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CRITICAL SECURITY STUDIES
IN THE GLOBAL SOUTH
SERIES EDITORS: PINAR BILGIN · MONICA HERZ

Everyday Boundaries,
Borders and Post
Conflict Societies
Renata Summa
Critical Security Studies in the Global South

Series Editors
Pinar Bilgin
Department of International Relations
Bilkent University
Ankara, Turkey

Monica Herz
Institute of International Relations
PUC-Rio
Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
Critical approaches to security have made significant inroads into the study
of world politics in the past 30 years. Drawing from a broad range of
critical approaches to world politics (including Frankfurt School Crit-
ical Theory, Poststructuralism, Gramscian approaches and Postcolonial
Studies), critical approaches to security have inspired students of inter-
national relations to think broadly and deeply about the security dynamic
in world politics, multiple aspects of insecurities and how insecurities are
produced as we seek to address them. This series, given its focus on the
study of security in and of the Global South, will bring to the debate new
spheres of empirical research both in terms of themes and social locations,
as well as develop new interconnection between security and other related
subfields.

More information about this series at

http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/15576
 Renata Summa

Everyday Boundaries,
Borders and Post
Conflict Societies
Renata Summa
International Relations Institute
Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro
Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

Critical Security Studies in the Global South

ISBN 978-3-030-55816-1 ISBN 978-3-030-55817-8 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55817-8

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To my parents, Cristina and Aimone
 Preface

This is ultimately a book about how borders and boundaries are produced,
reproduced, challenged and diverted in post-conflict societies. Although
borders and boundaries have been claimed as fundamental assets during
conflict and in post-conflict societies—justifying walls and fences and
displacing whole populations—this book argues that the production of
boundaries does not happen in the ways we usually think it does, nor
where we usually expect it to happen. Indeed, borders and boundaries
have been easily naturalized and taken for granted—sometimes as a de-
historicized given, as fixed lines that clearly demarcate the inside from
the outside and produce inclusions and exclusions. Sometimes historical
claims are made in order to trace or contest the demarcation lines, but
even when this happens, space is essentialized as a national space clearly
demarcated from the space of the ‘others’. From Bosnia and Herzegovina
to Northern Ireland, from Croatia to Cyprus, conflict has strengthened,
if not produced, new forms of violent demarcations, highlighting the role
played by borders and boundaries in conflict and post-conflict societies.
They have been understood both as the cause and as the solution to wars.
As such, they have been of major concern of the political elites, figuring on
the negotiation tables and peace agreements, demarcated on official maps,
preserved by the national military or by NATO and used as a fundamental
security tool to keep peace in post-conflict societies. Based on security
claims, many boundaries are institutionalized.

vii
viii PREFACE

This book, however, suggests looking elsewhere to make sense of

borders and boundaries in post-conflict society. It provides an alternative
account of how boundaries operate in post-conflict societies by taking the
everyday as a serious field of analysis. Indeed, looking into the everyday of
a post-conflict society challenges militarized conceptions of security and
reveals that everyday interactions and everyday places are crucial to how
local people experience security. Moreover, by looking at the everyday
and, more specifically, to everyday places, it is possible to provide a more
dynamic account of boundary productions than the one offered by peace
treaties or UN Peace Operations.
Drawing on a detailed investigation of everyday places in two cities in
Bosnia and Herzegovina, this book raises questions about how processes
of identification and othering take place in post-conflict societies, some-
times appearing as rigid lines of segregation and, in many other cases, as
ephemerous and fragmented enactments of boundaries. Tactics such as
silencing, crossing, cherishing the pre-war past and passing as someone
from the other community are widely adopted, while more frontal ways
of challenging the post-war ethnonational logic are also widespread in
everyday practices and places.
Coach stations, schools, cafes, squares, beauty salons and shopping
malls thus become political spaces where boundaries are both enacted
and challenged, reconfigured, subverted, minimized, displaced, disdained,
dismissed, but also reinforced, reaffirmed and celebrated. The fluidity of
everyday boundary enactments provides for a very different picture of the
situation of Bosnia and Herzegovina than the one offered by the Dayton
Peace Agreement—and, ultimately, of post-conflict societies that rely on
the idea of the segregation of difference in order to keep order, secu-
rity and peace. And so, by looking at the everyday, it becomes clear that
Bosnia will never be what Dayton wants it to be.
This book is largely based on the research conducted for my Ph.D.
which was financed in part by the Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de
Pessoal de Nível Superior—Brasil (CAPES)—Finance Code 001. It is fair
to say that this is also a work about encounters: between people, ideas
and places, and, also, my encounters with people, ideas and places. I
would thus like to thank those who were part of this journey, espe-
cially my supervisor, João Pontes Nogueira, who has always supported my
work and my ideas. I am very grateful to other professors from Pontifical
Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro: Monica Herz, Carolina Moulin,
Marta Fernandéz, Maira Simon, Nicholas Onuf, Philippe Bonditti, Rob
 PREFACE ix

