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Gendered Transformations of State Power: Masculinity, International Intervention, and the Bosnian Police*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2018

Elissa Helms
Elissa Helms*
Affiliation:
Central European University, Department of Gender Studies, Hungary. [email protected]
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Extract

Many Bosnians I talked to were skeptical about my plan to do research among local police in the central Bosnian town of Zenica. They told me that no one would talk to me there. “They're too scared of foreigners,” they said, meaning especially Westerners who might be connected to the powerful international institutions that have acted as de facto protectorate to the fragmented and unstable state after the collapse of socialist Yugoslavia and the devastating 1992–1995 war. In their efforts to neutralize the police as enforcer of ethnonational separatism and to promote the new democratic values of rule of law, respect for human rights, and ethnic and gender equality, the “international community” had sacked hundreds of officers, restricted police powers, and introduced quotas for ethnic minorities and women. There was thus a sense that “foreigners” posed a threat to the masculinized coercive power of the state as embodied in the police. As it happened, the police did talk to me, though always in reference to this context of shifting relations of state and state-like power, as well as the economic and social instability that characterizes postwar Bosnia-Herzegovina (hereafter Bosnia).

Type
Articles
Information
Nationalities Papers , Volume 34 , Issue 3 , July 2006 , pp. 343 - 361
Copyright
Copyright © 2006 Association for the Study of Nationalities 

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References

Notes

1. Examples in a substantial literature on gendered nationalisms in former Yugoslavia, mostly focused on women, include Wendy Bracewell, “Women and the Biological Reproduction of ‘the Nation”,” Women's Studies International Forum, Vol. 19, Nos 1–2, 1996, pp. 17–24; Vesna Kesić, “From Reverence to Rape: An Anthropology of Ethnic and Genderized Violence,” in Marguerite R. Waller and Jennifer Rycenga, eds, Frontline Feminisms: Women, War, and Resistance (New York: Routledge, 2001); Maja Korać 1998, “Ethnic–National Conflicts and the Patterns of Social, Political and Sexual Violence against Women: The Case of Yugoslavia,” Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power, Vol. 5, No. 2, 1998, pp. 153–182; Carol Lilly and Jill Irvine, “Negotiating Interests: Women and Nationalism in Serbia and Croatia, 1990–1997,” East European Politics and Societies, Vol. 16, No. 1, 2002, pp. 109–144; Dubravka Zarkov, “From Media War to Ethnic War: The Female Body and Nationalist Processes in the Former Yugoslavia, 1986–1994,” Ph.D. thesis, University of Nijmegen, 1999. On (homo)sexuality and gender in Croatia and Serbia, see e.g. Kevin Moss, “Yugoslav Transgendered Heroes: ‘Virgina” and ‘Marble Ass”,” Reč, Vol. 67, No. 13, 2002, pp. 347–367; Tatjana Pavlovic, “Women in Croatia: Feminists, Nationalists, and Homosexuals,” in Sabrina P. Ramet, ed., Gender Politics in the Western Balkans: Women and Society in Yugoslavia and the Yugoslav Successor States (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999), pp. 131–152.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

2. Apart from the other articles in the present issue, these also include Dusan I. Bijelic and Lucinda Cole, “Sexualizing the Serb,” in Dusan I. Bijelić and Obrad Savić, eds, Balkan as Metaphor: Between Globalization and Fragmentation (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), pp. 279–310; Wendy Bracewell, “Rape in Kosovo: Masculinity and Serbian Nationalism,” Nations and Nationalism, Vol. 6, No. 4, 2000, pp. 563–590; Jessica Greenberg, “‘Goodbye Serbian Kennedy”: Zoran Dinđtić and the New Democratic Masculinity in Serbia,” East European Politics and Societies, Vol. 20, No. 1, 2006, pp. 126–151; Sasho A. Lambevski, “Suck My Nation: Masculinity, Ethnicity, and the Politics of (Homo)Sex,” Sexualities, Vol. 2, 1999, pp. 397–419; Aleksandra Milicevic, “Joining Serbia's Wars: Volunteers and Draft-Dodgers, 1991–1995,” Ph.D. dissertation, University of California at Los Angeles, 2004; Dubravka Zarkov, “The Body of the Other Man: Sexual Violence and the Construction of Masculinity, Sexuality and Ethnicity in Croatian Media,” in Caroline O. N. Moser and Fiona C. Clark, eds, Victims, Perpetrators or Actors? Gender, Armed Conflict, and Political Violence (London: Zed Books, 2001), pp. 69–82; Marko Zivkovic, “Serbian Stories of Identity and Destiny in the 1980s and 1990s,” Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Chicago, 2001, pp. 93–114.Google Scholar

