Grassroots Narratives and Practices of Diversity in Mostar and Novi Sad

Love, activism, and the possibility of radical social change in Mostar

“…And exactly because the collaboration between international and local political actors has always been problematic, internationally-led strategies to produce change (i.e. to move forward with the state-building and peace processes) have steadily moved towards the nurturing of civil society as an alternative political protagonist (Goldstein, 2015;Jeffrey, 2013;Kappler, 2014;Keil & Perry, 2015). Accordingly, since the end of the conflict, many international and local NGOs settled in Mostar to work on education, dialogue, and reconciliation.…”

Everyday Active Citizenship the Balkan Way: Local Civil Society and the Practice of ‘Bridge Building’ in Two Post-Yugoslav Cities

“…If we take cosmopolitanism as, first of all, appreciation of (national) cultures other than our own, then calling the 'bridge building' practices in the postwar Western Balkans 'cosmopolitan' is likely to obscure the nature of these practices rather than explain them. For in the area in question, unlike in the Western Europe, 'building bridges' is often about appreciation of a local culture which has been hybrid for centuries, rather than of 'new hybridities' (Beauregard and Body-Gendrot 1999;Binnie et al 2006), of well-known rather than of unknown (for my short discussion on this see Goldstein 2015). While Nava (2002) tells us that 'ordinariness and domestication of difference are the distinguishing marks of vernacular cosmopolitanism in urban Britain today ' (ibid., 94), talking of 'domestication of difference' in Western Balkans would be inappropriate, if not for anything else, for that it would be hard to say which of the cultures would be domestifying and which domestified.…”