Walker, Roberto Yamato, Mike Shapiro and Stefano Guzzini. I can only
offer my gratitude to Jef Huysmans, for his insightful thoughts and the
productive discussions we had at Open University and elsewhere following
my time there. To Pinar Bilgin, for comments and encouragement. And
to Cynthia Enloe, for being an inspiration to (female) IR academics.
I am indebted to all my interlocutors in Bosnia and Herzegovina: thank
you for your time, your trust and your interest. I could have not achieved
as much without Aida Golić, Aida Hadzimusić, Amir T., Andrea Peres,
Armina Pilav, Azra Polimać, François Lunel, Giulia Carabelli, Nicholas
Moll, Selma Dzemidzić. Thanks to Ratko Orozović, who introduced me
to many of his friends and acquaintances in Dobrinja/Istočno Sarajevo
and, also, in Mostar. Thanks to all my interviewees, who have been
anonymized in this book, for taking the time to share your stories with
me. I learnt a lot from our encounters. Life in Sarajevo (and so many
encounters since) would not be the same without Armin, Bojan, Maria.
Caterina, Daniela and Mate: thanks for sharing coffee, thoughts, trips,
books and your friendship in Sarajevo, Bjelina, Belgrade, London and
beyond. Many thanks to Omar, with whom I had so many important
discussions since our encounter in Kino Bosna. Our friendship has shaped
this book in many ways. Thanks to my language teachers, Tea and Milan.
Also thank you to my close friends through this journey, my sources of
joy, strength and inspiration along the way: Gigi, Boselli, Camé, Carol,
Emma, Fe Alves, Fe Sucupira, Guilherme, Julián, Leo, Manu, Horta, Nat,
Paulinha, Paulinho, Victor and Sue. Thanks to Patricia and Ricardo, the
best siblings one could have. To Numa, who has supported this project
in so many ways and through the years, I am forever grateful. Thanks for
being there. And to Henrique, who makes life (and life in quarantine)
beautiful, which was the condition of possibility to finish this book.

Rio de Janeiro, Brazil Renata Summa

 Contents

1 Introduction 1
1.1 ‘Gladni smo na tri jezika!’ 11
References 19

2 Enacting Boundaries 21
2.1 Introduction 21
2.2 Dayton Peace Accords: Boundaries as Solution? 23
2.3 Conceptualizing Borders and Boundaries 30
2.4 International Relations: From Borders to Boundaries? 33
2.5 Making (Violent?) Boundaries 41
2.6 Enacting Boundaries 46
2.7 Conclusion 49
References 50

3 The Place(s) of Everyday and Everyday Places 55

3.1 Introduction 56
3.2 An Invitation to Look at the Everyday 57
3.3 Conceptualizing the Everyday 60
3.3.1 Four Prevalent Conceptions of the Everyday
and Its Critic 65
3.4 The International as Everyday 71
3.5 Everyday Places 80
3.5.1 Displacement, Estrangement, Curiosity 84

xi
xii CONTENTS

3.5.2 Snippets as Method 86

3.5.3 On Sites and Places 88
3.5.4 Localizing Research 91
3.6 Conclusion 93
References 93

4 Politics of (Im)mobility (or Everyday Practices Around

a Coach Station) 97
4.1 Dobrinja/Istočno Sarajevo 97
4.2 Imagining Boundaries (or, How Boundaries Came
to Be) 101
4.3 Drawing, Redrawing, Demarcating 112
4.4 (Im)mobility, Crossing 116
4.4.1 Taxis’ Tactics: Coping with Bordering Practices 122
4.5 Boundary Zone (or, a Meeting Place?) 125
4.6 Everyday Places as Boundary Enactments 130
4.7 Polysemic Boundaries 139
4.8 Conclusion 141
References 143