3. The very few empirically based, scholarly studies that address gender in Bosnia are nearly exclusively about women. Examples aside from my own work, cited below, are: Cynthia Cockburn, The Space between Us: Negotiating Gender and National Identities in Conflict (London and New York: Zed Books, 1998); Cynthia Cockburn with Rada Stakić-Domuz and Meliha Hubić, Women Organizing for Change (Zenica, Bosnia-Herzegovina: Medica Zenica Infoteka, 2001); Cornelia Sorabji, “Mixed Motives: Islam, Nationalism and Mevluds in an Unstable Yugoslavia,” in Camillia Fawzi El-Sohl and Judy Mabro, eds, Muslim Women's Choices: Religious Belief and Social Reality (Providence: Berg, 1994), pp. 108–127.Google Scholar

4. Partial exceptions are Xavier Bougarel, “Death and the Nationalist: Martyrdom, War Memory and Veteran Identity among Bosnian Muslims,” in Xavier Bougarel, Elissa Helms, and Ger Duijzings, eds, The New Bosnian Mosaic: Identities, Memories and Moral Claims in a Postwar Society (Aldershot, England: Ashgate, forthcoming), which focuses on a male social category but does not analyze its gendered aspects, and Stef Jansen, “Gendered Transformations of ‘Home” amongst Displaced Bosnians,” paper presented at the conference Displacement: Global Dynamics and Gendered Patterns, University of Bergen, September 2005, which analyzes Bosnian masculinities but outside Bosnia itself.Google Scholar

5. Elissa Helms, “Women as Agents of Ethnic Reconciliation? Women's NGOs and International Intervention in Postwar Bosnia-Herzegovina,” Women's Studies International Forum, Vol. 26, No. 1, 2003, pp. 15–33; Elissa Helms, “‘Politics Is a Whore”: Women, Morality and Victimhood in Postwar Bosnia-Herzegovina,” in Xavier Bougarel, Elissa Helms, and Ger Duijzings, eds, The New Bosnian Mosaic: Identities, Memories and Moral Claims in a Postwar Society (Aldershot, England: Ashgate, forthcoming).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

6. See Bijelić and Cole, “Sexualizing the Serb;” Maria Todorova, Imagining the Balkans (New York/Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 13–15; Bracewell, “Rape in Kosovo;” Živković, “Serbian Stories of Identity and Destiny.”Google Scholar

7. Often it is Serbian men, from Serbia proper, who are especially portrayed this way, or only Serbs are mentioned, i.e. without specific reference to those in Bosnia. For examples, see Euan Hague, “Rape, Power and Masculinity: The Construction of Gender and National Identities in the War in Bosnia-Herzegovina,” in Ronit Lentin, ed., Gender and Catastrophe (London: Zed Books, 1997), pp. 50–63; Alexandra Stiglmayer, “The Rapes in Bosnia-Hercegovina,” in Alexandra Stiglmayer, ed., Mass Rape: The War Against Women in Bosnia-Hercegovina (Lincoln/London: University of Nebraska Press, 1994), pp. 147–160.Google Scholar

8. Dubravka Zarkov, “Gender, Orientalism and the History of Ethnic Hatred in the Former Yugoslavia,” in Helma Lutz and Nira Yuval-Davis, eds, Crossfires: Nationalism, Racism, and Gender in Europe (London/E. Haven, CT: Pluto Press, 1995). See also Elissa Helms, “‘East and West Kiss”: Gender, Orientalism, and Balkanism in Muslim-Majority Bosnia-Herzegovina,” unpublished manuscript.Google Scholar

9. R. W. Connell, Masculinities (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995); Andrea Cornwall and Nancy Lindisfarne, “Dislocating Masculinity: Gender, Power and Anthropology,” in Andrea Cornwall and Nancy Lindisfarne, eds, Dislocating Masculinity: Comparative Ethnographies (London: Routledge, 1994); for ethnographic accounts, see Orna Sasson-Levy, “Constructing Identities at the Margins: Masculinities and Citizenship in the Israeli Army,” Sociological Quarterly, Vol. 43, No. 3, 2002, pp. 357–383; Thembisa Waetjen, “The Limits of Gender Rhetoric for Nationalism: A Case Study from Southern Africa,” Theory and Society, Vol. 30, 2001, pp. 121–152.Google Scholar

