Hunger and Fury: The Crisis of Democracy in the Balkans

Jasmin Mujanović

71.00

Less than two decades after the Yugoslav Wars ended, the edifice of parliamentary government in the Western Balkans is crumbling. This collapse sets into sharp relief the unreformed authoritarian tendencies of the region's entrenched elites, many of whom have held power since the early 1990s, and the hollowness of the West's 'democratisation' agenda.

There is a widely held assumption that institutional collapse will precipitate a new bout of ethnic conflict, but Mujanovic argues instead that the Balkans are on the cusp of a historic socio-political transformation. Drawing on a wide variety of sources, with a unique focus on local activist accounts, he argues that a period of genuine democratic transition is finally dawning, led by grassroots social movements, from Zagreb to Skopje. Rather than pursuing ethnic strife, these new Balkan revolutionaries are confronting the 'ethnic entrepreneurs' cemented in power by the West in its efforts to stabilise the region since the mid-1990s.

This compellingly argued book harnesses the explanatory power of the striking graffiti scrawled on the walls of the ransacked Bosnian presidency during violent anti-government protests in 2014: 'if you sow hunger, you will reap fury'.

Podijeli stavku :

Jasmin Mujanović

I am a political scientist and policy specialist of southeast European and international affairs with a PhD from York University in Toronto. My career background is a unique blend of global academic and professional engagement, as I have worked as a scholar, policy analyst, consultant, researcher, and writer in both North America and Europe.

My academic research concentrates primarily on the politics of contemporary southeastern Europe, with a particular focus on the politics of the non-EU states of the Western Balkans. More broadly, my academic fields of interest and expertise are split between international relations, global political economy, and political theory. I am interested in democratization processes, state development (including the process of state and regime failure), and post-conflict and peace studies, in particular as these topics relate to southeastern and eastern Europe. These concerns likewise keep me invested in debates on social movements and organized labor, regionally and globally.

Between 2018 and 2020, I was a limited term Assistant Professor of Political Science and Policy Studies at Elon University, during which time I also co-hosted of the popular regional podcast Sarajevo Calling.

My doctoral research concerned the development of the state in the Balkans, in particular, Bosnia-Herzegovina (BiH). A work of both political and international relations theory and area studies, my project situated the post-war Dayton constitutional order in BiH in a longer process of state and class formation in the region. My first book, Hunger and Fury: The Crisis of Democracy in the Balkans, was published in 2018 by Hurst Publishers and Oxford University Press and drew extensively on the research that I had conduced during my time at York, as well as during my stay at Columbia University as a Visiting Scholar at the Harriman Institute.