Dr Catherine Baker Catherine.Baker@hull.ac.uk
Reader in 20th Century History
Language intermediaries and local agency: peacebuilding, translation/interpreting and political disempowerment in 'mature' post-Dayton Bosnia-Herzegovina
Baker, Catherine
Authors
Abstract
The peace negotiations that ended the 1992–95 war in Bosnia-Herzegovina established a constitutional system of ethnic power-sharing that satisfied its signatories (the presidents of Serbia, Croatia and Bosnia) enough for war to cease and provided for international military and civilian peacebuilding to play a significant role in post-conflict Bosnia’s governance and economy. This indefinite peacebuilding mission, still ongoing in a downsized form, depended – like any other form of intervention where foreigners work across linguistic boundaries – on interlinguistic mediation by locally-recruited translators/interpreters, an aspect of knowledge production that even current peace and conflict research into peacebuilding’s micropolitics often neglects. On an individual level, locally-recruited interpreters’ frequently-overlooked agency was integral to peacebuilding practice. Yet theorising their agency must also acknowledge the macrosocial level, where the post-war constitutional system has often been argued to have stripped Bosnians of political agency, since it foreclosed political participation as anything but an ethnic subject corresponding to the three institutionalised ethnic identities (Bosniak, Croat or Serb). The entrenched and growing disconnect between political elites and the public, expressed through social protest in 2014, foregrounds the problem of agency and dis/empowerment in Bosnian society more sharply than research on the politics of translation/interpreting and peacebuilding in Bosnia before 2014 took into account, yet reveals further articulations of how international peacebuilding and domestic political contestation were intertwined.
Citation
Baker, C. (2019). Language intermediaries and local agency: peacebuilding, translation/interpreting and political disempowerment in 'mature' post-Dayton Bosnia-Herzegovina. Journal of War and Culture Studies, 12(3), 236-250. https://doi.org/10.1080/17526272.2019.1644413
Journal Article Type | Article |
---|---|
Acceptance Date | Jun 11, 2019 |
Online Publication Date | Jul 18, 2019 |
Publication Date | 2019-08 |
Deposit Date | Jun 11, 2019 |
Publicly Available Date | Jan 19, 2021 |
Journal | Journal of War and Culture Studies |
Print ISSN | 1752-6272 |
Publisher | Taylor and Francis |
Peer Reviewed | Peer Reviewed |
Volume | 12 |
Issue | 3 |
Pages | 236-250 |
DOI | https://doi.org/10.1080/17526272.2019.1644413 |
Keywords | Agency; Bosnia-Herzegovina; Dayton Peace Agreement; Ethnopolitical conflict; Interpreting; Peacebuilding; Translation |
Public URL | https://hull-repository.worktribe.com/output/1972418 |
Publisher URL | https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17526272.2019.1644413 |
Contract Date | Jun 11, 2019 |
Files
Article
(766 Kb)
PDF
Copyright Statement
©2019 University of Hull
You might also like
Introduction: Thinking Politically with Popular Music of the Balkans
(2024)
Book Chapter
Downloadable Citations
About Repository@Hull
Administrator e-mail: repository@hull.ac.uk
This application uses the following open-source libraries:
SheetJS Community Edition
Apache License Version 2.0 (http://www.apache.org/licenses/)
PDF.js
Apache License Version 2.0 (http://www.apache.org/licenses/)
Font Awesome
SIL OFL 1.1 (http://scripts.sil.org/OFL)
MIT License (http://opensource.org/licenses/mit-license.html)
CC BY 3.0 ( http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/)
Powered by Worktribe © 2024
Advanced Search