10. See Wendy Bracewell's critique of one-dimensional representations of Balkan masculinity and her evidence to the contrary in the case of Serbia: Bracewell, “Rape in Kosovo.”Google Scholar

11. See Andrew Gilbert, “On Corrupt and Monstrous Forms: (Non)Postsocialism in Postwar Bosnia-Herzegovina,” paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association, Washington, November 2005.Google Scholar

12. For more on the importance of non-ethnic social categories in the political and social transformations of postwar Bosnia, see Xavier Bougarel, Elissa Helms, and Ger Duijzings, “Introduction,” in Xavier Bougarel, Elissa Helms, and Ger Duijzings, eds, The New Bosnian Mosaic: Identities, Memories and Moral Claims in a Postwar Society (Aldershot, England: Ashgate, forthcoming).Google Scholar

13. See Sumantra Bose, Bosnia after Dayton: Nationalist Partition and International Intervention (London: Hurst, 2002). For critical views of international institutions and state-building in Bosnia, see Robert Hay den, “‘Democracy” without a Demos? The Bosnian Constitutional Experiment and the Intentional Construction of Nonfunctioning States,” East European Politics and Societies, Vol. 19, No. 2, 2005, pp. 226–259; Gerald Knaus and Felix Martin, “Lessons from Bosnia and Herzegovina: Travails of the European Raj,” Journal of Democracy, Vol. 14, No. 3, 2003, pp. 60–74.Google Scholar

14. On the shifts in these various levels of governance and the challenges for studying them in Southeast Europe, see Paul Stubbs, “Stretching Concepts Too Far? Multi-level Governance, Policy Transfer and the Politics of Scale in South East Europe,” Southeast European Politics, Vol. 6, No. 2, 2005, pp. 66–87.Google Scholar

15. Gemma Collantes Celador, “Police Reform: Peacebuilding through ‘Democratic Policing”?” International Peacekeeping, Vol. 12, No. 3, 2005, pp. 364–376. The U.N. Mission to Bosnia-Herzegovina was charged with implementing the technical and security provisions of Dayton. By the end of 2004, the European Union had taken over the U.N. Mission's functions, IPTF being replaced by the EUPM in January 2003.Google Scholar

16. Michel-Rolph Trouillot, “The Anthropology of the State in the Age of Globalization,” Current Anthropology, Vol. 42, No. 1, 2001, pp. 125–138. By “non-state” I refer to the fact that these institutions are not part of the Bosnian state, though international institutions very much depend on the power of foreign states.Google Scholar

17. For critical views of postwar economic policies, see Michael Pugh, “Transformation in the Political Economy of Bosnia since Dayton,” International Peacekeeping, Vol. 12, No. 3, 2005, pp. 448–476; Dominik Zaum, “Economic Reform and the Transformation of the Payment Bureaux,” International Peacekeeping, Vol. 12, No. 3, 2005, pp. 350–363.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

18. See Elissa Helms, “Gendered Visions of the Bosnian Future: Women's Activism and Representation in Post-War bosnia-Herzegovina,” Ph.D. dissertation, University of Pittsburgh, 2003.Google Scholar

19. The project, which has since been repeated all over Bosnia-Herzegovina, also provided training for judges and legal professionals, social workers, medical emergency workers, NGO activists, and journalists. It was sponsored by the U.N. Bosnia Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) and the Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE). In fact, it was due to this international support, rather than Medica's influence or any cooperation from the state, that the state institutions involved had been persuaded to allow employees to attend the training as part of their regular paid work duties.Google Scholar

20. This was a part of the broad program of IPTF police reform, being continued by the EUPM, for which the goal was to reach “European standards” of about 10% female officers (interview with EUPM spokesperson Kristen Haupt, 10 August 2004, Sarajevo).Google Scholar

21. In a variety of contexts, the police have generally been constructed as an underiably masculine institution and individual profession: see e.g. Suzanne Franzway, Dianne Court, and R. W. Connell, Staking a Claim: Feminism, Bureaucracy and the State (Cambridge, England: Polity Press, 1989); Steve Herbert, “‘Hard Charger” or ‘Station Queen”? Policing and the Masculinist State,” Gender, Peace and Culture, Vol. 8, No. 1, 2001, pp. 55–71; Anastasia Prokos and Irene Padavic, “‘There Oughtta Be a Law against Bitches”: Masculinity Lessons in Police Academy Training,” Gender, Work and Organization, Vol. 9, No. 4, 2002, pp. 439–459.Google Scholar

