Bosnian-Herzegovinian Citizens in the Making – The Citizenship Debate in the Time of Social Mobilizations

Abstract

Drawing upon rhetorical approaches to citizenship, this article analyzes how the contested notion of Bosnian-Herzegovinian (BiH) citizenship has been crafted on the discursive level during two series of social mobilizations taking place in 2013 and 2014. It aims to provide a better understanding of how various actors make sense of BiH citizenship. This study investigates what values were associated with citizenship, how boundaries of membership were drawn, and how the ethno-national dimension and linguistic complexities came into play. It analyzes a corpus of 150 media articles covering the protests in four major printed daily newspapers while methodologically relying on the discourse historical approach developed by Reisigl and Wodak. The analysis demonstrates that discursive articulations of citizenship are generated within the immediate context of social mobilization but are also influenced by historical legacies, institutional preconditions, regional aspects or global narratives. It shows that the decentralized institutional set up combined with the multi-layered and multidimensional meaning of citizenship blur the notion of BiH citizenship as an all-encompassing term and pose an obstacle to the formulation of an alternative vision of the BiH polity to the post-Dayton order.

1 Introduction

The separatist aspirations of Republika Srpska and ongoing debates on reforming election law have recently re-energized debates on the constitutional system of Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) and the basic contours of its statehood and polity determined by the Dayton Peace Agreement (DPA), which ended the war in BiH in 1995. BiH is simultaneously a multinational, post-socialist, and post-conflict country, which remains deeply divided. Conflicting visions on the ideal organization of the Bosnian polity and its territorial and citizenry boundaries, which fueled the Bosnian war (1992–1995), have persisted in the post-war era. Different stances on fundamental issues of allegiance and identity exist among the three BiH constituent peoples – Bosniaks, Serbs, and Croats – but also regionally. The disputed legitimacy of Bosnian statehood, reification of ethnicity as the primary marker of one’s identity, and a multi-layered citizenship regime leaving little space for purely civic loyalties to the state pose a substantial challenge to the concept of Bosnian citizenship.

The article conceives of citizenship as a multidimensional concept that entails civil, political, social, or cultural rights and also encompasses identity and emotional attachments (Džankić 2015, 4). It draws on rhetorically oriented studies of citizenship that strive to better understand how individuals and groups negotiate various aspects of memberships, and how broader social, political, and cultural contexts determine their multiple and shifting identities and belonging (Štiks 2015, 10; Kock and Villadsen 2017). It analyzes how the contested notion of BiH citizenship has been crafted at the discursive level during two series of approximately month-long demonstrations – the so-called “JMBG protests” (or “Babylution”) that took place in June 2013 and the “Social Uprising” (or “February protests”) in February 2014. These events represented one of the most important civil awakenings in post-Dayton Bosnia and opened a new space for formulations of citizenship.

This article analyzes a corpus of some 150 media articles covering the protests in four major printed newspapers and complements this analysis with the study of other related primary and secondary materials and scholarly literature. While the protests have been intensively studied and debated, this text argues that the existing analyses focus too narrowly on narratives articulated by the protesters and other public figures supporting their cause, and tend to see them in isolation, overlooking how they were constantly contested by competing visions proposed by other actors or influenced by global narratives. Methodologically, it relies on the discourse-historical approach to critical discourse analysis (Reisigl and Wodak 2015) and analyzes the citizenship debate as an open and dynamic field wherein multiple and changing narratives about citizenship articulated by both elites and “lay citizens” intersect and influence each other.

The article aims to provide a better understanding of how various actors make sense of Bosnian citizenship, how they interpret and at the same time constitute what it means to be a Bosnian citizen, and how their conceptualizations challenge the symbolic level of BiH citizenship. It focuses on contestations and negotiations between the constructions of “we – the citizens” versus “them,” made by various actors from the political, civil society, or media sphere, while further seeking to answer the following questions: What values were most often associated with citizenship and how were boundaries between “us” and “them” drawn? How do historical legacies, recent context, and the multi-layered meaning of the term “građanin” (citizen) shape the citizenship narratives? In which ways do terminological complexities and ethno-national and regional dimensions influence the citizenship debate?

The article thus first introduces the study’s theoretical underpinnings and expands on the difficult connection of citizenship and nationalism, critical for multinational democracies such as Bosnia and Herzegovina. The following section discusses the Bosnian context, providing an overview of BiH institutional design and citizenship regime and highlighting the problematic aspects of ethnic determinism. It also briefly touches upon the BiH socioeconomic situation, describes the two series of protests, and defines the terminology related to citizenship issues in the BiH context. The fourth section expands on the methodology and sources. The fifth section discusses the findings of the analysis of the citizenship debate during the two sequences of protests. It presents a brief description of the narrative arena, highlighting characteristics and dimensions associated with “we – the citizens” and “you – political elites,” and shows how the boundary of inclusion and exclusion was contested to conclude with discussion of the ethno-national and regional dimensions of the citizenship debate. The main points are summarized in the Conclusion.

2 Towards a Rhetorical Citizenship

2.1 Citizenship as a Multidimensional Concept and Discursively Crafted Phenomenon

The concept of citizenship as a direct relationship and legal bond between citizens and the state has become the central feature of the modern socio-political structure (Heater 1999). It endows an individual with certain entitlements and duties and defines his/her relations to other citizens and non-citizens. Traditionally conceived as encompassing civil and political rights, the scope and meaning of citizenship have been reconfigured and broadened by newly emerging historical contexts (Joppke 2007, 37; Deiana 2013). After Marshall’s (1950) seminal concept of social citizenship brough the class aspect into Western intellectual debates on citizenship, the scope of citizenship rights has been extended to also include gender and ethnic aspects (Walby 1994) or cultural rights (Kymlicka and Norman 2000). This article therefore conceptualizes citizenship as a multidimensional concept, encompassing not only status and rights but also identity as well as symbolic or psychological aspects (Bosniak 2006; Joppke 2007, 37; Deiana 2013).

Furthermore, the article draws on recent approaches, which depart from the historical perspective commonly used in earlier works by sociologists and political scientists and suggest we should not understand citizenship as a given phenomenon, but as an experience lived by people on a daily basis, subject to constant negotiation (Džankić 2015, 339; Štiks 2015, 10; Džankić et al. 2015, 341). The actual functioning of citizenship is shaped by informal ideologies, social practices and rituals, and personal and collective narratives that serve as signifiers of citizenship by ascribing to it particular meanings, identity, status, and values (Fairclough, Pardoe, and Szerszynski 2006, 101). That is why many scholars (Asen 2004; Kock and Villadsen 2017; Fairclough, Pardoe, and Szerszynski 2006) have recently called for the use of discursive approaches and rhetorically oriented studies of citizenship, which this article pursues.