5 Boundary Displacement and Displacement as Boundary

(or a Saturday Afternoon in a Kafana) 145
5.1 Introduction: Placing Mostar 146
5.2 What Boundary? (or, a Short Story of the Bulevar) 152
5.2.1 The Bulevar as a Frontline 153
5.2.2 Dayton Divisions and Displacements 156
5.3 The ‘Invisible Boundary’ or, ‘Boundaries Are
on People’s Head’ 159
5.3.1 Destruction and Renovation 160
5.3.2 Boundary Enactments at the Bulevar 161
5.3.3 Beyond Administrative Integration: Attempts
in Everyday Life 166
5.3.4 Polysemy of the Lived Space 168
5.4 Displacing Boundaries at Boemi Kafana: Alternative
Spatiotemporal Categories 171
5.5 Inventing Places: Disrupting the ‘Divided City’ 178
5.6 Conclusion 184
References 185
 CONTENTS xiii

6 ‘Meeting at BBI’ (or, on Shopping Malls, the ‘Local’

and the ‘International’) 187
6.1 Introduction 187
6.2 Meeting Points 188
6.3 (Re)Inventing the Square 193
6.4 The Politics Behind ‘Non-places’ 200
6.5 The International and/in the City 208
6.6 Conclusion 214
References 215

7 Conclusion 217
Reference 224

Bibliography 225

Index 243
 About the Author

Renata Summa is a Postdoctoral Researcher in International Relations

at Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro (PUC-Rio). She holds
a Ph.D. from PUC-Rio and an M.A. in International Relations from
Sciences Po Paris. She was a Visiting Researcher at the Centre for South-
eastern European Studies at the University of Graz, Austria. Her research
interests are conflict and post-conflict situations, borders and boundaries,
ex-Yugoslavia and everyday approaches in IR.

xv
 Abbreviations

ARBiH Army of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina

BBI Bosnia Bank International
BiH Bosnia and Herzegovina
BSC Bosnian, Serbian, Croatian language
DPA Dayton Peace Accords
EU European Union
EUFOR European Union Forces
FBiH Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina
GFA General Framework Agreement for Peace in Bosnia and Herze-
govina (also known as Dayton Peace Accords)
HDZ Hravatska demokratska zajednica—Croat Democratic Union
HR High Representative
HVO Hravatsko vijece obrane—Croat Defense Council
ICTY International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia
IDP Internal Displaced Person
IEBL Inter-Entity Boundary Line
IFOR Implementation Force
IMF International Monetary Fund
JNA (Jugoslavenska narodna armija) Yugoslav People’s Army of the
former Yugoslavia
KM Konvertibilna Marka—Convertible Marks
KS Kanton Sarajevo—Canton Sarajevo
NATO North Atlantic Treaty Organization
NGO Non-Governmental Organization
OHR Office of High Representative for Bosnia and Herzegovina
OSCE Organization for Security and Co-ordination in Europe

xvii
xviii ABBREVIATIONS

PIC Peace Implementation Council, an International Body Guiding

and legitimizing the OHR
RS Republika Srpska
SCC Sarajevo City Center
SFOR Stabilization Force
SFRY Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia
UN United Nations
UNESCO United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organiza-
tions
UNHCR United Nations High Commission for Refugees
UNPD United Nations Procurement Division
UNPROFOR United Nations Protection Force
USAID United States Agency for International Development
VRS Vojska Republike Srpske—Army of Republika Srpska
 List of Figures

Fig. 4.1 Demarcations showing the end of Kanton Sarajevo—and,

therefore, the city of Sarajevo—and the beginning of City
of Istočno Sarajevo—both in Cyrillic and Latin scripts 98
Fig. 4.2 The Coach Station 99
Fig. 4.3 Map of the area 102
Fig. 4.4 Street signs in Istočno Sarajevo (blue) and Sarajevo (green) 115
Fig. 4.5 Doorbell at a building on the boundary, Istočno Sarajevo 116
Fig. 4.6 Woman sells painted eggs for Orthodox Easter at the
boundary 128
Fig. 5.1 Map of Mostar 147
Fig. 5.2 Mostar Old Town, Old Bridge and Neretva River—March
2015 149
Fig. 5.3 Dwellers crossing the Bulevar—December 2014 154
Fig. 5.4 Bulevar and Catholic Church with its redimensioned tower 162
Fig. 5.5 Mostar Old Gymnasium, at Spanish Square 164
Fig. 5.6 Destroyed buildings around Spanish Square—April 2015 165
Fig. 5.7 Granice su u vasoj glavi—Borders are in your heads—May
2015 170
Fig. 5.8 Boemi Kafana, Tito’s photo—April 2015 173
Fig. 6.1 Three of the meeting points: the Eternal Flame, the
Cathedral and BBI 189
Fig. 6.2 One of the Olympic Snowflakes, this one painted at
Sarajevo main pedestrian street 197
Fig. 6.3 Sarajevo City Center and its neon lights (on the left and
below) 202

