Aid as pan‐Islamic solidarity in Bosnia‐Herzegovina

Abstract

For decades Arab Muslims have engaged in pan‐Islamic solidarity aid work in Bosnia‐Herzegovina. In delivering aid from the Middle East to a European country, they disrupt the racial and civilizational hierarchies that structure most international relief work. Their experiences demonstrate the utility of a more capacious anthropological understanding of universalism. Rather than dismiss universalism as mere ideology or as a set of homogenizing processes, I highlight how universalist projects put into practice complex idioms that are notionally directed at all of humanity. Ethnographic attention to these relief workers’ material conditions reveals that they lack many of the privileges of the white, Western, and highly mobile protagonists of most ethnographies of aid. Moreover, it illuminates how spiritual practices coalesce with considerations of transnational mobility, class, and political action—considerations that are often neglected in anthropological work on Islamic piety. [universalism, solidarity, humanitarianism, charity, aid, Islam, pan‐Islamism, Bosnia‐Herzegovina]

Remaking the value of work

“…It is precisely their precarious and relatively marginalized socioeconomic conditions that allow these volunteers and grassroots philanthropists to formulate a grassroots politics based on an affect of empathy with their beneficiaries, whom they identify with as “ordinary people” who have a shared past and a shared future. In this relational form of giving in a late‐socialist context, people imagine care for others in a way that differs from the bourgeois philanthropy of neoliberal capitalism, which is shaped by dualistic economic inequality and the transnational, northern‐led humanitarianism that is premised on imaginaries of “distant” suffering (Ticktin 2014, 275) and structured around “racial and civilizational hierarchies” (D. Li 2021, 231). Such a remaking of the value of work features in how people imagine their roles and how they experiment with ways of contributing to social change.…”

The Desire to Help

“…Th is article joins the recent attempts of anthropologists and historians to de-centre and pluralise the humanitarianism that has so far been dominated by the paradigms of Northernled and highly institutionalised international regimes (e.g. Brković 2023;Fiddian-Qasmiyeh and Pacitto 2015;Li 2021).…”

“…As Didier Fassin (2011: 6) puts it, 'injustice is articulated as suff ering' in this new humanitarian governance in the global North. However, as historians and anthropologists point out, 'humanitarianism', just like charity and philanthropy, have multiple, local and transnational genealogies in non-Western contexts (Capotescu 2020;Fassin 2023;Fuller 2015;Li 2021). Th ese alternative notions and forms of humanitarianism may operate on very diff erent vernacular imaginaries from the Western liberal notions of universal humanity and Northern 'emergency imaginaries' and hence may disrupt the global structures of racial and civilisational hierarchies inherent to post-war, Northern-led transnational humanitarianism and open up the possibility of imagining alternative paradigms of humanitarianism in a shift ing world order, one that goes beyond the entrapment of neoliberal capitalism, dystopian violence and dualistic hierarchies between those who have and those who have not (Capotescu 2020;Li 2021).…”

Conjugated Universalism

“…By conjugated universalism, I refer to how peasant revolutionaries like Allah Baksh connected and transformed ideational elements in the pursuit of a politics of universalism, 1 defined here as “structures of aspiration that direct a particular message to all of humanity“ (Li 2021, 4). My use of conjugation flags both connection and transformation , drawing on the term's resonance with vocabularies of kinship (as in conjugality) and grammar (whereby verbs transform in particular relational contexts) 2 .…”