The article follows Kock and Villadsen (2017, 571; 578) in considering citizenship as discursively enacted and crafted, while simultaneously reflecting and affecting the way we see our place in a community and the nature of that community. It understands citizenship deliberations as debates concerned with boundaries of membership and belonging or formulations of “us” versus “them,” which represent essential questions of citizenship. They are not only arenas for negotiating the notion of citizenship but are also constitutive of it – of what it means to be a citizen and what rights it entails (Livio 2017, 2671).

Rhetorical approaches to citizenship have shifted attention to occasions of social mobilization when citizenship acts break with hegemonic citizenship practices and open space for redefining the boundaries of membership (Deiana 2013, 187; Gleiss 2017, 233). New meanings, identity constructions and “boundaries of the permissible” are created through the process of social mobilization. However, they do not take place in a vacuum, as they relate to and are pre-determined by past articulations (Gleiss 2017, 234, 237). The two series of protests taking place in BiH in 2013 and 2014 marked the two most important civil awakenings and events for the citizenship debate in the last decade. The article thus analyzes how various formulations and practices of citizenship developed during that time of opening and how they interacted, were mutually constitutive of one another, and positioned themselves in relation to the hegemonic ethno-national frame.

2.2 The Troubling Nexus of “the People” and “the Nation”

For understanding the citizenship debate in the Bosnian context, the following paragraphs expand on the strand of theory that addresses specific challenges brought to multinational democracies by ethnopolitics as a result of the difficult connection of citizenship and nationalism (Habermas 1995, 107). Although citizenship regimes historically precede democratic political systems (Mann 1987; Turner 1990), the concept of citizenship is crucial for democratic theory and practice. Democracy is inconceivable without citizenship, as it delineates the boundaries of a polity, sets rules for inclusion and exclusion, and construes an ensemble of equal citizens as a unit of democratic deliberation and decision-making (Taylor 2001, xiii). However, due to a paradox inherent to the intersection of citizenship and nationalism (Habermas 1995, 259), the citizenry has come to be typically perceived as a nation, as something that is more cohesive than just a set of individuals who, by historical coincidence, happen to be legally bound to the state (Brubaker 1992, 21). The process which Delanty (2000, 91) calls “the coupling of nation and state” resulted in the equation of nation, state, and people in modern political thought and discourse (Hobsbawm 1992, 19). As a result, the politics of citizenship usually mirrors specific ideas of nationhood (Štiks 2006, 484). The state – and nation – building projects, however, often do not overlap. In the context of ethnic pluralism, their incongruency poses an essential challenge to state formation and legitimacy.

It was this troubling nexus of “the people” and “the nation” that proved to be critical for the fate of multi-national Bosnia and Herzegovina during the disintegration of Yugoslavia and has remained a source of tensions ever since the war. As post-communist realities and conflicts accompanying the breakup of Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union brought the issue of ethnicity to the fore, theoretical literature has also sought to answer the question of how far ethnopolitical challenges to citizenship can go for a state to be viable. The intellectual debate has focused mostly on the question whether, and to what extent, a common citizenship identity is necessary for the functioning of a polity and state legitimacy. This discussion has been of crucial relevance to Bosnia and Herzegovina where the problematic nexus of the people and the nation raises a significant challenge to the state’s legitimacy and functioning. It is, consequently, the ambivalent feelings and contested commitments of BiH citizens that this article aims to explore.

3 Discussing Citizenship in the Bosnian Context

3.1 BiH Citizenship Regime After Dayton and Ethnic Determinism

The Bosnian constitution as well as its citizenship regime are contained in the Dayton Peace Agreement (DPA), which ended the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina (1992–1995) and defined a new institutional design for the country. Bosnia and Herzegovina was created as a highly decentralized state. Its organization rests on the principle of territorial autonomy comprised within its division into two entities: the Republika Srpska (RS) and the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina (FBiH). FBiH is further divided into ten cantons. The level of decentralization of the system is manifested through the existence of fourteen parliamentary assemblies and governments. The territorial autonomy principle is complemented with a consociation through power-sharing among Bosnia’s three constituent peoples: Bosniaks, Serbs and Croats. The ethnic logic is deeply entrenched in the institutional set up and determines the allocation of positions at almost all levels of the state administration, based on the contested demographic data from the 1991 census (Žíla and Čermák 2021).

The citizenship legislation is defined by Paragraph 7 of Article 1 of Annex IV (DPA, 1995) and mirrors the complicated set up of post-Dayton BiH. Unlike the citizenship regimes of other post-Yugoslav states, that of BiH is two-tiered: state-level and entity-level (Article 1 (7), Annex IV, DPA, 1995). Although the Constitutional Court on July 1, 2000, confirmed the sovereignty of BiH over the entities and the supremacy of the BiH constitution over the entities’ constitutions, the de facto power, including management of citizenship registers and issuing of passports, lies with the entities (Štiks 2011, 256).

While entity-level citizenship reflects the territorial autonomy principle, the consociation principle also finds its expression in the citizenship regime as it differentiates between “Bosniaks, Croats, and Serbs, as constituent peoples (along with Others), and citizens of Bosnia and Herzegovina.” This phrasing draws on the legal tradition of Socialist Yugoslavia where citizens were often mentioned as a specific category of people that, together with “working people” and “nations and nationalities of Yugoslavia,” defined the citizenry of the state. The wording itself is significant since rightful owners of the country are defined as members of the constituent nations: “Others” (read: national minorities) and “citizens,” “in apparently descending order” (Guzina 2007, 226). Citizens, together with the “others,” represent residual categories and are left without a clear status (Hooper and Schwartz 1999, 57; Stipić 2017, 95; Guzina 2007, 226).

The constitution, therefore, ethnically stratifies the “demos” and leaves little space for purely civic loyalties to the state (Džankić 2015, 531). The endorsement of ethnicity as the primary dimension of citizens’ identities, destruction of shared public spaces, or segregated media and education landscapes create room for continuing competition between Serb, Croat, and Bosniak nationalism and cultural fundamentalism (Hromadžić 2015, 10; Hromadžić 2012, 32; Bieber 2006, 56; Deiana 2013, 189). Alternative narratives, which try to escape three dominant ethno-national interpretations, such as those formulated by protesters, remain unorganized, themselves contested, and rather context-dependent (Bougarel, Helms, and Duijzings 2007, 19; Moll 2013, 922).

3.2 Socioeconomic Factors and Protests as Windows of Opening

Although the previous section paid attention to Bosnian ethno-national segmentation, contemporary BiH cannot be understood only through identarian post-conflict lenses. A growing strand of literature, often of an ethnographic nature, call for appreciation of the effects of post-socialism and socioeconomic factors on the most troubling problems of BiH society (Arsenijević 2014; Bieber 2017, 158; Kurtović 2017; Čelebičić 2017).