xix
 CHAPTER 1

Introduction

The tragedy of Dayton was that we created a state that was defined in terms
of the people who created the war; and they defined the war ethnically;
and they defined the state ethnically. And that, I don’t think, was the
primary appellation ordinary Bosnians would use. (James O’Brien, [one of
the Americans responsible to formulate the Dayton Accord], in Toal and
Dahlman 2011: 164)

In 1989, while the Berlin Wall was being demolished, a famous comedic
group from Sarajevo imagined the end of Yugoslavia and the division
of the city of Sarajevo in two. In the episode ‘Podjela Sarajeva - Sara-
jevski Zid’1 (Divided Sarajevo-Sarajevan wall), a wall has been built in the
middle of Sarajevo, dividing it into Zapadno Sarajevo (West Sarajevo) and
Istočno Sarajevo (East Sarajevo), as had been the case in Berlin. Although
it was recorded and broadcasted in 1989, the episode suggested that the
action was taking place on 11 November 1995—a date when, indeed,
representatives of the warring parties from Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH)
would later sit at the negotiation table in Dayton, Ohio (USA), along
with leaders from the United States, France, Germany, United Kingdom,

1 This episode from Top Lista Nadrealista can be found on YouTube under the name:
Podjela Sarajeva (Sarajaveski Zid). Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nt9
cMJAAwPA&list=RDnt9cMJAAwPA#t=3.

© The Author(s) 2021 1

R. Summa, Everyday Boundaries, Borders and Post Conflict
Societies, Critical Security Studies in the Global South,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55817-8_1
2 R. SUMMA

Russia, Croatia and Yugoslavia (now Serbia), to discuss precisely, among

other topics, the division of Sarajevo.
Two of the main issues to be agreed upon by the parties during
those 21 days of fierce negotiations were ‘the new Bosnian map’ and the
future of approximately half of BiH’s population at that time (4.4 million
people), who were driven from their homes,2 many through practices that
have been denominated ‘ethnic cleansing’.
What emerged from these negotiations—the Dayton Peace Agree-
ment—was an ambivalent response. On the one hand, the ethnic
cleansing campaigns3 were sanctioned, when an internal Inter-Entity
Boundary Line (IEBL) was agreed upon, dividing BiH into two entities
and ‘confirming a de facto ethnoterritorialization of what was once simply
Bosnian shared space by all’ (Toal and Dahlman 2011: 6). The division
of BiH into two political entities—the Federation of Bosnia-Herzegovina,

2 By 1995, after almost four years of war, it is estimated that 1.1 million were internally
displaced persons and 1,259,000 had fled the country and became refugees in nearby
European states or even on other continents.
3 ‘Ethnic cleansing’ is a term that was forged in the Bosnian war (Bringa 2002; Toal
and Dahlman 2011). It has been defined by the UN as ‘a purposeful policy designed
by one ethnic or religious group to remove by violent and terror-inspiring means the
civilian population of another ethnic or religious group from certain geographic areas’
(Commission of Experts Established Pursuant to United Nations Security Council Reso-
lution 780). A UN Report from the United Nations Commission of Experts, in 1994,
states that ‘ethnic cleansing has involved means such as the mass killing of civilians, sexual
assaults, the bombardments of cities, the destruction of mosques and churches, the confis-
cation of propriety and similar measures to eliminate or dramatically reduce’ the presence
of other groups in a certain territory. According to the report, ‘ethnic cleansing by the
Serbs has been systematic and apparently well-planned’. While acknowledging that Croat
forces, too, have engaged in ethnic cleansing practices, the UN Final Report of the United
Nations Commission of Experts states that Muslims have not engage on such practices:
‘Croatian forces in the Republic of Croatia and BiH have engaged in «ethnic cleans-
ing» practices against Serbs and Muslims. Croats, for example, have conducted «ethnic
cleansing» campaigns against Serbs in eastern and western Slavonia and in parts of the
Krajina region, as well as against Muslims in the Mostar area. The UN concluded that,
while Bosnian Muslim forces have engaged in practices that constitute «grave breaches» of
the Geneva Conventions and other violations of international humanitarian law, they have
not engaged in «ethnic cleansing» operations’. Available at: www.ess.uwe.ac.uk/comexp
ert/anx/IV.htm ‘Ethnic cleansing’, however, is not a juridical category, and the crimes
committed under this label have been judged either as ‘Crimes against Humanity’ or
‘Genocide’ by the International Criminal Court for the Ex-Yugoslavia.
 1 INTRODUCTION 3

