching the river’s cool on their evening strolls. The river gathers the town on its banks and makes collectivities (see Hromadžić 2022). One dusk in 2015, a cousin’s husband waves my mother and me down from the hilly road that follows the river upstream, inviting us over. We walk down to his garden and wade into the blistery cold water. He turns over a green-gray river stone and shows me its underside: “See, no crabs are hiding under the stones. We used to have crabs, but they can’t live in polluted water.” I know what he’s talking about, what I have heard from neighbors and family members: the arms and ammunition factory Igman, the town’s main employer, had been dumping unfiltered toxic waste into the beloved turquoise river whose waters feed entire regions of Bosnia and Croatia.

Hazardous military waste is particularly toxic industrial waste. Throughout the world, it has been burned in open fires, dumped at sea, and into lakes and rivers. Like other people who live around ammunition factories, residents of Konjic are told that they are not at risk. But hazardous waste imperils human life in “inter-generational time” (Murphy 2013) and causes harms that will manifest across generations in human and nonhuman bodies (see Liboiron, Tironi, and Calvillo 2018).

The river demonstrates the harms of toxicity already, as large quantities of unfiltered toxic sludge have annihilated some of the life it once nurtured. In recent years, toxic dumping has become visible to the naked eye, and Neretva has turned a rotten orange-brown color right under the new bridge. The river’s poisoning has become the talk of the town, a constant reverberating murmur. Residents have abandoned the polluted beaches and now bond by commemorating their loss—the river still brings them together, albeit not to share pure joy but to dwell in the presence of its wounded beauty and spirit, to mourn, parse things out, and agitate.

The talk of the river’s pollution – destruction, they say (uništili su je)—started ubiquitous but hushed. Rather than voicing loud critique in public forums or staging protests, residents expressed their critique of toxicity in intimate gatherings and spontaneous conversations. When I would greet the men who fish by the bridge or the roadside on top of the left riverbank with the words I learned from my grandfather, a sports fisherman, bistro (may the water be clear), they responded by shaking their heads and shrugging their shoulders: “There is no fish to catch. You see what they’re doing to the river.” Their bitter complaints on breezy summer evenings, the conversations with passersby is how they protested. “See what they are doing?” The culprits were not named. Who they are was both understood and not to be made explicit.

An environmental activist group called Zeleni Neretva (Greens Neretva) has documented Igman and its former subsidiaries such as Eurosjaj as the main polluters that dump illegal quantities of chromium, lead, zinc, cadmium, and phenol into the river.¹ Residents are becoming familiar with terms such as trivalent and hexavalent chromium, and worry about their carcinogenic effects. Yet even the activists omit naming names in their reports, instead referring to the “metal processing industry.”²

Fear, respect, inheritance, and enclosure by the state-capital-military-industrial complex set the tone for the kind of critique that is locally possible. The residents and the activists understand but do not expose in writing the chain of entanglements between factories and government institutions that encloses the lived and political space. They mourn the river and fear the health hazards but not more than they fear losing their jobs or offending people in power and authorities who sanction toxicity and tacitly authorize toxic dumping. Igman’s entwinement with the state is particularly dense. Once a worker-owned factory, Igman is today co-owned by the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina and private shareholders. During the last war, it was one of the main suppliers of ammunition to the Bosnian Army. Today, it is one of the country’s leading export businesses and a source of jobs, kickbacks, and social capital. Indeed, the military industry is one of Bosnia’s few functional industries, and is considered a lifeline. At a time of mass unemployment and an exodus of people that has hollowed out the country (Kurtović 2021), the military industry enables people to stay home at the same time as it imperils life. In contemporary Bosnia, people’s stability, togetherness, and being-in-place, not being displaced, are predicated on toxicity.

Fear, Bosnian political activists say, is what holds back revolt. But there is more than fear and dependence to furtive critique, as militarization is deeply entangled in everyday life. I understand militarization as the process by which past wars and ideas of readiness for future war or self-defense organize economy, society, government, and people’s lives and subjectivities.³ In conversation with anthropologists who illuminate militarization on the granular level (González, Gusterson, and Houtman 2019), I show that Bosnian livelihoods, gendered subjectivities, attachments, and social relations have long been co-constituted by the military industry. In Konjic, where residents either work for Igman or have family members who do, militarization makes people, socialities, and spaces that connect them. Although Bosnians have inherited militarization, it affects them differently today, as a result of postwar neoliberal dispossession.

I illuminate how militarization is reproduced and contested in Igman’s riverine neighborhood, in what we might call the extended domestic sphere: the intersections between public and private where much of Bosnian life is lived. The furtive critique of military industrial toxicity flourishes in intimate gatherings in people’s homes and yards, on neighborhood benches and corners, and, invariably, on walks by the river. This sphere is where militarization reproduces itself, but it also the space where dissent begins. Here, residents claim their inheritance of the river to critique toxic dumping.

By the extended domestic sphere, I mean neighborhood life itself, where the domestic and the public have long been enmeshed and where they permeate each other. Analyzing militarization in Bosnia requires us to question some of the enduring Eurocentric assumptions about what constitutes domestic life and how it relates to the public. In Bosnia’s militarized neighborhoods, work and living together have been conjoined for several generations. The neighborhood generates its own collectivity: it is a space of intimate social relations that shape who we are as subjects, whom we care and provide for, to whom we feel closest, how we think and feel, what we aspire to and hope for, what we can and cannot say.