22. See Celador, “Police Reform.” The independent news media provided a steady stream of exposés and investigative reports on organized crime and its links to former warlords and government officials, especially those in the ruling nationalist parties, who were shown to be getting away with all sorts of brazen crimes. This visibility added to the sense among ordinary Bosnians that the rule of law was in shambles and that no one could rely on the state for justice. Crime, police corruption, and political entanglements have also figured prominently in films about the postwar era by Bosnian directors, notably Pjer Zalica's Fuse (Gori Vatra) and Srdan Vuletić's Summer in the Golden Valley (Ljeto u zlatnoj dolini).Google Scholar

23. This is a pseudonym, as are all names of police officers in this paper. Translations of quotes from the Bosnian language are mine.Google Scholar

24. Many of these officials were also retired or on the verge of retirement, so that the IPTF earned the nickname “International Pensioners' Task Force.”Google Scholar

25. Such orientalist hierarchies in which Africans and Asians figure as inferior to ‘civilized” Europe are commonly invoked in Bosnia by both men and women (see Helms, “‘East and West Kiss”“). Racism in this region deserves further analysis, but the point here is that, for these male police officers, the presence of people from societies they perceived as inferior added insult to the injury they already felt in having their power restricted.Google Scholar

26. For details of the political and administrative structure of postwar Bosnia, see e.g . Florian Bieber, “Governing Postwar Bosnia,” in Kinga Gal, ed., Minority Governance in Europe (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2002), pp. 322–344; Bose, Bosnia after Dayton.Google Scholar

27. Zenica was the major mining and steel center of pre-war Bosnia; most of the approximately 23,000 workers, both men and women, had lost their jobs at the steel mill during the war.Google Scholar

28. Celador, “Police Reform.”Google Scholar

29. This arrangement also ensured that more members of ethnic minorities were also young, inexperienced women in a male-dominated institution who would therefore be less likely to “make trouble.”Google Scholar

30. Research conducted in the Zenica area showed, on the contrary, that domestic violence was indeed widespread: Medica Zenica, To Live with(out) Violence—Final Report: Violence against Women, Zenica, Bosnia-Herzegovina (Zenica, Bosnia-Herzegovina: Infoteka, Medica Zenica, 1999).Google Scholar

31. This British television program for very young children was also popular in Bosnia, where it ran overdubbed in the local language under the title Teletabisi. The program is saturated with messages about traffic safety, good citizenship, and ethnic/racial tolerance (multiculturalism).Google Scholar

32. One also wonders where rapists figured in this ranking. In a study of male inmates of the Zenica prison (KP Dom), Zenica sociologist Alisabri Sabani found that the highest status was given to those who had committed murder, while rape was considered an unworthy crime and evidence of depravity. Murder was the understandable if regrettable result of (male) passions and violent reactions to insults or injustice: Alisabri Šabani, Sociologija zatvorenickog drustva: Socijalna klima zatvora zatvorenog tipa u Zenici u periodu od 1993. do 1997.g [Sociology of a Prisoner Society: The Social Climate of a Closed-Type Prison in Zenica, 1992–1997] (Sarajevo: Graffo M, 2005), pp. 123–156. One could thus speculate that rape was considered unmanly because “true men” should be able to attract women voluntarily, rather than having to get sex by force.Google Scholar

33. As one highly placed official in the police jokingly commented, putting the stress on heterosexual virility, “We can't afford ourselves the luxury of frisking women.”Google Scholar

34. See Herbert, “‘Hard Charger” or ‘Station Queen”?” Bonnie McElhinny, An Economy of Affect: Objectivity, Masculinity and the Gendering of Police Work,” in Andrea Cornwall and Nancy Lindisfarne, eds, Dislocating Masculinity: Comparative Ethnographies (London: Routledge, 1994), pp. 159–171.Google Scholar

35. One officer joked to me in front of his male colleagues, “You know how we like women dressed the best? In their natural skin! [u prirodnoj koži ]” (the word for “skin” is the same as that for “leather”).Google Scholar

36. Even though I was not affiliated with any foreign organization, the mere fact of my being a Westerner was enough for one policeman to joke about “talking in front of the international community.”Google Scholar