The concurrent processes of post-war reconstruction and post-socialist transformation accompanied by a high level of corruption and clientelism resulted into enrichment of a small segment of political elites and war-profiteers, often linked to criminal networks (Bieber 2006, 34–35; Mujkić 2008, 25). Poor performance of the BiH economy has resulted in persistently low wages and high unemployment. Political parties are largely held accountable for the country’s difficulties and are believed to work solely in their own interests. Ordinary citizens, therefore, feel alienated from politics and the term “political” has negative connotations for them, implying something immoral, ethnically driven, and subject to party manipulation (Milan 2017, 1353). Opinion polls show that the vast majority of people do not feel pride in BiH political institutions (Roick and Huskić 2020), and the higher the level of government, the less they feel represented by its institutions (Carsimamović Vukotić et al. 2017).

Frustration over the economic situation and unresolved constitutional issues have led to two major waves of protests in 2013 and 2014, which represented the most significant bottom-up challenge to the ethnically defined post-Dayton order. Other civic mobilizations were either much smaller in their scale or not organized around questions of membership and belonging and the people-nation nexus. That is the reason why the article does not analyze, for instance, the more recent “Justice for David” protests, dominated by topics of criminal justice, state violence, and security. As citizenship-related issues were intensively discussed during the course of 2013 and 2014 protests, they have been seen by scholars as windows of opportunity for societal change and generation of new conceptualizations of citizenship, breaking with the hegemonic ethno-national discourses (Arsenijević 2014; Stipić 2017, 91; Majstorović, Vučkovac, and Pepić 2015, 663; Kurtović and Hromadžić 2017, 263).

The first protests, known as JMBG or Babylution (Bebolucija), took place in June 2013 in reaction to the failure of MPs to pass a new law allowing newborn babies to obtain a citizen identification number (jedinstveni matični broj građana, JMBG) after the original law was suspended by a court. The protests began with a blockade of the Parliament building by a few protesters after a story was shared by an activist on Facebook of a terminally ill baby who was prevented from travelling to Germany for medical treatment as a result of not obtaining a JMBG and a passport (Stipić 2017, 98). In just a few days, some ten thousand protesters gathered in the square in front of the Parliament, and a series of protests continued throughout June, supported by protesters gatherings in many other towns across the country, resulting in a major demonstration that took place on July 1, 2013 (Milan 2017, 1352; Mujkić 2016, 225).

In February 2014, the second wave of protests broke out. Protests were started by factory workers in Tuzla – and later joined by the wider public – demanding the resignation of the cantonal government for its inability to deal with the effects of corrupted privatization. Within a few days, they spread to several other Bosnian towns, though only in the Federation of BiH, to develop into what is now known as the “Social Uprising” or “Bosnian Spring.” Protests eventually turned violent and governmental buildings in several towns, including the building of the Presidency, were set on fire, and thus attracted massive attention from foreign media (Mujkić 2016, 226). In several towns, citizens’ plenums were established and served as forums for discussions, engagement, and articulation of demands.

Plenums were perceived as experiments of direct democracy for giving “voice to those whose voices have so far been politically marginalized and repressed” (Kurtović and Hromadžić 2017, 277). The protesters achieved the resignation of several cantonal governments, but the initial enthusiasm over the awakening of society and expectations of a brighter future appeared to have been overstated, and the plenum’s activity slowly faded out. Looking back, the protests have not achieved any tangible change. According to some, they are rather seen as a wasted opportunity that, in the long-term, brought even greater disillusionment and apathy. ¹

3.3 Setting the Terminology – “Građanin,” “Državljanin,” and “Narod”

The existing concepts and meanings that citizenship-related terms have been traditionally associated with crucially influence present-day discourses and shape the political and social imaginary. It is thus necessary to take a closer look at these terms, identify the various meanings they bear, and deal with some terminological complexities. The English term “citizenship” has two equivalents in the Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian language – it can be translated as “državljanstvo” or “građanstvo.” The term “državljanstvo” is utilized in the citizenship legislation of BiH, but outside the administrative and legal sphere its utterances are rare. In contrast, the term “građanstvo” has a much broader meaning and is used in many different contexts.

Besides referring to citizens as members of a state entitled with certain rights or as a specific group of people alongside constituent nations and the others, the term “građanstvo” is used when speaking about people living in a country or area, regardless of their formal citizenship status, or even about people in general. Similarly to “citizen” in English, “građanin” also denotes an inhabitant of a town or an urban area. The term is, furthermore, often linked with more specific aspects of citizenship, such as with public activities of citizens and active engagement in civil society (“Šta Je Građanin?” 2016). The term can be also connected with certain socioeconomic, political, or class connotations. “Građanstvo” often implies “ordinary people,” as opposed to the rich, politicians or other elites. Moreover, in the ethno-national order of BiH, “građanstvo” is claimed by those who do not wish to identify themselves in ethnic terms, and interpreted as a universal term which escapes the ethno-national categorization.

Moreover, any analysis of rhetoric of citizenship must pay attention to the term “narod,” which either overlaps with the terms “nation” and “ethnic group,” or refers to “all ordinary people” and transcends, and challenges, ethnic identification (Hromadžić 2015, 132). Hromadžić also shows that although “narod” is usually understood as an inherently apolitical category, it is largely used to criticize the establishment and politics, and thus acquires a political or metapolitical meaning. This observation is significant as it is exactly this usage of the term “narod” where it overlaps with the rhetoric of citizenship.

4 Methodology and Sources

To appreciate the role of the context that citizenship debates take place in, this article methodologically relies on a discourse-historical approach to critical discourse analysis, as proposed by Reisigl and Wodak (2015). The analysis thus takes into consideration linguistic variables, as well as broader social variables, situational frames, and historical legacies (Reisigl and Wodak 2015, 32). Examining various utterances of the term “citizen,” it focuses on several discursive strategies outlined by Wodak and Reisigl: how persons, events, and processes are named and referred to (nomination), what characteristics and features are attributed to them (predication), what arguments and argumentative strategies are used (argumentation), and from what perspective these arguments are expressed (perspectivization). Attention is also put on recontextualization and reframing of particular narratives by various actors over time. Conceptualizations of citizenship are understood as relationally organized. Definitions of “we – the citizens” are always constructed in contrast to those who are excluded, as the named becomes something only when contrasted with what it is not (Jorgensen and Phillips 2002, 43).