Igman’s riverine neighborhood is a space where militarization gains social traction and significance, organizing daily life and sociality itself. The domestic/oikos of Igman’s neighborhood includes balconies and terraces, yards (enclosed and semi-enclosed yards with flowers called avlije), street benches, pedestrian and car bridges, sidewalks and sokaci (small streets), river walkways and promenades (šetnice). Much of life is lived in neighborhood’s outside spaces, and people come and go into homes as they please. (To have to schedule a coffee with friends used to dampen the allure of migrating to the West.) Military industrialization is normalized in these shared spaces of living that have united multiple generations of the residents. Igman too is not only an employer, but a neighbor, albeit one with an oversized presence and power. Neighborhood residents pay it respects, just like they respect each other.

Bosnia is also one of the many countries in the world where the neighborhood, rather than the private home, constitutes the boundary of the social world (see Roberts 2017). This is true both for old neighborhoods such as the mahala next to Igman and on Neretva’s banks, as well as the socialist high-rises in cities, where I grew up, and where each building is its own social archipelago. The socialist formation of the factory as the provider of housing meant that militarization was domesticated in the neighborhood of high-rises. More than jobs, housing, and school fellowships, it gave meaning to people’s lives, knitted and sutured social relations.

When Konjic residents furtively critique industrial toxicity, they target not the industry itself or even the hazardous waste it produces, but its mismanagement and unhinged dumping. They separate out Igman’s inherent industrial toxicity from the wonton dumping of unfiltered toxic waste. That toxicity has become visible to the naked eye is a decidedly postwar phenomenon. “Prije rata” (before the war), Igman had a department that monitored industrial waste and filtration. The war and the ensuing neoliberal dispossession and deregulation have changed everything.

But this is also a riverine neighborhood, and the river makes dissent possible. We might say that the residents are attached to the river as much as they are attached to the military industry: the river, they love and care for; Igman, they need. But it may be more precise to say that residents are entangled with both, are of both. The river and Igman are not external to people; rather, the residents are people of the river and people of the factory at once. The town and its people are co-constituted by the river and the military factory. Thus, military factory’s toxic dumping into the river creates an impasse and a repertoire of furtive critique in the extended domestic sphere. I attend to stories about toxic hazards, bitter complaints articulated in vague metaphors, poignant fragments of memory told in passing or recounted time and again in front yards, living rooms, and on the streets. I witness how acts of reclaiming the river shift the residents’ orientation from critique to survivance.

Feminist STS scholarship has long insisted that we live in fabricated worlds and inhabit cyborg subjectivities (Haraway 1991). It also recognizes that our bodies are so co-constituted by sediments of chemicals and toxicants that we embody new forms of “posthuman corporealities” (Povinelli 2017, 509). One of the most pressing questions for our toxic world is what kind of survival and what kind of politics are possible within such compromised spaces (Liboiron, Tironi, and Calvillo 2018; Fiske 2020). Rather than returning to an imagined purity of the past or the future (which here might mean decontextualizing socialism or pacifism as spaces of innocence), I conceptualize ethical and political potential in conversation with scholars and communities that imagine our futures from an already toxic, fragmented, and militarized present. People facing toxicity work creatively within, against, and to the side of liberal scientific and technopolitical frameworks (Broto 2013; Graeter 2017). They make their worlds more habitable through practices of healing (Langwick 2018), life-affirming work (Ahmann and Kenner 2020), intimate activism and an ethics of living, such as cleaning what cannot be made pure and tending to plants that cannot be made decontaminated (Tironi 2018), as well as collaborative land defense against settler colonial environmental harm (Murphy 2020).

Contributing to these ongoing debates, I show how the poisoning of the river reshapes Bosnians’ recognition of their inheritance and generates possibilities of dissent. Responses to environmental violence in Bosnia are complex because the perpetrators are not always distant colonizers. It is the case that the country imports waste and experiences “waste colonialism”: transnational corporations have purchased factories that they close at will or operate with wonton disregard for environmental laws, causing accidents and deaths and poisoning the land, water, air, and people around them on an unprecedented scale (Arsenijević 2022). Yet it is also the case that domestic companies such as Igman are not far behind. What kind of political dissent is possible when speaking up requires rising against one’s own?

I argue that reclaiming the river propels Bosnians’ furtive critique of militarized toxicity and generates acts of defiance and survivance. Survivance exceeds survival; it is an “active sense of presence” that renounces “dominance, tragedy, and victimry” (Vizenor 2008, 20). My argument is not only a scholarly endeavor but joins in social projects such as that of the Bosnian feminist artist Smirna Kulenović, who brings together people to plant flowers in toxic war trenches (Egger 2022). I see this text as planting another seed of survivance and a reclaiming of a different inheritance.