to be divided into ten cantons between Bosniaks4 and Croats, and the
Republika Srpska for the Serbs5 —was based on the territories conquered
during the war by each group at the moment when the DPA was signed.
Negotiations in Dayton thus operated ‘on the assumption that (…) war
could be ended by a cartographic fix’ (ibidem: 149). The drawing of the
IEBL and, consequently, the institutionalization of this ethnoterritorial
logic, created several difficulties for those who suddenly found themselves
living ‘on the other side’—and were called ‘minorities’. The Dayton Peace
Agreement reduced spaces and places to matters of ethnonational owner-
ship (Campbell 1998: 115), and was followed, in the first months after
its signature, by a renewed practice of ‘unmixing’ of Bosnia and Herze-
govina, this time led by ‘minorities’ moving towards their ‘proper’ entity.
On the other hand, the DPA states that ‘the early return of refugees and
displaced persons is an important objective of the settlement of the conflict ’
and that ‘all refugees and displaced persons (…) to freely return to their
homes of origin’ (General Framework Agreement,6 1995, Annex 7).
Dayton, thus, provides a ‘schizophrenic’ normative framework: while it
foresees the re-mixing of Bosnian population, it also reinforces and legit-
imizes the drive for homogenization of spaces produced during the war.
That ambivalence was for a long time reflected in the policies of returning
refugees and internally displaced persons. While the United Nations High
Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) has mobilized, since 1996, efforts
to assure the returns, in the first years especially, returnees were often met
with animosity and even violence by certain groups, especially in Repub-
lika Srpska, who wanted to maintain the recently achieved status quo.
Sparks of violence led NATO’s Implementation Force (IFOR) respon-
sible for securing the DPA’s Military Annex—to declare a halt to returns
by establishing checkpoints in the IEBL and, thus, “giving it materiality

4 ‘Bosniaks’ and ‘Bosnian’ are terms that refer to two distinct categories. While the
former refers to the group which identifies itself (and/or are identified by others) as
‘Muslims’, here comprise people who are not religious, the latter refers to all people who
have the citizenship of the state of Bosnia and Herzegovina.
5 Those three are the major ethnonational groups that compose Bosnia and Herze-
govina. Differently from the other federations that integrated Yugoslavia, BiH was formally
constituted not by one, but by three so-called constituent people (Bosniaks, Serbians and
Croatians), since none of the three was truly majoritarian.
6 The General Framework Agreement is the name of the document signed during the
Dayton Peace Accords, and that is still in force today, working as the Constitution of
Bosnia and Herzegovina.
4 R. SUMMA

(…) guarding Republika Srpska from ‘incursions’ and putting Annex 7

on hold for the first years after Dayton” (Toal and Dahlman 2011: 170).
Homogenization was, however, never achieved, and, as this book
argues, it can never be achieved. Through the years, the returning process
was resumed, although it is difficult to ascertain precisely the extent it
has reached.7 For those who would find themselves as a ‘minority’ in
the villages or cities where they were born or spent a part of their life,
there were few incentives to ‘go back’ (Brubaker 2013; Halilovich 2013).
Due to displacements and disruptions in the social fabric, many found
themselves lacking in familiar bonds and connections, which are not
only important for social life, but also in order to find employment, for
example.8 Moreover, just as the Bosnian map has been reduced to matters
of ethnonational ownership, many aspects of life were also ‘remade’. The
DPA has taken ethnonationality as the primary category around which to
organize political life in BiH, and many services on the everyday life have
been reorganized accordingly, such as the health and schooling system,
universities and the media. That has represented a shift for Bosnians,
who were used to categories such as religion and ethnonational affiliations
being considered a personal matter and mainly relegated to domestic life.
For the generations that grew up in Yugoslavia after the Second World
War, ‘being Bosnian was growing up in a multicultural and multireli-
gious environment, an environment where cultural pluralism was seen as
intrinsic to the social order’ (Bringa 1993: 87). There were differences in
how this multiculturalism and multi-religious society was organized and
lived, according to each region and, also, from one village to another. This
distinction, however, was sharpened in what concerned rural and urban
areas. In rural BiH, Bringa (2002) suggests, kinship was the primary bond
of loyalty. Because interethnic marriages are rare in rural areas, even before
the war, ‘kinship overlaps with ethnicity’, although it is ‘kinship and not
ethnicity that held the primary emotional appeal and is the mobilizing
factor’. In the cities, especially among ‘mixed families’9 and those who

