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AbstractThis article has an empirical and a conceptual aim. The first aim is to provide additional historical depth to recent analyses of the "Balkan Route" through Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) with a reconstruction of the making of a border/mobility assemblage during the first two and a half decades of that state's existence. These processes occurred under direct foreign supervision and were framed in terms of the conditionality of the "Road into Europe" specific to the European semiperiphery. The second aim concerns a prominent feature in recent studies of borders and mobility: the use of assemblage theory. I use my historical analysis to reflect on the implications of that theory's programmatic call to foreground heterogeneity and provisionality. Specifically, in tracing patterns and tensions in the bordering of BiH I call attention to the importance of actors' encounters with already-assembled hierarchical configurations, provisional but effective at the time of the encounter.

Ethnographers working in Bosnia and Herzegovina have been at the forefront of the struggle against the identitarianism that dominates scholarship and policymaking regarding the country. Tirelessly foregrounding patterns of life that exceed, contradict, complicate or are oblivious to questions thus framed, we have—unsurprisingly—paid a price for this contribution: explorations of the appeal of nationalism are left mostly to others. Th is article identifies anemic and etic politics/people paradigm that facilitates our timidity to register the ways in which "ordinary people" may enact nationalist subjectivity. Seeking to retain the paradigm's strengths, I call for a recalibration of how we understand it to function and explore conceptual tools to make this work. Starting from two cases of "foot soldier narratives," I suggest that hegemony theory can help us trace not only how people are subjected to nationalization but also how they may seek subjectification through it.

Thisarticle critically examines the normative, liberal assumptions that most frequently underlie scholarly, activist, and policy calls for reconciliation in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Rather than measuring how reconciliation is progressing, I suggest we ask ourselves whose reconciliation is being desired here: by whom, for whom, and for what? Which importantalternative questions remain unasked and which latent answers are ignored ordownplayed in the process? Particular attention is paid to the ways in which liberal reconciliation discourse tends to depoliticize questions of justice.

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. © 2013 European Association of Social Anthropologists.

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.RésuméL'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.