The analysis builds primarily on a corpus of 150 media articles. Although public debates take place in different forums, and, in the case of the protests, evolved primarily in public spaces and the streets, it was media that enabled dissemination and coverage of competing discourses and claims, giving voice to and informing both policy makers and the public and bringing the citizenship debate into “the intimate spaces of ordinary citizens” (Bornman 2013, 434). The corpus of texts was assembled using the digital archive of articles of four important BiH printed daily newspapers run by Mediacentar Sarajevo (“Digitalni Arhiv – Infobiro” n.d.). The archive provides a unique collection of searchable full texts of content-relevant articles, as well as their photocopies from printed media. Although the selection of archived articles is performed by Mediacentar staff and their selection policies have slightly changed over time (i.e., the overall number of archived media articles decreased from 21,184 in 2013 to 13,579 in 2020), the archive represents a reliable and comprehensive source. The composition of archived sources is reasonably balanced as it aggregates newspapers aiming at all three ethnic communities, which are furthermore located in three major urban centers in the country spread across both entities. Of the analyzed newspapers, two are Sarajevo-based – Dnevni Avaz, the most read daily newspaper in BiH, targeting a predominantly Bosniak audience, and Oslobođenje, which is popular among liberal and higher-educated urban populations and presents itself as ethnically unaffiliated. The other two newspapers are Dnevni List, which belongs to the Croat media scene in BiH and is based in Mostar, and Nezavisne Novine, one of the traditional daily newspapers read by the Serbian audience and based in Banja Luka (Scancariello 2017).

The corpus of articles for analysis was selected as follows. First, the digital archive and its full-text search were used to identify periods of most-heated citizenship debate, based on the number of articles containing various forms of the word “građanin” (citizen) in the past decade. June 2013 and February 2014, when the two series of protests took place, represented the two sharpest spikes in the number of citizenship-related articles in monthly intervals; they doubled compared to the average of preceding months. These periods also reported the highest numbers of such articles relative to the overall number of archived articles in that particular year, as well as in absolute terms, thus confirming the relevance of protests for the citizenship debate. In both cases, the highest occurrence of citizenship-related texts took place in the two weeks following the outbreak of the protests (more precisely, a day or two later, when reporting on protests appeared in printed media). These periods – June 7–20, 2013, and February 6–19, 2014 – were thus selected for the analysis. Second, roughly one fifth of citizenship-related articles from each of the four newspapers was selected into the corpus based on their relevance, assessed by the number of mentions of citizenship-related terms and relevance to the topic. One fifth of articles was chosen to cover a meaningfully exhaustive proportion of content-relevant articles (in certain newspapers practically all). Numbers of analyzed articles among the four newspapers thus differed proportionately to their coverage of citizenship-related issues (the largest difference appeared between Nezavisne Novine and Oslobođenje in the first week of protests in 2014, with 4 and 17 respectively). The selection of the most relevant articles was done separately for each of the two analyzed weeks to take into consideration the temporal factor.

Individual mentions of citizenship-related terms occurring in the corpus of the texts (roughly 150 in the case of JMBG and 250 from the Social Uprising) were then coded and analyzed drawing on the discourse historical approach and rhetorically oriented studies of citizenship, understood as a multidimensional concept containing status, rights, and identities and being subject of constant negotiations. When analyzing the rhetorical struggles over who counts as “a BiH citizen,” attention was first directed to nomination strategies – how citizens were named and referred to – with regard to the boundaries of membership – formulations of “us” versus “them,” dimensions of citizenship, associated rights or specific meanings of the term “citizen” that were implied. The sequences were coded along several lines: 1) definition of “we – the citizens,” in cases where reference was made specifically to demonstrators and protest participants, active citizens (someone exercising their own rights), ordinary people (as explained above in relation to a specific usage of the term “narod”), or a specific category of people (i.e., workers and citizens); 2) what it is opposed to, whether political elites or ethnicity (implying that citizenship transcends ethnic divisions); 3) dimensions it contained, in cases where it implied citizenship as civil and political rights, as social rights and class dimension or ethnic identity, and 4) the unit of citizenship, whether it referred to municipality, canton, entity, or the state level. These categories were generated during a pilot analysis of a smaller number of texts but were not treated as mutually exclusive since individual mentions often contained several meanings of the term “citizen.” For example, ordinary people were sometimes endowed with agency (and both categories were then coded positively), at other times not. Tables 1 and 2 bring an overview of the coded categories including the results.

Table 1. Occurrences of sequences implicating a specific meaning of citizenship and to what it is opposed

Table 2. Occurrences of sequences invoking a specific dimension of citizenship and unit of membership

The coding served to identify main trends and differences between the discursive crafting of citizenship during the two sequences of protests. In the second step, predications and argumentation in the coded sequences were analyzed to see how “citizens” and “the others” were characterized and what arguments were used in the debate to forward the speakers’ cause. The analysis looked at how various actors interpreted what it meant to be a Bosnian citizen and how these interpretations were contested and reacted to each other, seeking to answer the questions: What values were most often associated with citizenship and how were boundaries between “us” and “them” drawn? In which ways do terminological complexities and ethno-national and regional dimensions influence the citizenship debate?

In addition to the analysis of the corpus of the media articles, to gain a thorough understanding of the context of the debate, a range of other genres and texts was studied such as online media articles, television coverage and videos of the events, manifestos, and written demands issued during demonstrations, or Facebook pages of the protests and plenums. In order to understand and explain the complex issue of discursive construction of BiH citizenship, empirical observations were complemented with scholarly literature on citizenship theory, present-day Bosnian context, the immediate context of the protests, as well as dominant narratives and concepts related to citizenship in BiH and their historical legacy. Particularly enlightening have been papers by several scholars, mostly local ones or with regional roots, some of whom took an active part in the protests and plenums and engaged in analyzing the meaning of the protests for the citizenship debate (Stipić 2017; Mujkić 2016; Majstorović, Vučkovac, and Pepić 2015; Arsenijević 2014; Kurtović and Hromadžić 2017; Milan 2017; Touquet 2015; Murtagh 2016). As they come from similar ideological positions, their reading of the events is largely consensual but has been criticized for being too idealistic and ideologically driven (Hronesova 2015; Armakolas and Maksimovic 2013). Their findings and observations, nonetheless, often serve as a good starting point, and are discussed in the analysis of the discursive crafting of citizenship presented in this article.

5 Rhetorical Citizenship in BiH – Analysis of the Citizenship Debates During Two Sequences of Protests

5.1 Description of the Discursive Arena

The analyzed media capture narratives of protest organizers, civil activists, political analysts, and journalists sympathetic to the demonstrators’ cause, reactions and proclamations of leading politicians, as well as voices of randomly interviewed ordinary citizens and statements by international community representatives. The corpus of texts thus provides a comprehensive and balanced pool of formulations of citizenship-related issues from various perspectives. The review of the two sets of data enables us to see that the debate taking place during each of the observed periods took specific contours influenced by the context of the demonstrations, their means and demands. Before delving into the analysis of specific uses of citizenship-related terms, it is useful to outline key features of the respective discursive arenas.