A note on methods. I did not seek out research on military industrial toxicity—I found myself surrounded by it. I also inherited concerns about it. In summer, my returns to Bosnia take me to my mother’s ancestral home in Konjic, and the old riverine neighborhood adjacent to Igman. To live in Igman’s neighborhood is to be enveloped in industrial dust, to see the river lose its shape and change its color, to smell suspicious odors, to witness the beach turn into a toxic wasteland. And to talk about it daily—raising concerns, pondering questions that both do and do not have answers. Over time, I begun formalizing a research project. Yet, when I started interviewing factory workers and neighborhood residents, I learned that they understand interviews as public speech. And when it comes to Igman, one speaks differently in public. Some speak with deference, others quiet their voices or disavow their criticism. In their voices, I heard the awe Igman inspires—respect mixed with fear and trepidation.

Fear, again. In the context of the extended domestic sphere where an interview appears as a cruel experiment, I have chosen to rely on participant observation.⁴ The form I practice here is better called attuned participation: I participate in everyday life, create opportunities for conversation, announce my research and make it known, and sometimes ask questions, but primarily listen for what is said to me and what is said because of my presence. Attuned participation is a form of autoethnographic research that allows me to synchronize my method with the sensitivity of furtive critique of militarization. Anthropologists such as Mitzi Carter have also found that “criticism and recovery in ethnographic practices ‘in the field’ involve active listening outside the traditional structure of the formal academic interview” (2013, 12). In her autoethnographic work on militarized, US-Japanese occupied Okinawa, Carter reimagines ethnographic conversations as a yuntaku (talk story, chit chat), “where stories took the form of a gift with a more communal, reciprocal value. The knowledge gained from a yuntaku comes not solely from direct answers to questions, but, rather, from instructive advice, the questions themselves, the silences and shared values of the unspoken” (14). I too note when I am being taught, instructed, given historical reminders, made to laugh or humored.

Although this research brings me closer to Konjic, this is not a hometown ethnography (Docot 2017), but one born of simultaneous love and estrangement. My hometown is Mostar, another riverine and militarized town, where Neretva no longer unites people but divides them, and where factories that sustained the town are vacant ruins. While I feel my difference in Konjic, I know that many people who live there do so as well. This picturesque, pleasant tourist town is claustrophobic to residents who do not conform. My uncle told me that the mountains’ squeeze puts pressure on people and drives them mad, drove him mad. My female cousins talk about feeling unfree, always under the watchful eyes of the small town. I know exactly what they mean, have known it since I was a teenager. The town does not publicly reckon with the fact that the Bosnian Army tortured, raped, and killed civilians in the municipality, committing genocide and war crimes. When my great-uncle told me about the murder of his colleague’s family, he tilted his voice just a bit. When you are taught not to fall out of line, not to expose yourself to public judgment, you embrace furtive speech.

To think of Bosnia is to think of the war that tore the country apart and made it a country of refugees and labor migrants. The war formally ended in 1995, but it is not over, as peace that followed entrenched the war logic and turned war-made divisions into internal borders and ethno-nationalist ruling regimes. The war’s readily apparent afterlives are tucked in across the human and more-than-human landscape—in crumbled buildings with wild figs growing from window holes, gravestones in city parks, fields and forests awash in depleted uranium, landmines more numerous than the population and signs warning of them in wildflower meadows where we pick herbs, red flowers painted into the bruised, blood-stained cracks of Sarajevo’s bombed sidewalks, Muslim monuments to the dead in poor mountain villages, photographs on living room armoires, and the enduring grief in my aunt’s eyes. War lives on in emptiness: in abandoned factories, hollowed out villages, empty houses. War lurks from the past and the future when flooding dislodges landmines, ethnonationalist politicians stir up fears, Russia flexes its muscles in the Balkans with help from Bosnia’s Serb Republic, and when Russian and NATO ships chase each other in the Adriatic. To Bosnians, the war in the Ukraine feels palpable and proximate, but so does the war on terror that displaces people who come to Bosnia and end up stuck there because they are violently prevented from crossing into the EU and lodging asylum claims there.⁵

Bosnia is haunted by more than one war, as the country’s society, economy, infrastructure, landscape, and urban planning have been co-constituted by militarization. A historical and analytical focus on militarization shifts our lens towards the porous line between war and peace that Bosnians straddle in their daily lives. Bosnia’s military factories have not only sustained people but have made them. Militarization has also bound people together, suturing domestic and public thresholds. Consider the following scene in Igman’s neighborhood, before the war.

Let us say it is an early summer morning sometime in the late 1980s in Konjic. From my grandmother’s avlija, I am calling good morning to her neighbors walking down the narrow street in front of the house. They are joining a procession of elegantly dressed people going to work, converging a hundred yards down the street at the gate to Igman. There is something peaceful about this scene. Walking to work was itself quiet, its rhythm dignified. Everyday life and work were blended in this old neighborhood wrapped around the factory. The gate itself was a cultural landmark, an orientation in the neighborhood’s landscape. I picked up my grandfather’s newspaper Политика from the kiosk at Igman’s gate (“they’re always telling lies,” he’d add). As children we played there, scavenging dropped change to buy pink, cigarette-shaped bubblegum. Now, children no longer play here, and few people walk to work. Honking cars and trucks clog up the neighborhood, spewing dirt and toxic dust on its small garden patches.