7 One way this is measured is by identifying how many houses and apartments were
reclaimed by refugees and displaced persons. However, many only reclaimed them in order
to sell, exchange or rent those apartments.
8 On the role of ‘connections’ in Bosnia and Herzegovina, please refer to Jansen (2015).
9 I use ‘mixed families’ and ‘mixed marriage’ with a quotation mark because this is
also a contested categorization, often employed in a derogatory way. Especially during
the war, but also after, many ‘mixed families’ experienced situations of mistrust from
 1 INTRODUCTION 5

considered themselves communists or Yugoslavs, ethnonational categories

would barely make sense10 and people would live intermingled, dwelling
in the same buildings, attending the same schools etc.
There is something very personal and intimate about the war in Bosnia
and Herzegovina, and part of it relies on what it takes to ‘unmix’ people
who live together. Employing a strong image here, we could say that
war in BiH called its victims by something as personal as their names,
in the sense that, most of the time, someone’s name is the only way to
distinguish between Serbs, Croats and Bosniaks.11 A myriad of accounts
describes how people would recognize neighbours, colleagues or ancient
teachers—familiar faces—among their tormentors. Thus, during and after
the war, many marriages, friendships and neighbouring ties were recon-
figured (Maček 2009) and the enactment of boundaries in Bosnia and
Herzegovina became strongly related to spheres of life understood as
private or personal.
Another episode from Top Lista Nadrealista deals with this question.
In 1991, the group produced a sketch that would become symbolic in
the years to come, named ‘Rat u familiji Popuslic’12 (War in Popuslic’s
family). In the video, a building in the city of Sarajevo is on fire, and there
is a ‘war’ going on in one of its apartments. A couple is about to divorce
due to their ‘differences’. The woman, standing behind the trenches and
holding a rifle, says she has conquered ‘the kitchen, the big room and
a smaller room’. She then yells to her future ex-husband, who is behind
the trenches from the other side of the apartment, that she has ‘historical
rights, historical rights’ on those ‘territories’. As in the metaphor of the
divided apartment, ‘everyday places’ have become more visibly politicized
and contested.
However, it is also in the everyday life that we find cracks in this segre-
gation and homogenization logic. Toal and Dahlman (2011), in their

their neighbors, becoming in some millieus an unacceptable social category, with children
from such marriages considered particularly unacceptable by nationalist groups. Hromadžić
(2015) refers to them as ‘Invisible Citizens’.
10 Many of my interlocutors and friends have described how they have only ‘found out’
to be (Serbian, Bosniak or Croat) during the war.
11 In many cases, however, names are more neutral and ambiguous, making hard to
automatically place someone in one of these three groups.
12 Top Lista Nadrealista, Episode “Rat u familiji Popuslic”. Available at:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v =0-EvhjGG29I.
6 R. SUMMA

monumental effort to provide a portrait of this process of ‘ethnicization

of spaces’ in BiH, suggest, in their conclusion, that:

Ethnic cleansing (…) has been the most powerful force in the remaking of
Bosnia over the last two decades. Contemporary Bosnia has an ethnoter-
ritorial structure it previously never had. Formerly entwined human
geographies have largely been uprooted and destroyed. Ethnically mixed
communities with strong neighborhood identities have been transformed
into far more homogeneous communities characterized by divisions among
locals, displaced settlers, and returnees. What was previously a marginal
spatial form on the palimpsest of Bosnia-Herzegovina – so-called ethnic
enclaves – has become the dominant pattern. Examine the details, however,
and traces of a more complex human geography are visible. (p. 307, my
emphasis)