The JMBG protests initially attracted significant media attention but overall gained less coverage than the February mobilizations. Given the peaceful character of the protests and the human and universally understandable nature of the demonstrators’ demands – that political representatives pass a new law enabling the issuance of personal identification numbers to babies – the analyzed corpus was at first dominated by protesters’ narratives and voices sympathetic to them. The main narrative constructions and framing of protesters’ aims were narrowly focused and remained rather consistent over time. Politicians, against whom the protests were aimed, resorted to short comments on the demonstrators’ cause and aims – but not on their means. A blockade of the Parliament Building that that took place during the first major demonstration on June 6, when MPs and other people present in the building were prevented from leaving it until the evening, sparked debates and provided fertile ground for politization of the events.

During the wave of protests and the establishment of plenums that took place in 2014, both the character of the media debate and the content of dominant narratives and conceptualizations of citizenship differed significantly from the JMBG protests. The corpus was characterized by higher narrative plurality, and a more active exchange of opinions took place among various actors. Violence that accompanied unrest in several towns provoked fierce political reactions and disapproval by some people, who would otherwise support the protesters’ cause, as images of burnt buildings and cars were reminiscent of war years and sparked fears. The protests and plenums were also characterized by a higher level of decentralization and regionalism, as they to a large extent maintained local character and raised specific demands to their cantonal governments or FBiH leadership.

The sections “We – The Citizens” and “The Other – Political Elites” analyze the formulations of “us” versus “them,” articulated by protesters and their sympathizers, and the following section looks at their contestations and conflicting narratives of boundaries of membership proposed by other actors. While these three sections rest mainly on the analysis of narratives put forward by various actors as they were captured by the analyzed media, the last section on citizenship’s ethnic and regional dimensions also brings to light a meta level of medially constructed narratives, showing that media discourse is not a mere reflection of debates in the public space.

5.2 We – The Citizens

Differences regarding the way in which citizenship was dominantly conceptualized by people supporting the protests are apparent between the two observed periods. During the JMBG demonstrations, the protesters’ discourses remained focused on civil and political rights-based citizenship and citizenship as identity, while during the February protests socioeconomic issues assumed a key role (see also Milan 2017, 1356). Consequently, the dimension of citizenship encompassing civil and political rights was evoked in almost a quarter of mentions during the JMBG protests, compared to only 8 percent during the Social Uprising (see Table 2). In contrast, the social-rights dimension, which was mentioned in only a handful of cases during JMBG, was implied in more than a quarter of occurrences of citizenship-related terms during the 2014 protests (see Table 2). These differences, combined with a distinct political imagery, gave rise to strikingly different portrayals of citizens.

During the JMBG mobilization, the notion of an active citizen ready to fight for his or her fundamental rights and demand the accountability of the authorities dominated the citizenship debate. When looking at nomination strategies related to the participants of the protests, who represented “we – the citizens,” the frequently mentioned references included “parents,” “babies,” “students,” and “children” “who were playing and drawing” (Rizvanović 2013). The square in Sarajevo where demonstrations took place was likened to a “playground,” as babies were described as “the youngest citizens” and fighting for their basic rights epitomized the righteousness of the demonstrators’ cause. Citizens were most often characterized as “dissatisfied” and their demands as “justified.” “Responsibility,” “dignity,” “peacefulness,” “solidarity,” and “care” commonly appeared as the defining traits of citizenship. This understanding was encapsulated in a Oslobođenje piece where the journalist said that “after the end of the demonstrations, despite the rain and cold weather, organisers collected rubbish and completely cleaned Trg BiH to deliver one more positive example of citizens” responsibility” (Rizvanović 2013). As other Oslobodjenje journalists noted, “the protests show that citizens finally woke up, reclaimed responsibility and took things in their own hands” (Karić, Gudelj and Katana 2013). According to widely shared logic, by fighting for their rights and speaking out, BiH citizens finally became fully fledged citizens. The notion of citizenship thus presupposed an active agency and exercise of rights. The salience of this narrative is shown by the fact that the meaning of “a citizen” as “an active member of civil society” who fights and stands for own rights was evoked in 40 percent of mentions of the term (see Table 1).

During the February 2014 protests, a new set of more revolutionary political and social imagery emerged that was inspired by radical leftist ideologies or the discursive tradition of socialist Yugoslavia. Workers replaced parents and babies as initiators of the protests – their relationship to citizens, however, remained fuzzy. In most common formulations, “workers and citizens” appeared side by side as a specific category, thanks in part to the legacy of the Yugoslav socialist discourse. Other groups designated as citizens included “students,” “pensioners,” “veterans,” or “the unemployed.” Portrayal of citizens as “ordinary people” became widespread, invoking the particular meaning of the term that entailed a social class dimension as shown for example in the following quote from Dnevni List: “the country is divided between two groups of inhabitants. One comprises rich political elites and tycoons who are not even aware of all the assets they possess, and the other one includes millions of poor citizens, at whose expense the first group got rich” (Osmović 2014b). Similar references to citizens, often using the term “narod,” appeared in 25 percent of mentions, and were thus twice as common in comparison to JMBG (see Table 1).

The emphasis on the citizens’ struggle for rights persisted and the active agency meaning of citizenship was evoked in 30 percent of analyzed sequences in 2014. However, the content of rights changed and was narrowed to social and working rights and justice. Citizens were described for example as “seeking “social justice, better life, their working rights and change of government” (Mustafić 2014) or “better material conditions for living, but also confronting those responsible for exploiting hungry people” (Hasić 2014). As a protest and plenum participant summed it up, “among the basic problems are those of economic nature, very few working places, violation of workers’ rights, very bad social security, and lack of health insurance for some citizens” (Bradvica 2014). While “what it means to be a citizen” was explicitly formulated during JMBG, and citizenship was endowed with certain positive values, during the February protests, all predications focused on citizens’ state of mind and the situation that this group of people found themselves in, such as being “thirsty,” “hungry,” “furious,” or “having nothing to lose.” Interestingly, “citizens as ordinary people” were thus almost never endowed with agency and remained rather passive subjects. Most of these predications also pointed to the significance of social and class aspects.