37. Kulturni/nekulturni only roughly corresponds with urban/rural distinctions but is closely linked to class aspirations, an aspect that requires more extensive analysis than space here allows. On kulturni/nekulturni distinctions before and after the war, see Tone Bringa, Being Muslim the Bosnian Way: Identity and Community in a Central Bosnian Village (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995); Cornelia Sorabji, “Managing Memories in Postwar Sarajevo: Individuals, Bad Memories and New Wars,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, Vol. 12, No. 1, 2006, pp. 1–18; Anders Stefansson, “Urban Exile: Locals, Newcomers and the Cultural Transformation of Sarajevo,” in Xavier Bougarel, Elissa Helms, and Ger Duijzings, eds, The New Bosnian Mosaic: Identities, Memories and Moral Claims in a Postwar Society (Aldershot, England: Ashgate, forthcoming).Google Scholar

38. See Helms “East and West Kiss.”Google Scholar

39. See Srdjan Vucetic, “Identity is a Joking Matter: Intergroup Humor in Bosnia,” Spaces of Identity, Vol. 4, No. 1, 2004, pp. 7–34.Google Scholar

40. Michael Herzfeld, Cultural Intimacy: Social Poetics in the Nation-State (New York: Routledge, 1997), p. 28; For more on the gendering of symbolic geographies and civilizational categories in Bosnia, including the association of “patriarchal men” with backward peasant culture, see Helms, “‘East and West Kiss”.”Google Scholar

41. Herzfeld, Cultural Intimacy, p. 3. On positive and deliberate invocations of the primitive Balkan male in Serbia and Croatia, see Stef Jansen, “Svakodnevni Orijentalizam: Dozivljaj ‘Balkana”/‘Evrope” u Beogradu i Zagrebu” [Everyday Orientalism: Experiences of “Balkan”/”Europe” in Beograd and Zagreb], Filozofija i drustvo, Vol. 18, 2002, pp. 33–71; Mattijs van de Port, Gypsies, Wars, and Other Instances of the Wild: Civilisation and Its Discontents in a Serbian Town (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1998).Google Scholar

42. For example, Herbert, “‘Hard Charger” or ‘Station Queen”?” Prokos and Padavic, “‘There Outta Be a Law”;” Malcolm Young, An Inside Job (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991).Google Scholar

43. Bougarel, Helms, and Duijzings, “Introduction.” See also Akhil Gupta, “Blurred Boundaries: The Discourse of Corruption, the Culture of Politics, and the Imagined State,” American Ethnologist, Vol. 22, No. 2, 1995, pp. 375–402; Stubbs, “Stretching Concepts Too Far?” Anthropologists working in other postwar countries with international presence and struggling states have noted that such situations illuminate the intersection of local processes with state and transnational forms of power, even shedding light on the dynamics of globalization itself. See George E. Marcus, “General Comments,” Cultural Anthropology, Vol. 9, No. 3, 1994, pp. 423–428. And see Carol J. Greenhouse, “Introduction: Altered States, Altered Lives,” in Carol J. Greenhouse, Elizabeth Mertz and Kay B. Warren, eds, Ethnography in Unstable Places: Everyday Lives in Contexts of Dramatic Political Change (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), pp. 1–34.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

44. This complicates observations about more totalitarian state-socialist systems, which were seen to have de-masculinized men or infantilized the entire population (Katherine Verdery, “From Parent State to Family Patriarchs: Gender and Nation in Contemporary Eastern Europe,” East European Politics and Societies, Vol. 8, No. 2, 1994, pp. 225–255; Peggy Watson, “Eastern Europe's Silent Revolution: Gender,” Sociology, Vol. 27, No. 3, 1993, pp. 471–487, here 483). As representatives of the state, and in post-Yugoslav retrospection, police officers saw their masculinity as strengthened under socialism, though ordinary citizens may still have experienced a de-masculinization in some ways during this period. This is a question for further research.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

45. Individual concerns about masculinity vis-à-vis women, sexuality, male breadwinner roles, and class aspirations were another aspect of police narratives that I have not discussed in detail here due to lack of space.Google Scholar

46. For related findings on competing masculinities in Serbia, see Greenberg, “‘Goodbye Serbian Kennedy”.”Google Scholar

47. Although this discourse superficially reminds many Bosnians of the socialist emphasis on gender equality, the current thrust is towards women's integration into a newly shaped neoliberal economy, supported by democratic institutions (Vanessa Pupavac, “Empowering Women? An Assessment of International Gender Policies in Bosnia,” International Peacekeeping, Vol. 12, No. 3, 2005, pp. 391–405). On similar changes in other post-socialist countries see e.g. Susan Gal and Gail Kligman, The Politics of Gender after Socialism: A Comparative Historical Essay (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

48. See Helms, “Women as Agents of Ethnic Reconciliation?”Google Scholar