Dissatisfied Citizens: Ethnonational Governance, Teachers’ Strike and Professional Solidarity in Mostar, Bosnia–Herzegovina

Abstract

This ethnographic and anthropological study documents the contours of professional solidarity among teachers in postwar and postsocialist Bosnia–Herzegovina. The article illustrates how ethnically divided Croat and Bosniak teachers at the first ‘reunified’ school in postwar Bosnia and Herzegovina – the famed Mostar Gymnasium – came together to strike together, and to voice their profession-shaped citizen demands. These teachers frequently referred to themselves as nezadovoljni građani or dissatisfied citizens, stressing the generational, moral and economic aspects of their predicament. The combined feelings of citizen-dissatisfaction, loss of social status and being left out of administrative procedures – which enable access to rightful entitlements – led to the formation of a teachers’ protest group across the lines of ethnic citizenship. These joint actions generated a shift in the teachers’ political subjectivities, however provisional, and they probed the horizon of ethnic politics in postwar and postsocialist Bosnia.

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