The seemingly peaceful scene belies the fact that Igman was always a military factory. Named after a nearby mountain legendary for the WWII maneuver in which Yugoslav anti-fascist resistance outsmarted the German troops, Igman has sustained the lives and livelihoods of the entire town and the region since the 1950s. It had once also employed my grandmother (in the canteen) and, until the pre-war layoffs, my uncle (doing office work), as well as many of my cousins, neighbors, and friends. The factory complex was built on the land that belonged to my great-grandfather. As a child, I learned early on: to live in Konjic is to be connected to Igman, to have life and livelihood routed through it.

Building on Gabrielle Hecht’s (2011, 3) analysis of Cold-War technopolitics, we might say that Bosnia has been bound up with militarized technopolitics, which I understand as a form of state power that relies on the production of military technology to enact a range of political and biopolitical goals. In Bosnia, it was the militarized technopolitics that shaped “political rule, economic arrangements, social relationships, and cultural forms” (2011, 1). Socialist militarized technopolitics produced socialist communities, and did so successfully. It generated new products, people, and arrangements between them. It was instrumental in the making of the socialist state and its subjects, from people’s individual lives and gendered social relations to broader social worlds.

For decades, Bosnia’s economy and society flourished with help of socialist militarization. Bosnia is awash in military factories (some working, others hollowed out in war), as socialist Yugoslavia located much of its military industry in this mountainous, mineral-rich terrain where the country was birthed and defended. Founded after World War II as a means of supporting an autonomous Yugoslav self-defense, military industry helped shifted Bosnia’s economic production from centuries-long extractive mining and deforestation to manufacturing.

Igman was one of the factories charged with securing the sovereignty of the new and precariously positioned non-aligned country sandwiched between the NATO and Warsaw Pacts. In the name of having to defend itself from potential future foreign occupation by much greater world powers, Yugoslavia invested heavily in military technology, spending a high percentage of its federal budget on the military industry, which manufactured everything from arms and ammunitions to airplanes and ships. It also instilled citizen love in the behemoth Yugoslav People’s Army (JNA) that would one day become monstrous and turn against its own.⁶

The country prepared its defense against potential foreign invaders on Bosnia’s mountainous terrain, placing a secret, underground infrastructure of military defense and control in two towns, Konjic and Bihać. Unbeknownst to locals, the JNA had built “Tito’s bunker”—an underground nuclear shelter and military command center hidden under the mountain next to Konjic, complete with residential rooms and kitchens, conference rooms, a command and communications center, its own energy supply, and more. Those who had helped build and maintain the bunker kept it a secret for decades.

Socialist Militarization: Projecting Anti-fascism, Anti-colonialism, Equity, and Unity

Bosnia’s militarization is a vestige of Cold War, and socialist Yugoslavia’s toxic gift to Bosnia. Because a toxic gift is both toxic and a gift, analyzing socialist, non-aligned militarization requires an account of ambiguity. To account for ambiguity is not to redeem or to celebrate but to historicize and contextualize. It is one thing to critique the militarization of the world’s military empire that kills millions and whose Defense Department is the world’s largest polluter; it is another to critique the sedimented effects of militarization in a precariously positioned country that was at the fault line of the Cold War and now serves as EU’s and NATO’s constitutive outside.⁷

Feminist critique of militarization has clearly outlined its violent effects. Indeed, we cannot discuss militarized toxicity without discussing colonialism, racial capitalism, and environmental racism. Colonized and postcolonial countries and territories have been the targets of imperial wars, nuclear experiments, and ammunition testing; they are also exposed to hazards from militarized mining, imported toxic waste, and military’s pesticides. Within countries and empires, it is the most marginalized groups that are subject to militarized environmental violence and military recruitment, policing, and death. These dynamics are apparent in Bosnia, which now also imports toxic commodities and toxic waste and is both subject to and perpetrator of environmental violence. Necropolitical capitalism at EU’s periphery shapes lives of all residents but racist violence disproportionally shapes the lives and bodies of Roma, who survive by gathering scrap metal and salvaging materials from waste dumps. In some towns, waste dumps are also spaces of Roma living, the only spaces where the state tolerates their habitation.

My analysis affirms feminist critique of militarization’s violence without taking the grounds and tenor of this critique as universal. Decentering capitalism and the Global North as vantage points allows us to historicize socialist militarization’s compound effects, placing the unsettled ambiguity of toxic gifts at the center of critique. Whereas militarization is said to deform “human potentials into the hierarchies of race, class, gender, and sexuality” (Lutz 2002, 723), my analysis of socialist militarization shows that Yugoslavia’s militarized technopolitics was a part of a larger project not of producing but overcoming difference (class, gender, ethnic, national), and engendering unifying and equalizing social structures. This project had constitutive violence in its core, many limits and exclusionary effects, and a genocidal ending, yet it was also enormously successful in what it tried to accomplish.⁸

Yugoslavia understood its military technopolitics not as readiness for wars of occupation, but as preparation for anti-fascist revolutionary struggle and resistance to foreign rule. Citizens were not taught to see themselves as soldiers, but as anti-fascist revolutionaries committed to self-determination and ready to fight for it. Obligatory high school people’s defense classes taught students to envision fighting invaders with partisan, guerilla tactics alongside the armed forces. The idea that all citizens would fight future occupations stemmed from the historical experience of successful anti-fascist organizing in WWII that enabled the country’s independence and profoundly transformed gender relations.⁹

