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In February 2014, Bosnia-Herzegovina witnessed its largest and most dramatic wave of civic protests since the end of the 1992–1995 war and the signing of Dayton Peace Accords. Confrontations with the police and the destruction of dozens of government buildings subsequently gave way to the formation of plenums – town hall assemblies – where protesters collectively articulated their grievances against the country's corrupt and deeply unpopular political authorities. The plenums emphasized Bosnia's pressing problems of widespread unemployment, rising poverty and corruption, and in so doing sidelined the ossified nationalist rhetoric and identity politics. This article analyzes the main representations of protests, and the sociopolitical and economic pressures that helped usher in this massive public uprising. We demonstrate how protesters sought to break out of the impasses of post-Dayton ethnic politics by actively recuperating and representing alternative visions of participatory politics and popular sovereignty associated with socialist-era imaginaries and embodied in the plenum. We argue that these efforts signal the emergence of a new kind of prefigurative politics that provide alternative practices of political organization, decision-making, and sociability in Bosnia and beyond.

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In this introduction to special issue 'After Utopia: Leftist Imaginaries and Activist Politics in the Postsocialist World', we explore the theoretical implications for thinking about activism as a form of historically situated practice in the former socialist world. Building on insights from the papers included in this issue, which draw on ethnographic research in Ukraine, Armenia, Bosnia and along the Balkan refugee route, our introduction considers both the fragility and resilience of leftist imaginaries in the aftermath of lost utopian dreams of socialism and the betrayed promises of post 1989 democratic transformation. We do so in four moves, (i) by offering a reframing of postsocialism as a problem-space of historical and political consciousness; (ii) by interrogating the figure of the activist in its self-conscious and ethnographically embedded guises; (iii) by heeding Sherry Ortner's call to think beyond 'dark anthropology' and finally, (iv) by considering what it might mean to imagine, and model, political alternatives in both activist and scholarly work.

In June 2013, a breakdown in the routine functioning of state bureaucracy sparked the largest and up to that point most significant wave of protests in postwar Bosnia-Herzegovina, named the Bosnian Babylution. The protest centered on the plight of newborn babies who, because of this particular administrative problem, could no longer be issued key documents, even to travel outside the country for life-saving medical care. These events exposed the profound nature of the representational crisis gripping this postwar, postsocialist, and postintervention state that has emerged at the intersection of ethnic hyper-representation and the lived experience of the collapse of biopolitical care. Yet, as this analysis shows, this crisis has also helped unleash new forms of political desire for revolutionary rupture and reconstitution of the postwar political.