Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-8ctnn Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-28T04:13:40.403Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Prosperity without Security: The Precarity of Interpreters in Postsocialist, Postconflict Bosnia-Herzegovina

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 January 2017

Catherine Baker
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This article uses life history interview data collected during a project on languages and peace support operations in Bosnia-Herzegovina to consider, as an occupational group, people from former Yugoslavia who were employed as interpreters by foreign military forces. In exploring their opportunities for temporary prosperity and the sources of precarity that were associated with this distinctive form of work, Catherine Baker discusses the socioeconomic transformation of Bosnia-Herzegovina both in light of literature on postsocialist labor and in light of a global “development-security nexus” that may be observed during and after contemporary conflicts. Neither lens is sufficient for understanding the full extent of Bosnia-Herzegovina. Baker concludes by making the case for researchers of all postsocialist societies in central and eastern Europe, not just the societies that have direcdy experienced armed conflict, to take account of the global context of security, development, humanitarianism, and intervention.

Type
Articles
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 71 , Issue 4 , Winter 2012 , pp. 849 - 872
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 2012

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Early versions of this paper were presented at the Second Languages at War Annual Workshop, Imperial War Museum, London, 28 May 2010, and at the American Association for Applied Linguistics (AAAL) annual convention, Chicago, 26-29 March 2011. The research was carried out as part of the project Languages at War: Policies and Practices of Language Contacts in Conflict, funded by the United Kingdom's Arts and Humanities Research Council, while I was employed at the University of Southampton. A British Academy Overseas Conference Award supported the presentation of this research at AAAL. Thanks are due to Louise Askew, Mona Baker, Hilary Footitt, Eric Gordy, Michael Kelly, and Simona Tobia, to discussants and attendees at the panels in London and Chicago, and to the editor of Slavic Review and the anonymous reviewers of this paper for comments that have improved it greatly.

1. Bougarel, Xavier, Duijzings, Ger, and Helms, Elissa, eds., The New Bosnian Mosaic: Identities, Memories and Moral Claims in a Post-War Society (Aldershot, Eng., 2007)Google Scholar; Subotic, Jelena, Hijacked Justice: Dealing with the Past in the Balkans (Ithaca, 2009).Google Scholar

2. For these concepts as external impositions, see Jansen, Stef, “Of Wolves and Men: Postwar Reconciliation and the Gender of Inter-National Encounters,” Focaal 57 (2010): 33–49.Google Scholar For their lack of fundamental legitimacy, see Chandler, David, Bosnia: Faking Democracy after Dayton (London, 1999).Google Scholar For the idea that they mirror a European Raj, see Knaus, Gerhard and Martin, Felix, “Travails of the European Raj,” Journal of Democracy 14, no. 3 (July 2003): 70.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

3. For ethnographies of intervention in Bosnia-Herzegovina, see Jansen, Stef, “The Privatisation of Home and Hope: Return, Reforms and the Foreign Intervention in Bosnia-Herzegovina,” Dialectical Anthropology 30, nos. 3 - 4 (2006): 177-99CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Helms, Elissa, “Gendered Transformations of State Power: Masculinity, International Intervention, and the Bosnian Police,” Nationalities Papers 34, no. 3 (July 2006): 343-61CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Coles, Kimberley, Democratic Designs: International Intervention and Electoral Practices in Postwar Bosnia-Herzegovina (Ann Arbor, 2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Pickering, Paula M., Peacebuilding in the Balkans: The View from the Ground Floor (Ithaca, 2007)Google Scholar; Andrew Gilbert, “Foreign Authority and the Politics of Impartiality in Postwar Bosnia-Herzegovina” (PhD diss., University of Chicago, 2008); Hromadzic, Azra, “Discourses of Integration and Practices of Reunification at the Mostar Gymnasium, Bosnia and Herzegovina,” Comparative Education Review 52, no. 4 (November 2008): 541-63CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Stefansson, Anders H., “Coffee after Cleansing? Co-Existence, Co-Operation, and Communication in Post-Conflict Bosnia and Herzegovina,” Focaal 57 (2010): 62–76 Google Scholar; Selimovic, Johanna Mannergren, “Perpetrators and Victims: Local Responses to the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia,” Focaal 57 (2010): 50– 61.Google Scholar

4. Jansen, “Privatisation,” 193.

5. Ibid., 190.

6. Louise Waite, “A Place and Space for a Critical Geography of Precarity?” Geography Compass?,, no. 1 (2001): 415.

7. Beck, Ulrich, Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity, trans. Ritter, Mark (London, 1992)Google Scholar; Bauman, Zygmunt, Work, Consumerism and the New Poor (Buckingham, Eng., 1998)Google Scholar; Sennett, Richard, The Corrosion of Character: The Personal Consequences of Work in the Nexu Capitalism (New York, 1998)Google Scholar; Standing, Guy, The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class (London, 2011).Google Scholar Though Beck, Bauman, and Sennett employ the concepts of risk and instability rather than precarity, their observations on work have still framed the contemporary study of precarity: Waite, “Place and Space,” 419-20.