The Yugoslav project of gender equity was forged in crucibles of WWII and was rooted in the socialist women’s workers movement and international resistance to fascism (Majstorović 2018). Yugoslav women participated in the anti-fascist struggle in record numbers; at its height, the Partisan resistance numbered half a million people, including 110,000 women. They were supported by a broad anti-fascist movement, including the Anti-Fascist Women’s Front (AFŽ). Formalized on Bosnian territory in 1942, the AFŽ eventually numbered two million members out of the country’s fifteen million citizens. In midst of WWII, a newly minted constitution enshrined a progressive marriage and family law and cemented women’s status as equal-rights-bearing citizens. After independence, the state ensured free education, free childcare, and equal salaries (Batinić 2001) but also dissolved the AFŽ and took control over women’s organizing.

Militarization was integral to the country’s development projects that simultaneously targeted society and infrastructures. Factories like Igman were to foster not only self-defense, but also social modernization, including women’s emancipation. A country whose economy was destroyed in WWII rebuilt itself as industrialized and urbanized. Young women and men participated in voluntary youth work brigades that built the country’s railways, airports, and roads; they were at the same time fashioned into new Yugoslav citizens who had equal rights, socialized across ethnic and geographic lines, and forged international friendships. And when the factories were built, they became workers. For decades, militarization, industrialization, and social—and socialist—prosperity went hand in hand. “Industry” was synonymous with “economy” and the military industry, however toxic or destructive, was an unquestioned good. Women and men worked in military and other factories, while children went to free public schools and universities, often with factory stipends. For decades, Igman and factories like it embodied Yugoslav pride in revolutionary self-sufficiency and socialist good life.

Socialist militarization also acted as an anti-colonial force, as Yugoslavia shared its military goods with non-aligned, decolonizing countries of the Global South. As one of the founders and leaders of the non-aligned movement (NAM), Yugoslavia tasked the military industry with technopolitics that fostered international solidarity and supported anti-colonial struggles. Yugoslavia gave gifts weapons and ammunition to decolonizing movements and newly independent countries, while also selling them to others. By offering financial, logistic, and military support to decolonizing efforts, Yugoslavia solidified relationships with countries that were building up their armies, and people that were under occupation, such as Palestinians. In addition, Yugoslavia also gave university stipends to non-aligned countries’ students, built housing and industrial infrastructures across member countries, and exported its experts in socialist development across the non-aligned world. Military technopolitics turned Yugoslavia’s into what we might call a comrade-donor: a global actor that gave and sold its weapons, understanding itself as acting in solidarity.¹⁰ This toxic gift was also both poisonous and welcome. In a militarized Cold War world, non-aligned countries thought themselves hard pressed to exist without their own armaments.

Capitalism has shifted the purpose of the military industry, uncoupling the trade in weapons from the political work of building international solidarity. Weapons and ammunition once gifted to the decolonizing countries of the Global South are today happily sold to anyone who will buy them; the shareholders and the state reap profits; workers are grateful for their jobs at the same time as their bodies and the river are exposed to toxicants. Military industry is a toxic lifeline in a country once again largely reliant on extractive economies.

“When Igman employs, Konjic lives,” write the newspapers testifying to the success of a factory that ensures the town’s survival. The talk of survival is not an exaggeration: Igman feeds the town and prevents the people from being displaced yet again. The workers’ steady salaries are an exception in a country where many jobs do not pay regular wages and where delayed salaries are a part of life. Now Europe’s poorest economy, Bosnia’s 40 percent unemployment rate is one of the world’s highest, and the very highest for the youth. The government, which is the country’s largest employer, is in a perpetual state of indebtedness, hovering at the edge of bankruptcy.¹¹ It often delays paying salaries to civil servants—a condition that harkens back to the economic collapse that precipitated the war.

Precarity and joblessness in Bosnia, combined with EU’s poaching of select classes of laborers, work in tandem to slowly drain the country of its people. Bosnia is being emptied out—by underestimated official counts, a fifth of its population left, more than during the war. Bosnians join other former Yugoslavs and Eastern Europeans as Western Europe’s new underclass of care and construction workers and semi-legal temporary workers. Those who stay in Bosnia are labor migrants in waiting, or in preparation—German classes are booming, as are credentialing agencies. “We raise our children knowing they will leave,” my cousin tells me. There is a special kind of pain in this knowledge.

Konjic has not experienced a mass exodus precisely because the military industry holds the town together and keeps it going at the same time as it injures it and erodes life around it. The weapons and ammunition production is one of a few profitable industries, which means that Igman workers are paid living wages, and on time. They are no longer the self-governing workers, the socialist citizen-subjects with say over the means of production, but neither are they hyper-exploited and expendable as much of Bosnia’s workforce. The successful global trade in ammunition enables a measure of stability for the workers and the region as a whole.