Citizens were still characterized as dissatisfied, but more expressive adjectives were added as well, such as “impoverished,” “disempowered,” “robbed,” “deceived,” “humiliated,” “furious,” or “hungry.” An image of “a hungry citizen” became particularly widespread. “Hunger” gradually begun fulfilling the role of a substitute for a wide range of problems stemming from dire socioeconomic conditions, inefficient government, or corruption. Exclamations such as “We are hungry!” or “Who sows hunger, reaps horror!” (Mustafić 2014) then came to be used as a general justification of reasons for protests and righteousness of demands. Hunger and poverty were additionally evoked as sources of cohesion and citizens’ unity during the Social Uprising, as manifested for example in the slogans: “Hungry stomach reacts the same, it has no ethnicity” or “Hunger does not choose, it affects everyone” (Grabovac et al. 2014). When contrasted with humanity and compassion for rights of the “youngest citizens,” which were often depicted as sources of solidarity during the Babylution, we see that the definition of the central cohesive force uniting citizens significantly differed.

5.3 The Other – Political Elites

In contrast to fluid and shifting notions of what citizenship was, there seemed to be a much broader consensus on what it was not among demonstrators and their sympathizers. As was already pointedly highlighted in scholarly literature (Stipić 2017; Mujkić 2016; Arsenijević 2014; Kurtović and Hromadžić 2017), protesters during both mobilizations formulated the main boundary separating “us” from “them” as a division between “the citizens” and “political elites.”

During the JMBG protests, nominations of “the others” included “politicians,” “political elites,” “government,” “authorities,” or “political representatives.” One of the most frequently voiced critiques of their conduct was that they were “not doing their job,” “the job for which they were elected by citizens and for which they receive decent wages” (Osmović 2013). An activist from Mostar called on the governing elites to “realise they were not granted their offices by God and have to be accountable for their doings” (Šimović 2013). The narrative of politicians’ inactivity often appealed to their conscience, as nicely captured in a quote by an NGO representative: “It is a shame that politicians do not do their job and that all citizens of this country pay the price of their idleness” (Karić, Gudelj, and Katana 2013). Politicians were frequently predicated as “unprofessional,” “incompetent,” “disinterested,” “not working” and “irresponsible.” Given the emphasis on citizens” responsibility, this virtue and its absence emerged as one of the crucial elements for drawing a boundary between “the citizens” and “the others.”

During the Social Uprising, the mentioned names given to the out-group were expanded by “gangsters,” “tycoons,” or “criminals” to also include economic elites. Ruling elites were said to be “living in richness for as long as 20 years while pushing their citizens to the brink of existence” (Čustović 2014) or accused of “putting the state and its future on fire” (Osmović 2014a) and “making it poor and hopeless” (Mustafić 2014). Besides irresponsibility and incompetence, the elites were described as “criminal,” “corrupted,” “lying,” or “looting” and “impoverishing” the country’s assets and people. As a result of statements such as “politicians, amongst whom there are no innocent” (Osmović 2014a) and the more revolutionary nature of the February protests, the dividing line was more radical, while appearing somewhat softer and more porous during the Babylution.

This definition of “we” versus “them” made even so inherently political agendas as those performed by protesters and plenums to strictly distance themselves from any partisan and official politics. People were invited to participate in demonstrations and plenums only as individuals, not representing any party or association, and principles of leaderlessness and horizontality were declared by protest and plenum organizers. This approach was aptly captured in a commentary made by a civil society activist and Tuzla plenum participant: “Behind the Plenum are ordinary people [“narod”], no leader. People from various political structures try to infiltrate us but […] the Plenum, we all together, won’t let it happen” (B. D. 2014). Another Tuzla plenum member saw the happenings as the “beginning of a new democratic BiH” and plenums as an “authentic way of national organization, where everyone can come, everyone has a right to vote and all are equal” (B. D. 2014).

A look at the global context and grassroot social mobilizations, such as the Spanish Indignados Movement or the worldwide Occupy movement (both 2011 and 2012), however, shows that these principles were far from unique for BiH. The understanding of the public sphere as a forum where ordinary people without official power rely on open deliberation, and where no one speaks for groups or collectivities, but always as an individual, was in fact a defining feature of these earlier movements as well (Rovisco 2016, 14–15). The JMBG manifesto bears striking resemblance to the Indignados movement manifesto, and the organizational principles of plenums also show inspiration by principles articulated by this and other global movements. So, while the negative connotation of anything political played a crucial role in drawing the boundary of inclusion and exclusion as “citizens” versus “political elites,” choices of particular narrative constructions and organizational principles were influenced and inspired by the narratives, practices, and ideology of contemporary global social movements.

On the discursive level, these particular narratives and principles served to reinforce the alienation of “citizens” from politics. The evocation of “an unbridgeable gap between them [ethno-national oligarchies] and their citizens” (Mujkić 2016, 226) has had specific consequences for the citizenship debate. The fact that “the evil other” was embodied by the official representatives of the state or its elites points to the deep crisis of trust in the state and its institutions, which crucially contributes to the contested internal legitimacy of BiH statehood. Movements that claim to be profoundly democratic and to represent all citizens regardless of their ethnicity, status, or occupation then also themselves effectively construct new sharp frontiers running inside the Bosnian polity. While the discursive separation of the governed and the government is common at anti-government protests, articulations of “we” versus “them” during BiH protests draw firm and unbreachable boundaries. People categorized and labelled as members of the ruling class were stripped off their citizenship and peoplehood and turned into aliens. The dominant narrative construction of “us” versus “them” articulated by protesters therefore did not propose any all-encompassing notion of citizenship on which a viable alternative to the post-Dayton order could have been based.

5.4 Contested Boundaries of Inclusion and Exclusion – Competing Appropriation Claims and Narrative Reframing

Although the protesters’ narratives analyzed in the previous chapters have been in the focus of most analyses, they were not universally shared but were contested by competing visions proposed by various actors. The category of “citizens,” no matter whom it was to represent, largely emerged in the corpus as a subject of competing claims for appropriation by multiple actors who asserted to speak in its name and defend its interests.

Contradictory views on the boundaries of inclusion and exclusion were most vocally proposed by the governing political elites, who either openly confronted the protesters’ narratives or questioned and redrew the boundaries of membership. The blockade of the Parliament Building during the JMBG protests and the outbursts of violence during the uprising were interpreted by some leading politicians, most notably the Republika Srpska leadership or Bosnian Croats representatives, as “attacks against the state.” In 2014, the framing of the events as “a coup” was used by almost all prominent political figures across the party spectrum and ethno-national boundaries. However, as a Nezavisne Novine journalist noted: “The problem lies in ‘corrupted politicians’ but this apparently does not concern everyone, only mid-level government officials” (Kuljiš 2014). Furthermore, as both series of demonstrations took place mostly in predominantly Bosniak-inhabited areas, the involvement of Bosniak politicians was often asserted. Protests allegedly had an anti-Serb and anti-Croat focus, and attempted to centralize the country by dissolution of Republika Srpska or the cantons. While RS political representatives “concluded that unrests in FBiH are politically instrumentalized with the ultimate aim of spreading to RS and destabilizing it” (Katana 2014), a university professor from Mostar warned that “claims by Dragan Čović that this is a Bosniak plan for the abolition of cantons hit their mark in Northern Herzegovina” (Šišić 2014).