8. Burawoy, Michael, “Reaching for the Global,” in Burawoy, , ed., Global Ethnography: Forces, Connections, and Imaginations in a Postmodern World (Berkeley, 2000), 4.Google Scholar Ethnographers trained by Burawoy have studied groups such as U.S. shipyard workers facing casualization and Hungarian mothers affected by the postsocialist shift from universal welfare payments to means-tested benefits and have sought and explained “lacunae or anomalies” in existing theories of globalization. Burawoy, “Reaching,” 27-28.

9. See Footitt, Hilary and Kelly, Michael, eds., Languages at War: Policies and Practices of Language Contacts in Conflict (Basingstoke, Eng., 2012).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

10. These interviews are drawn from 52 oral history interviews with 51 people carried out for the University of Southampton's research into peacekeeping in Bosnia- Herzegovina as part of the comparative study Languages at War: Policies and Practices of Language Contacts in Conflict.

11. Because this individual had worked only in Croatia, his interview is not considered in this article.

12. Ghodsee, Kristen R., The Red Riviera: Gender, Tourism, and Postsocialism on the Black Sea (Durham, 2005), 13–17.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

13. Dunn, Elizabeth C., Privatizing Poland: Baby Food, Big Business, and the Remaking of Labor (Ithaca, 2004).Google Scholar

14. Weiner, Elaine, Market Dreams: Gender, Class, and Capitalism in the Czech Republic (Ann Arbor, 2007).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

15. Sampson, Steven, “The Social Life of Projects: Importing Civil Society to Albania,” in Hann, Chris M. and Dunn, Elizabeth C., eds., Civil Society: Challenging Western Models (London, 1996), 122.Google Scholar

16. Ghodsee, Red Riviera, 76; Weiner, Market Dreams, 97-99; Sampson, “Social Life,” 123.

17. See also Lynne A. Haney, “Global Discourses of Need: Mythologizing and Pathologizing Welfare in Hungary,” in Burawoy, ed., Global Ethnography, 53-55.

18. Duffield, Mark R., Global Governance and the Nexo Wars: The Merging of Development and Security (London, 2001), 9.Google Scholar

19. Ibid., 11.

20. Nordstrom, Carolyn R., Shadows of War: Violence, Power, and International Profiteering in the Twenty-First Century (Berkeley, 2004), 201.Google Scholar

21. Kaldor, Mary, New and Old Wars: Organized Violence in a Global Era (Stanford, 1999), 6–9, 31-68.Google Scholar Nordstrom's and Duffield's demonstrations of the globalization of war are focused on the present, with Duffield in particular seeing it as a consequence of post-Cold War changes in international relations. The historian Tarak Barkawi, however, reminds us that the development-security nexus is only the latest form of globalizing war, which has depended on interconnection and transfers of resources for much longer than a presentist outlook on globalization would suggest. Tarak Barkawi, Globalization and War (Lanham, Md., 2006), 15. Understanding the global dimension of war requires an understanding of culture, which Barkawi incorporates into his history of war by showing how “cultural frameworks derived from wartime experience” accelerate globalization by forcing people toward an awareness of unfamiliar places (Globalization, 80-81). Language—the competence interpreters supply—is less central in his history, despite a section on language in the British empire's Indian army (Globalization, 92). One way to write language into the globalization of war is offered by Vicente Rafael, who has shown how the United States has instrumentalized foreign languages and trained Americans in languages of the Other in order to project its own power abroad: during the war and insurgency in Iraq, Rafael argues, the locally recruited interpreter becomes an object of suspicion by virtue of the very fact that translation can never represent the transfer of all possible meanings from one language to another: Vicente L. Rafael, “Translation, American English, and the National Insecurities of Empire,” Social Text, no. 101 (Winter 2009): 1-23. For an analysis of why the states that intervened in Bosnia-Herzegovina lacked mass local-language capacity among their own citizens and therefore had to rely on locally employed interpreters, see Kelly, Michael, “Issues in Institutional Language Policy: Lessons Learned from Peace-Keeping in Bosnia-Herzegovina,” European Journal of Language Policy 3, no. 1 (2011): 61–80.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

22. See Allcock, John B., Explaining Yugoslavia (New York, 2000)Google Scholar; Lampe, John R., Yugoslavia as History: Twice There Was a Country, 2d ed. (Cambridge, Eng., 2000)Google Scholar; Patterson, Patrick Hyder, Bought and Sold: Living and Losing the Good Life in Socialist Yugoslavia (Ithaca, 2011).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

23. Under socialist Yugoslavia's ideology of “workers’ self-management,” social enterprises, run by workers’ councils, were the equivalent of state-owned enterprises in the Soviet bloc.