The precarity is an effect of war and postwar militarized neoliberalism. Most factories that stopped working during the war never turned on their engines again; others employ a fraction of their pre-war workforce. After the war, Bosnia acquiesced to de-industrialization and to neoliberalism, under duress. Militarized neoliberal rule was the price Bosnia had to pay for NATO’s “gift of freedom” (Nguyen 2012): the peace itself and the postwar reconstruction that refashioned the country into an import-dependent, free-market economy. The war ended after NATO’s military intervention in 1995 and the signing of the Dayton Peace Agreement, which violently remade the country’s socioeconomic and political order but sanitized this process as a “transition” from socialist communism to capitalism and democracy. The agreement required that Bosnia enshrine ethno-nationalism in law, accept the status of an immature country unable to govern itself and requiring foreign oversight, as well as surrender public and state property, including factories, to transnational and domestic finance. Bosnia’s government is overseen the EU/US joint operation called the Office of the High Representative that is supposed to advance Bosnia’s membership in the EU but considers the country a perpetual candidate.¹²

A vestige of socialist industrialization, military factories continue to produce people and communities, but their toxicity is more violent and more apparent under conditions of dispossession and deregulation. The toxic gift of militarized industrialization has created an enduring infrastructure of violence and toxicity that are now joined by indebtedness. Without the economic and legal safety net of a socialist state, Igman’s workers and their families are more dependent on the military factory, more exposed to toxicity, and more enclosed by entwinements of the state and necropolitical capitalism. “Before the war”— during socialism—the right to work was enshrined in the constitution, and the country had little unemployment until the 1980s economic crisis. The days of employment as a right are not only gone but erased. Today, access to basic infrastructures of life such as jobs and healthcare is precarious and depends on favors (Brković 2017). Indeed, being and feeling indebted is constitutive of Bosnian postwar condition (Jašarević 2017).

Under neoliberal indebtedness, militarization’s fueling of social reproduction is more pernicious. In a region and a country bereft of jobs, the value of having a steady employment that actually pays a steady salary and has social security benefits cannot be overstated. Workers feel fortunate to have jobs and consider the company’s profitability a streak of incredibly good luck, even as those who reap profits do so at the expense of the river. The interplay of neoliberal precarity and toxicity is also apparent in a nearby Serbian town reliant on a copper-processing plant. There too, residents are both grateful for and critical of the industrial smoke that, as they say, “feeds” them (Jovanović 2018, 495). When their lungs fill with smoke, it means that the factory is operational and that people have jobs they need, even as their hospital fills with pulmonary patients.

Precarity and dispossession condition Bosnians to consider having a job as a benefit and a gift. Getting a job is reconceptualized as a moral, discretionary act, an act dependent on a goodwill of certain individuals, and, of course, on connections that accrue and thicken indebtedness. Igman’s precious, though toxic jobs are passed through families and the fictive kin of neighbors, generating ongoing value and obligation, thickening indebtedness to one another and the company. The over a thousand people employed by Igman feel indebted to the company, as do the many thousands of people who are fed and sustained by each employee.

Some might say that Igman owns the town, but it may be more accurate to say that it manufactures being owed. Igman knows how to generate gratitude and loyalty by distributing highly visible social gifts that produce debt and dividends. It gives fellowships to students and children of war veterans. Whereas these fellowships bind the students to future employment in the factory, generalized joblessness means that the fellowships are seen not as unwelcome burdens but vital promises. Igman also donates to local causes, for instance by supplying PPE and medical equipment to the public hospital in Konjic as COVID-19 emerged. Even though Igman was trying to offset reputational damage after an ill-advised company celebration caused a disease cluster, its donation was publicly saluted and celebrated as a generous gift. By extending itself into the social realm and participating in a moral economy, Igman accrues gratitude and social indebtedness. When jobs are considered gifts, and small donations have high value, the gifts are considered uncompensated.

Igman is paid back in loyalty and partial silence. The silence is not absolute; the residents complain bitterly but without naming names. Partial silence also means speaking in metaphors and coded language. A radio journalist, curious about my research, interviews me and then tells me, “If you write about this, it will be a hit” (biće bomba): it will cause an uproar, an explosion. She explains, “Everybody knows, it’s a public secret, who is polluting the river. These companies, they employ people, so this is a double-edged sword.” Like others, she openly states what is known but cannot be named. When Igman’s neighbors talk about weapons sales, toxicity, and the sad state of the town and the country, they simultaneously write themselves into this context and take a distance from it. They readily critique toxic harms but see the factories as unassailable to any practical opposition. For not only do the toxic companies pay their bills and the country’s bills, they are also so deeply entangled with the state that the residents feel enclosed.

The sports fishermen’s association was the first to lodge legal complaints against Igman over a decade ago, but both the municipal and federal governments looked away. State-sanctioned environmental violence in the region around Konjic is vast. Industrial and commercial toxic waste is dumped into the river; municipal waste is hauled to illegally built dumps and pits that leak toxic spillage into the watershed and people’s gardens; legal and illegal quarries turn hills into sideline craters; semi-legal construction of small hydropower plants destroys riverbeds and annihilates fish. Further downstream, government-designated waste dumps have come under scrutiny for failing to contain hazardous waste and for being built semi-legally, in unapproved sites. Toxic waste is deposited in open dumps that spill, leak, and emit noxious, terrifying smells. The residents are the ones feel the fallout.

