Brown Bag: Project-Based Temporalities: International Intervention and Reconfiguration of Work in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Nejra Čengić - Project-Based Temporalities: International Intervention and Reconfiguration of Work in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

This presentation thematizes the relationship between international intervention in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and reconfigurations of labour. Short-term project-based employment under the umbrella of a postwar humanitarian, peacebuilding, democratizing intervention is marked by specific forms of precarity, along with certain advantages. It is understood primarily in contrast to permanent publicly-funded jobs, still widely regarded as a norm and an aspiration. Based on qualitative research amongst people engaged in internationally short-term funded projects, the presentation traces the specific strategies employed by these people to ‘accumulate continuity’ over the last 20 years. What old/new temporalities does this kind of work produce? How does it affect their lives and social reproduction?