This introduction discusses the hope boom in anthropological studies, suggesting that it reflects two converging developments: a sense of increasing unpredictability and crisis, and a sense of lack of political and ideological direction in this situation. We further identify two overall trends in the anthropological literature gathered under the rubric of hope: an emphasis on hopefulness against all odds and one on specific formations of hope and temporal reasoning.

Suggesting building bricks for an anthropology of everyday geopolitics, this text analyses affective engagements with regulation, here of cross‐border mobility. Following the logic of the regulation that constitutes them, I conceptualize zones of humiliating entrapment through documentary requirements – experienced by citizens of Bosnia‐Herzegovina and Serbia – as the EU's shrinking ‘immediate outside’. Using ethnography, I embed bodily experiences in visa queues in people's engagements with changing Eurocentric spatiotemporal rankings, refracting this entrapment against the privileges of certain foreigners (such as me) and against their own remembered mobility with the ‘red’ Yugoslav passport. I propose that complementing the dominant focus on the role of (national) identity politics in geopolitical affect with one on regulation and ranking is a central task for a critical anthropology of everyday geopolitics in peripheries. Résumé L’auteur de cet article entend mettre en avant des éléments pour constituer une anthropologie de la géopolitique quotidienne. Pour cela, il analyse l’abord affectif de la régulation, en l’occurrence celle des flux transfrontaliers. Suivant la logique de la réglementation qui les constitue, il conceptualise sous l’appellation « d’extérieur immédiat » de l’Union européenne des zones, de plus en plus exiguës, où les sujets (en l’occurrence des ressortissants de Bosnie‐Herzégovine et de Serbie) sont pris dans le piège humiliant des exigences paperassières. À l’aide de l’ethnographie, il incorpore le vécu physique des files d’attente de visas dans la confrontation des gens aux classements spatiotemporels eurocentriques mouvants, confrontant cette situation d’enlisement aux privilèges de certains étrangers (comme lui‐même) et à leurs propres souvenirs de mobilité avec le passeport yougoslave « rouge ». L’auteur suggère qu’une anthropologie de la géopolitique quotidienne dans les zones périphériques requiert de compléter la focalisation sur le rôle de la politique identitaire (nationale) dans les affects géopolitiques par une attention soutenue aux régulations et aux classements.

Contextualising the foreign-imposed return policies in early post-war Bosnia-Herzegovina, this article argues that the return of the displaced -however important it was to many Bosnians -ultimately functioned as the self-perpetuating lynchpin of an externally generated framework for post-war reconstruction, often out of tune with the hopes of its intended beneficiaries. Rather than following conventional anthropological cultural relativist arguments, I propose a critique of the foreign intervention that places it in its social, political and economic context, drawing attention to patterns of longing and belonging in Bosnia-Herzegovina. I contrast the groundings and implications of intervention policies with the experiences and yearnings of displaced Bosnians and show that, while it was legitimised as the implementation of an ostensibly ideologically neutral human rights discourse, the foreign emphasis on property and safety rights over other concerns channelled the reconstruction of Bosnia-Herzegovina into a peculiar, normative trajectory of postsocialist neoliberalisation.My objective in this article is to set out some critical lines of thought about early post-war transformations in Bosnia-Herzegovina. While grounded in long-term ethnographic research, detailed accounts of which are published elsewhere, 1 I consciously pitch my argument on a generalising polemical level. For an anthropologist, the most obvious route to formulate a critique of a project such as the foreign intervention in Bosnia-Herzegovina is to draw attention to the importance of local cultural specificities. Despite the recent vogue of rhetorically incorporating 'cultureÕ into global governance, the predominance of the human rights framework allowed the portrayal of those intervention policies as a neutral, technical toolkit for post-war recovery rather than as a Western-derived, historically specific process of societal transformation. And of course I agree, almost by professional default, with those who argue that such a blanket application of Western policy models is deeply problematic. This is not to say that

Anthropological dealings with the state often convey hope by replicating the hope of their subjects against the state. This libertarian paradigm provides effective analytical tools to grasp people's evasion of state grids, through cultural resilience-in-authenticity and/or autonomous self-organisation. Yet it cannot conceptualise their affective and practical investments in ordering statecraft, i.e. their hope for the state. Through a case study of self-organisation in the besieged outskirts of Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, this article traces inhabitants' yearnings for 'normal lives' and their efforts to allow the latter to unfold. I focus on schooling and its temporal calibration of routines, framed in the vertical encompassment of statecraft. Against the reduction of hope to hope against the state, the complementary analytical tool of 'gridding', I propose, allows an alternative form of replication, capturing people's yearnings for the convergence of topdown and upward/outward organisation of predictability on different scales.

This article addresses the contrasting pull of two tendencies in anthropology: (a) calls to redress the purification of human from non-human actants and (b) calls to denaturalise notions of borders as things, foregrounding borderwork. The resulting dilemma -do we treat people and things as equivalent actants on a 'flat' plane or not? -is explored through an ethnographic exercise on the border that divides Sarajevo. This case study crystallises methodological possibilities, implications for critique and matters of accountability presented by either path. Ultimately, I argue, a focus on things is productive insofar as it functions within a focus on human practice.