The collusion and entwinement between factories that dump toxic waste and government institutions that tacitly authorize it could be called corruption— a disturbance of order—but it is only partly that. We see corruption when state officials and factory management support and protect each other, prioritizing private, individual, short-term profit over public interest. States help comprise “the structure of toxicity” (Liboiron, Tironi, and Calvillo 2018, 336) that to many Bosnians feels like an enclosure. States produce and tolerate toxic waste, and sometimes even profit from it.

Yet, the government’s refusal to regulate toxic waste disposal is not simply a failure or corruption, but is facilitated by neoliberal design. Toxicity is embedded in state structure of environmental regulations. The state does not keep check on illegal dumping because neoliberal policies prescribe trust in the companies’ willingness and ability to mitigate environmental harms. Neoliberal environmental policies rely on self-regulation and self-monitoring, not government oversight or meaningful penalties. Bosnia is one of the places where we see the accentuated effects of deregulation that tolerates the poisoning of the river, soil, air, and human and nonhuman bodies.

First, governments are generally accepting of certain levels of toxicity, as the goal of environmental laws and policies is not to eliminate toxicants, but to set allowable limits. Thus, Bosnia prescribes legal restrictions on industrial waste in accordance with EU regulations that rely on the notion of threshold limits.¹³ Threshold limit regulations assume that “ecosystems and bodies can assimilate a specific amount of toxicant before harm occurs” (Liboiron, Tironi, and Calvillo 2018, 335), but fail to consider our layered, overlapping exposures to thousands of toxicants. As Amelia Fiske writes, “current models of toxicity are insufficient for conceptualizing and acting upon the role of toxicants in our lives” (2020, 22).

Second, monitoring adherence to these limits is outside the purview of the neoliberal government. As Zeleni-commissioned reports show, the amounts of allowable mercury, lead, trivalent and hexavalent chromium, and other toxicants are vastly exceeded in Konjic. Everyone, including government agents in charge, knows this. At the government agency Jadran (The Adriatic) in Mostar, I am told that the agency’s job is to issue water permits to companies whose waste flows into Neretva, not to monitor compliance with these permits. The friendly chemical engineer repeats what I have heard from residents: Igman now has bought a new, two-million-euro filtration system, but nobody knows whether it puts it to use. The disposable filters cost money whereas dumping is free, so everyone suspects that Igman and other factories do not use their filtration systems. This official is as clever at identifying loopholes as those who exploit them, but stresses that he cannot act on this knowledge: “Even if someone were to call the inspection team, they have to announce their arrival, and on those days, of course, the factories would use the proper filtration system.”

He also tells me that Konjic is an exemplary environmental steward, compared to the rest of the country. Here and elsewhere, officials legitimize toxic overflows by emphasizing how harms are relative to each other (see Neimanis, Neimanis, and Åsberg 2017, 635). Bosnia has much bigger problems, he stresses, as toxic dumping in Konjic pales in comparison to the coal mines and steel factories in central and northern Bosnia, or to toxicity that makes Sarajevo’s air pollution the worst in the world. Bosnia as a whole ranks as having the fifth- to second-highest mortality rate from air pollution worldwide. When having most polluted air is not the legal but the experiential threshold limit, the dumping of hazardous waste into a river can be normalized and made unremarkable. And yet the river also mobilizes people’s felt experience of political urgency and they reclaim it as their inheritance.

A decade after the war, Tito’s underground bunker in Konjic was turned into an art gallery. A symbol of demilitarization, the bunker today serves as one of the town’s main tourist attractions. On the tour I joined, the guides rushed us through, uninterested in the extraordinary art on display featuring socialist modernism. The military officer who was the main guide brought us to the central electric generator and showed us how it operated. Demonstrating the workings of the lever that turned it on, he said, “The real work of art here is the shelter itself.” The message was clear: we were to be in awe of the military structure itself, not the art installations on its walls. In Konjic itself, the military apparatus no longer inspires pride and awe, but militarization’s capillary hegemony is now supplanted by precarity and enclosure.

The river breaks through the enclosure. Its movement, force, and beauty invite the town residents to recognize it as a part of their inheritance, mustering defiance and cultivating survivance. Konjic and Bosnia are home to a powerful anti-capitalist riverine social movements, as people and activist groups have coalesced around their opposition to small hydropower plants. Zeleni Neretva has helped galvanize this movement, animating publics and generating political support. One reason this movement has been more successful than the struggle against toxic dumping is that small hydropower plants only benefit a very small number of investors and bought-off government officials. Activists have successfully shown that small hydropower plants bring benefits to their builders and government officials they pay off, but fail to benefit surrounding communities while carrying enormous environmental costs. That they alter the rivers’ physical shape and get in the way of migrating fish is seen as particularly violent and destructive.

In July 2022, the government of the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina adopted the legislation prohibiting the building of small hydropower plants; activist groups are now advocating for halting the work of already built ones. The successes of this movement have clarified the political stakes of people’s entanglements with the river, emboldening and electrifying their critique of toxic dumping. Residents of Konjic have also begun reclaiming the river. They have come to think of rivers as a form of inheritance that needs to be defended from the predatory capitalism/state formation. “Rivers belong to no one; rivers belong to us all,” they proclaim as they protest.