24. See Verdery, Katherine, What Was Socialism and What Comes Next? (Princeton, 1996)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hann, C. M., ed., Postsocialism: Ideals, Ideologies and Practices in Eurasia (London, 2001)Google Scholar; Ledeneva, Alena V., How Russia Really Works: The Informal Practices That Shaped Post-Soviet Politics and Business (Ithaca, 2006).Google Scholar

25. See Gagnon, V. P. Jr., The Myth of Ethnic War: Serbia and Croatia in the 1990s (Ithaca, 2004).Google Scholar

26. See Burg, Steven L. and Shoup, Paul S., The War in Bosnia-Herzegovina: Ethnic Conflict and International Intervention (London, 1999).Google Scholar

27. Andreas, Peter, Blue Helmets and Black Markets: The Business of Survival in the Siege of Sarajevo (Ithaca, 2008).Google Scholar

28. Employers did not demand a languages degree, let alone a professional interpreting qualification, from their interpreters but usually asked them to pass some sort of test before their employment could be confirmed. Sometimes, interpreters’ prospective supervisors at bases desperate for language support would bypass their own force's policy and hire the interpreter on an informal basis, widi payment in supplies or no pay at all, until the formalities were complete.

29. A year or two after this last interviewee had started working, the divisional headquarters began enforcing a minimum working age of eighteen and reportedly terminated several young interpreters’ contracts.

30. Dubravka, interview, Banja Luka, 9 May 2010.

31. Zorica, interview, Pale/Sarajevo, 27 October 2009.

32. Frankfort, T., “Peacekeeping and Humanitarian Action,” and C. L. Schoonoord, “Dutchbat III and the Population: Medical Issues,” both in Srebrenica, a Safe Area: Reconstruction, Background, Consequences and Analyses of the Fall of a Safe Area (Amsterdam, 2002), 2.8.6 and 1.4.Google Scholar

33. British captain, interview, Bugojno, 26 February 2009.

34. As, in very different circumstances, did downsized U.S. professionals interviewed by Richard Sennett in the 1990s. Sennett, Corrosion of Character, 28-29.

35. Jovana, Interview, London, 18 November 2009. In Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian, bezbjednost/sigurnost/bezbednost can mean both “security” and “safety.“

36. E.g., one interpreter remembered that an UNPROFOR colleague injured by shrapnel had been funded to have surgery in western Europe. Yet whether liaison officers would stand up for their interpreters at checkpoints depended entirely on the whim of the officer concerned.

37. Gordon (air force officer), interview, London, 26 June 2009.

38. Fred (British army linguist), interview, Germany, 24 July 2009.

39. Turner, Mandy and Pugh, Michael C., “Towards a New Agenda for Transforming War Economies,” Conflict, Security and Development 6, no. 3 (2009): 475.Google Scholar

40. Divjak, Boris and Pugh, Michael C., “The Political Economy of Corruption in Bosnia and Herzegovina,” International Peacekeeping, 15 no. 3 (August 2008): 373-86.Google Scholar

41. Jansen, “Privatisation,” 190.

42. Ioannis Armakolas, “Sarajevo No More? Identity and the Experience of Place among Bosnian Serb Sarajevans in Republika Srpska,” in Bougarel, Duijzings, and Helms, eds., New Bosnian Mosaic, 86.

43. As SFOR shifted its role from security to liaison, many SFOR bases closed and fewer night patrols were used. By 2010, this had converted many EUFOR field interpreter posts to office-hours positions.

44. Dubravka, interview, Banja Luka, 9 May 2010.

45. Larisa Jašarević, “Everyday Work: Subsistence Economy, Social Belonging, and Moralities of Exchange at a Bosnian (Black) Market,” in Bougarel, Duijzings, and Helms, eds., New Bosnian Mosaic, 279.