By framing the events as threatening the security of the country, politicians presented themselves as protectors of their citizens – whom this category encompassed remained vague but usually implied their own voters and constituent peoples – and turned the protesters into “the other.” Demonstrators were described as “criminals,” “hooligans” or “vandals,” and protests as “orchestrated,” “politically motivated,” and “subject to manipulation.” These narratives served to defy the legitimacy, authenticity and proclaimed apolitical and anational character of the protests.

Other political figures, either against whom the protests were not primarily directed or from smaller multinational parties, chose a strategy of distancing themselves from “the political elites” and supported the protesters’ cause, claiming to be a part of “we – the citizens.” Naša stranka, a multi-ethnic anti-nationalist party, for example stated that protests were “justified supranational and supra-ethnic social unrest of citizens who have been impoverished, disenfranchised and humiliated by the authorities for twenty years” and encouraged BiH citizens “to not believe messages shared by some media, political parties and leaders that give the protests ethnic meaning” (Naša stranka 2014). On some occasions, the boundaries of inclusion and exclusion were questioned more subtly by those who happened to be a part of the out-group. For example, during the JMBG protests, several female MPs pointed out that “by showing up to stand for the rights of children the demonstrators violated the rights of many mothers in the building and of their children who were waiting for them at home or at their granny’s or aunt’s” and so while “seeking to defend their own rights, they threatened the rights of their fellow citizens” (Degirmendžić 2013).

These conflicting narratives were often repeatedly reframed and recontextualized by the involved actors, dynamically influencing each other’s constructions of “us” and “them” (see also Touquet 2015 for these “framing battles”). The captivity theme was recontextualized by assertions that it was politicians who “had kept all citizens in captivity, treating them as servants and slaves and holding them in a “camp of poverty, dark present and even darker future” (Osmović 2013). Accusations of hooliganism were disputed by arguments that protesters were university-educated people who could not find a job, and violence was justified as a last resort for people struggling to protect their bare existence. Several commentators also pointed out that the violence of protesters paled in comparison with the country’s destruction caused by the elites. Such reframing is illustrated by an Oslobodjenje journalist who asserted that “violence of the authorities lasts twenty years while violence of citizens a couple of days. It is clear that the country is threatened not by its citizens but by the authorities who have ruined it for so many years and who have led citizens to a point when they have no other choice than destroy” (Kahrović-Posavljak 2014).

Boundaries of inclusion and exclusion were then also questioned by some of those who were supposed to be part of “we – the citizens.” The corpus contains expressions of distance from the protests, such as “organizers of the protests who claim about themselves to be citizens of BiH” (Hasić 2013). The detachment was either based on the alleged ethno-national dimension of the protests – depicted as a Bosniaks plot – or on the portrayal of demonstrators as subjects of political manipulations, thus questioning the righteousness of their aims and means. Articulations of distance appeared most often in Nezavisne Novine and other RS-based media but gradually also became more widespread in other parts of the country in 2014, either as a consequence of violence or in relation to the plenums’ activities. Violence that occurred in the streets raised fears, especially in Mostar, as voiced by several citizens interviewed by Dnevni List including a man who said: “I was afraid that 1992 would repeat. Dissatisfaction has to be expressed at peaceful gatherings and not by burning down houses that people built and will have to rebuild” (Šimović 2014).

The plenums’ legitimacy to speak in the name of the citizens was increasingly challenged, pointing for example to the fact that the plenums’ participants were not elected, and represented only a handful of people (Raspudić 2014). In addition, the hegemonizing claim to represent the will of the people were somehow complicated by the overlap of two different meanings of the term “citizen,” referring both to a town inhabitant and a citizen of a country. Given that the plenums were even named “Plenums of citizens of a particular city,” it often remained unclear to whom exactly the appeals to “citizens” referred, thus increasing tensions between the simultaneous claims of universality and the acknowledged regionalism of the plenums.

5.5 Who and Where? Ethno-national and Regional Dimensions

The last section looks at the ways in which the complex BiH citizenship regime combining territorial autonomy and consociation principles was translated onto the discursive level during the civil awakenings. In the scholarly literature, protests have been understood as moments of rupture with the hegemonic ethno-national order, and their anti-nationalist character has been considered their key feature (Arsenijevic 2014; Mujkić 2016; Stipić 2017; Murtagh 2016; Milan 2017). Mujkić (2016) for example suggests that through protests and plenums, citizens radically broke away from the post-Dayton “ethnocracy,” and called forth “the Demos as opposed to the dominant Ethnos” (222; 231). Stipić (2017) argues that they effectively “managed to convert ethno-national subjects into fully-fledged citizens” (102; 108).

In the corpus of media texts, however, the positioning of citizenship as anational and opposed to the ethno-national divisions formulated by protest organizers has not stood out so prominently. It appeared more often in June 2013 than in February 2014, but on average reached only 11 percent mentions, while the social or right-based dimensions were evoked in a quarter of them. The opposite side of the relation between citizenship and ethno-nationalism, the affirmation of the ethnic dimension of citizenship – meaning particular constituent people when referring to citizens – was not frequent in the corpus either. It was evoked rarely during the JMBG, and during the uprising, it emerged with the passage of time and the politicization of the events. It was implicated in 10 ten percent of mentions in analyzed periods in 2014. Besides the political elites, the ethno-national understanding of citizenship was articulated by those who distanced themselves from the protest movements and voiced disagreements over protesters’ claims to embody “all the citizens.”

In sum, in the analyzed media coverage, the ethnic dimension of citizenship – either its assertion or rejection – has been shown to be a less pronounced aspect than citizenship as rights or its social dimension, and gained less attention than earlier scholarly works suggested. This finding is interesting, as it is to be attributed to the particular source of data that this analysis relies on. When looking at slogans, manifestos, and other textual and audio-visual materials from the mobilizations, their claims of an anational character indeed stand out, but this dimension received disproportionately less attention in media coverage. The reasons for this remain unclear, and the analysis cannot establish whether it was a result of a deliberate or unintended choice by the journalists. Interestingly, the anational notion of citizenship on one hand and fears of ethnicization of the protests on the other were the most frequent in Mostar-based Dnevni List, where inter-ethnic tensions have been lately very tangible and politically relevant. The “ordinary people” meaning of citizenship was also used significantly more often in Dnevni List, and often implied the anational character, in contrast to the social dimension highlighted elsewhere. This might suggest that ethic hegemony, which is the post-war reality of most places including Sarajevo and Banja Luka, makes ethno-national issues less relevant at the local level, and journalists do not feel the need to accentuate them.