Reclaiming the river and acting as people of the river includes new and old practices, all of which are resignified as acts of defiance and survivance. They are endowed with a politics of opposition, care, and an orientation toward the river as a form of neighborly inheritance. To reclaim being people of the river means:

To seek it out on your daily walk and comment on its beauty, demise, or both each time you pass by: “Vidi nam Neretve!” (Look at our Neretva)
To clean its banks, gathering plastic and debris, even as you know that more will spill from the landfill
To dive into its depths, as divers’ clubs do every year, pulling out appliances and large waste
To keep it alive by bringing the fish back to it
To start a youth school of sport fishing
To say the names of the rocks on its banks and in its stream
To travel upstream to plunge yourself into it, rejoicing when you feel the cold deep inside your bones
To go further upstream where the river is potable because you want to drink its water and feel it inside your body
To photograph its canyons, waters, beaches, rocks, and plants
To paint it
To sing songs about it
To sing by it
To tell new stories about it.

Thank you to all the people who have pulled me towards the river, have taught me and talked to me, people who are kin and kin-like, and who create new collectivities. May many of us join forces. Thank you to Larisa Kurtović for insisting that I ground this article in place-based conversations. The special section editors also fostered a collective and created a space that makes academia a space of survivance rather than survival. Thank you, Xan Chacko, Astrida Neimanis, Diana Pardo Pedraza, and Jennifer Terry for your extraordinary organization, care, and guidance in the review and peer-review process. May we all follow in your footsteps. Thank you to Caren Kaplan, Lindsay Kelly, and Joshua Kim for your generous questions and comments. Thank you to anonymous peer reviewers for devoting your time and energy to offer detailed, constructive, and even collaborative reviews.

¹ Eurosjaj (Euroshine), Igman’s former subsidiary that now operates under German license and Bosnian ownership, is responsible for the visible toxic dumping in the center of town.

² Sporadically funded by Germany’s Green Party–aligned Heinrich Böll Stiftung and other foundations, Zeleni Neretva has tirelessly documented state-sanctioned toxic dumping and environmental violence in their social media and reports, helping galvanize public action (see http://zeleni-neretva.ba/).

³ To arrive at this definition, I build on conceptual discussions in anthropology of militarization (González, Gusterson, and Houtman 2019, 6; Lutz 2002, 723).

⁵ The US war on terror has displaced half of today’s 80 million and counting refugees, directly murdered over 900,000 people, and brought on sickness and deaths to millions of others (“Costs of the 20-Year War on Terror,” 2021). Those who try to find refuge face deprivation, torture, and closed borders; Bosnia is one of the countries into which the EU violently and illegally returns refugees (Ahmetašević 2021).

⁶ The JNA, under largely Serbian leadership, was one of the main protagonists in the genocidal wars in the 1990s. Often conceived as wars among ethnic groups or, at best, former Yugoslav republics, these wars were also waged by the JNA against its constituents who declared independence: Slovenia, Croatia, and Bosnia.

⁷ The Department of Defense produces “more toxic waste than the U.S.A’s top three chemical manufacturers combined” (Mitchell 2013, 1).

⁸ On violence constitutive to Yugoslav socialism, see the digital exhibit Our Families (forthcoming). On limits with respect to gender equity, see Korac 1998; on exclusions due to ethnicity, race, and nationality, see Krasniqi 2021 and Sardelić 2015.

⁹ Yugoslavia understood the condition of its sovereignty as derived from anti-fascist defense and subsequent militarization. We were taught that Yugoslavia was not freed by anyone in World War II—the country’s anti-fascist resistance forces had freed themselves from occupation. Freedom was not a gift to be repaid to imperial powers but a legacy to uphold.

¹⁰ See Subotić and Vučetić (2019) for a critique of Yugoslavia’s privileging of anti-colonialism over anti-racism.

¹¹ The unpaid civil servants rarely protest, but in November 2021 hospital workers from Konjic started striking, eventually laying down their uniforms in December. They cried as they did so, talking to TV cameras about how they had never stopped working, not even during the war, when the hospital was incessantly shelled for days at a time. They invoked the war to remind the state of their sacrifices and the legitimacy of their demands for salaries, which have been restored—for now.

¹² The Office of the High Representative has ill-defined and unaccountable powers. In addition, it often exercises authority it does not have, unilaterally firing Bosnian judges and members of parliament and trying to rewrite the country’s electoral law. All High Representatives have been men, and all have been white. I note this not to suggest that representational feminism would adequately address the fundamental problem of imperial statecraft, but to note that the international promotion of gender equality and democracy are less principles of governance than instruments of power. Indeed, reconciliation interventions have shored up affirmative essentialisms of “peaceful women” (Helms 2013) at the same time as neoliberal policies have reintroduced state-sanctioned patriarchy.

¹³ For example, although the World Health Organization (2022) says that “there is no safe lead blood level concentration,” governments allow certain percentages of lead and other heavy metals and pollutants in drinking water.

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Saida Hodžić is an Associate Professor of Anthropology and Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Cornell University. The author of the award-winning book The Twilight of Cutting: African Activism and Life after NGOs, she is writing a book called Refugee Solidarity: Humanitarian Afterlives of War and Violence and developing a podcast called Refugees Know Things.