46. Many interviewees could still remember pay rates, e.g., a British battalion commander who served in 1993 thought his unit's interpreters had been on 400-500 DM a month; interpreters employed by British forces in the Republika Srpska around 2000 remembered salaries of 1,000-1,800 DM; UNPROFOR in Sarajevo paid $300-$400 in 1993 and two interpreters in Pale recalled receiving $600 and $800, respectively; the civil affairs team at IFOR/SFOR headquarters paid its interpreters $900 in 1996 and $1,100 in 1998; at Zetra, one woman began as a secretary at $600 a month and was later promoted to a language assistant at $750; by 2009, after a professionalization process at SFOR headquarters had started in 2000, a headquarters interpreter hired at the lowest NATO grade (LCH 4) could expect a starting salary around 1,500 KM with biennial increments during their first twelve years of employment.

47. Most interpreters in Bosnia-Herzegovina were employed by “national contingents” (foreign units deployed to Bosnia-Herzegovina and funded by their national defense ministries) rather than directly through the force headquarters in Sarajevo.

48. International Crisis Group, Bosnia's Precarious Economy: Still Not Open for Business, ICG Balkan Report 115 (Sarajevo, 2001), 6. See also Pugh, Michael, “Postwar Political Economy in Bosnia and Herzegovina: The Spoils of Peace,” Global Governance 8, no. 4 (Autumn 2002): 467-82.Google Scholar

49. These included foreign military bases, duty-free shops for international workers, towns outside siege lines, and shops in Croatia where some UN units had their rear headquarters.

50. Suljagić, Emir, Postcards from the Grave, trans. Haverić, Lelja (London, 2005), 37–38.Google Scholar

51. Andreas, Blue Helmets, 81-85.

52. Suljagić, Postcards, 38.

53. Valtchinova, Galia I., “Between a Balkan ‘Home’ and the ‘West': Popular Conceptions of the West in Bulgaria after 1945,” in Hammond, Andrew, ed., The Balkans and the West: Constructing the European Other, 1945-2003 (Aldershot, Eng., 2004), 147-49.Google Scholar

54. Keith Brown, who has studied private military contractors recruiting Macedonians to work in Iraq, notes that, in this work, the category “foreign civilian” is further broken down into a hierarchy associating certain jobs with certain nationalities. He suggests that Macedonians “are placed or place themselves in a different occupational category from Serbs, Croats and Bulgarians, as well as western Europeans.” Brown, “From the Balkans to Baghdad (via Baltimore): Labor Migration and the Routes of Empire,” Slavic Review 69, no. 4 (Winter 2010): 834. The experiences of Bosnian workers in Iraq and Afghanistan deserve research but were beyond the scope of this project.

55. At that time, a major Bosnian jobs portal was http://www.posao.ba/job.php?jobID=54919 (accessed 9 May 2011; no longer available).

56. While much more deserves to be said about gender and interpreting, a full analysis of how this work was gendered is beyond the scope of this paper.

57. Interpreter, interview, Pale, 27 October 2009.

58. Boba, interview, Sarajevo, 28 October 2009.

59. Jašarević, “Everyday Work,” 279.

60. Pickering, Paula M., “Generating Social Capital for Bridging Ethnic Divisions in the Balkans: Case Studies of Two Bosniak Cities,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 29, no. 1 (January 2006): 83.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

61. Ibid., 94.

62. Stenning, Alison, “Re-Placing Work: Economic Transformations and the Shape of a Community in Post-Socialist Poland,” Work, Employment and Society 19, no. 2 (June 2005): 237.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

63. On precarity in the western academic labor market, see Collinson, Jacquelyn Allen, “Working at a Marginal ‘Career': The Case of UK Social Science Contract Researchers,” Sociological Review 51, no. 3 (August 2003): 405-22.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

64. Klein, Naomi, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (London, 2007), 6, 8.Google Scholar

65. Haney, “Global Discourses,” 70.

66. Ed Howker and Shiv Malik, Jilted Generation: How Britain Has Bankrupted Its Youth (London, 2010); Standing, Precariat, 1.

67. Bunce, Valerie, “The Political Economy of Postsocialism,” Slavic Review 58, no. 4 (Winter 1999): 770.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

68. Valtchinova, “Between a Balkan ‘Home’ and the ‘West,'“; Sampson, “Social Life.” See, e.g., Peterson, James W., “An Expanded NATO Confronts Terrorism and Instability,” Journal of Slavic Military Studies 20, no. 4 (2007): 475-97CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Hynek, Nik and Eichler, Jan, “The Czech Provinicial Reconstruction Team in Afghanistan: Context, Experience and Politics,” Defense Studies 10, no. 3 (September 2010): 405-30.CrossRefGoogle Scholar.