This observation is also related to the importance of entity-level citizenship in Republika Srpska and cantonal-level administration in the Federation of BiH for the citizenship debate. Media in the RS reported little about the mobilizations and portrayed them as only concerning the people in the FBiH. In an interview with Nezavisne Novine, for example, Prime Minister of RS Željka Cvijanović said she “supported the right of each RS citizen to express their own […] thoughts because RS is a mature democratic society, but did not support any activities that would help spread the crisis from a totally chaotic environment such as FBiH to an organized one such as RS” (H. A. 2014). Entity-level citizenship was thus constantly accentuated in RS-based Nezavisne Novine, and RS representatives almost exclusively referred to “citizens of RS,” who are in the nationalizing entity largely understood as consisting of Serbs only. The ethnic and entity dimensions of citizenship overlap in their discourse, and are consequently sources of confusion. Furthermore, the “an inhabitant of a town” meaning of “a citizen” was used frequently in citizenship debates in both entities, and during the February protests, cantonal-level administration was often referred to in FBiH media. If we look at a unit of a polity that citizens are suggested to be members of, BiH was implicated in a quarter of mentions during the Babylution, while only in one tenth during the February protests (see Table 2). The decentralization of the state administration, combined with the meanings of “citizens” as town inhabitants, civilians, demonstrators or people in general that were often used, crucially shapes the citizenship debates and blurs the concept of citizenship as a link between citizens and the state.

6 Conclusion

The article analyzes the citizenship debate in Bosnia and Herzegovina during two series of demonstrations – the JMBG protests in 2013 and the Social Uprising in 2014 – which constituted one the largest civic awakenings in post-Dayton BiH and most important events for the citizenship debate as they opened space for new formulations of membership and belonging. It has understood citizenship as a multidimensional concept and drawn on rhetorical approaches, which consider citizenship as a subject of constant negotiation and discursively crafted, simultaneously reflecting and affecting the nature of a polity. Citizenship debates have been then understood as deliberations concerned with boundaries of membership and belonging. Methodologically relying on the discourse historical approach proposed by Reisigl and Wodak, the article has built the analysis on the corpus of some 150 articles covering the protests in four important printed daily newspapers, targeting all three ethnic communities and based in three major urban centers – Sarajevo, Banja Luka, and Mostar – spanning both entities.

The article has aimed to provide a better understanding of the ways in which various actors make sense of Bosnian citizenship. In particular, it has investigated the following questions: What values were most often associated with citizenship, and how were boundaries between “us” and “them” drawn? In which ways do terminological complexities and ethno-national and regional dimensions influence the citizenship debate?

The analysis has shown that citizenship was linked with different characteristics during each of the protests and gave rise to two distinct images of “we – the citizens.” During the JMBG protests, conceptualizations of citizenship remained focused on the right-based dimension. Citizens were endowed with values of responsibility, active engagement, and readiness to fight for their rights. During the February uprising, socioeconomic issues assumed key importance, but no positive definition of citizenship was formulated. Instead, the category of citizens was characterized through its state of mind as encompassing dissatisfied, impoverished, robbed, furious, or hungry “ordinary people.” Hunger and poverty came to be used as general explanations of the reasons for the protests and sources of citizens’ cohesion.

In contrast to the shifting notion of what citizenship was, the boundary of exclusion formulated by demonstrators as “we – the citizens” against “you – political elites” remained. While politicians’ irresponsibility and incompetence were evoked during the JMBG, the dividing line hardened during the February protests when the out-group was extended to include economic elites and characterized as criminal, corrupted, or looting. “The evil other” was thus embodied by BiH official representatives and elites, which points to the deep crisis of trust in the state and its institutions. Articulation of such feelings further undermines citizens’ attachments to the state and contributes to the contested legitimacy of BiH statehood. Furthermore, the dominant narrative construction of “us” versus “them” evoked an unbridgeable gap between the groups and, therefore, drew sharp new boundaries within the Bosnian polity and did not propose any all-encompassing notion of citizenship.

The analysis, however, also brings into focus the contestations of the conceptualizations of citizenship proposed by the demonstrators and shows how they interacted with visions formulated by political elites, as well some of those supposed to be part of “we – the citizens.” Conflicting narratives were drawn along ethno-national lines – most often suggesting the involvement of Bosniak politicians – or in reaction to violence, thus portraying demonstrators as hooligans. Such narratives were then often repeatedly reframed. Plenums’ assertions to represent the will of “the people” also raised dissenting reactions. Interestingly, the category of citizens emerged in these interactions as a subject of competing claims for appropriation by multiple actors who asserted to speak in their name.

Although the discursive crafting of citizenship has shown to be highly dependent on the context of the protests and created through the process of social mobilization, the analysis has also highlighted the influence of past formulations and the recent global context. During the Social Uprising, revolutionary political and social imagery drawing on the discursive tradition of the Socialist Yugoslavia emerged, particularly visible in the specific usage of the category of workers. Specific protesters’ narrative constructions and declared organizational principles also illustrated inspiration by narratives and practices of global social movements of that time – notably the Spanish Indignados Movement.

The article has also investigated the effects of the complex institutional set up of the BiH citizenship regime, combining principles of ethno-national consociation and territorial autonomy, on the discursive formulations of citizenship. Although the ethno-national dimension – its affirmation as well as rejection – was relevant and became more manifest with the passage of time, the analysis of the corpus of media articles has not confirmed its crucial place for the citizenship debate, suggested by existing scholarly accounts and pronounced when studying materials generated by protesters. The findings are likely attributable to the media coverage as the source of data. Interestingly, the ethno-national dimension was most often reflected in the Mostar-based Dnevni List, suggesting that the political relevance of inter-ethnic tensions at the local level might make this issue more important for local journalists. The entity-level citizenship and regional aspects have been shown to have had a significant imprint on formulations of citizenship. At the level of a polity that citizens were members of, BiH was implied in a minority of cases. In RS, the denomination “citizens of RS” was used almost exclusively, and in FBiH, cantonal-level identities were important.

The presented findings demonstrate that discursive formulations of citizenship during periods of opening result from an interplay of the immediate context of the process of social mobilization with past articulations and institutional, regional, or global influences. In the case of BiH, the loose asymmetric federation of the nationalizing Republika Srpska and the decentralized Federation of BiH combined with the two-tiered citizenship regime and ethno-national consociationalism make the state distant to people in the particular contexts where citizenship debates develop. Together with various overlapping meanings and dimensions of the term “citizen,” it contributes to the constant “emptying” of the notion of “a citizen” as an all-encompassing term referring to all legal citizens of BiH. As a result, neither of the two most important civil awakenings succeeded in generating a positive narrative of BiH citizenship that could serve as a basis for an alternative vision of BiH polity to the post-Dayton order.