Here, I decided not only to ‘examine the details’, but to look else-
where, in order to understand how boundaries—which will be treated
here as a process and dependent on enactments—are not only produced
and reproduced, but, especially, subverted and destabilized. I turn to the
everyday as an onto-epistemo-methodological choice, by claiming that
the lived space of the everyday is full of contradictions, and those contra-
dictions are precisely where we must look in order to capture alternative
practices that provide for a different narrative of post-Dayton Bosnia
and Herzegovina and, ultimately, post-conflict societies. As Gupta and
Ferguson (1992) suggest, ‘important tensions may arise when places that
have been imagined at a distance must become lived spaces’ (p. 11). Thus,
one of the questions of this book might have been: What people ‘make-
do’ of Dayton and its boundaries in their everyday lives? Such question,
however, gives a false impression that those realms are detached from each
other, and that dwelling and imagining are in opposition to each other.
The main concern that will guide this work is, therefore, to under-
stand how boundaries are enacted and re-employed, shifted and displaced
in the everyday of post-conflict societies—looking with greater atten-
tion to the cases of Sarajevo and Mostar. In what regards Bosnia and
Herzegovina, the post-Dayton period will be privileged, although the
‘pre-Dayton period’ will recur many times. I also acknowledge other
forms of periodization that are widely employed in BiH, such as ‘before’
and ‘after’ the war. Insisting on employing ‘post-Dayton’ to refer to this
period is a way of indicating that I am more concerned with the ‘solu-
tions’ that were designed to address what came to be conceived as the
 1 INTRODUCTION 7

problems of BiH, rather than focusing on the causes and trying to provide
a solution to the problems myself. Moreover, ‘Dayton’ has a meaning in
BiH that goes much beyond the peace treaty. The term ‘Dayton’ is often
employed to designate a particular spatiotemporal location, one that is
marked by a dysfunctional or abnormal system or yet, the lack of a system,
and which is perceived to be ‘not going anywhere’ (Jansen 2015: 123).
In terms of years, this book thus mainly encompasses the period ranging
from 1995/1996 to 2018. This period is, however, not a homogeneous
block, and different phases, ruled by different practices, can be detected
through those two decades.
The term ‘post-Dayton’ also refers to a post-conflict period more
generally and brings the discussion about what a post-conflict moment
means. How and when does it begin? How and when does it end? Can
we consider France a post-conflict society? Or can we consider that it
enacts itself as a post-conflict society every time they hold a ceremony
for their veterans? Or every time they inaugurate a new monument to its
fallen soldiers?
It is perhaps easier and less questionable to consider Bosnia and Herze-
govina, Serbia, Croatia or even Northern Ireland as post-conflict societies,
due to the fact that war and violent conflict in those places ceased only a
few decades ago. But if temporal proximity is the criteria through which
we label some societies as ‘post-conflict’ and not others, how long does
post-conflict last? While the transition from war to post-war is usually
assumed to happen when peace agreements have been signed and fire has
ceased, the transition to post-conflict society to ‘just’ society is harder to
determine. Since there is no such measure and this very question already
points to the impossibility of drawing a precise line which settles the end
of a ‘post-conflict’ moment, it is useful to rely less on temporal features
and more on what is perceived to be the structuring consequences of war
in those societies. This is not to say that states such as France, to return to
our previous example, have not developed important traits (norms, laws,
symbols, holidays and so on) related to previous wars in which they were
involved. However, what will be considered here as post-conflict societies
are the ones in which those features currently structure political life and
still dominate public debates.
More precisely, the focus of this book is on post-conflict boundaries
and the role they play in the everyday of those societies. Boundaries are
related to the practices of demarcation and will not be limited here to its
geographical aspects or spatial features, even though they are not rarely
8 R. SUMMA

manifested spatially in post-conflict societies. The peace lines, in Belfast,

are one such example. Those walls and fences were built to separate
Protestant and Catholic communities and are considered by many as a
reliable form of protection against the other community. The peace lines
were built mostly in the less affluent parts of the city, such as in the North
and Western parts of Belfast (Calame and Charlesworth 2009: 62). They
might be up to 12 meters high and 1.6 km long but, although they are
the most visible and concrete form of boundary in Belfast, boundaries are
not reduced to their materialities and their effects. Indeed, many aspects
of the everyday life are divided in Belfast, such as sports, education, pubs
and other social activities (Calame and Charlesworth 2009: 73).
Nowadays, borders and boundaries in Northern Ireland are the subject
of another debate. While Brexit negotiations were being held, one of
the key issues holding back the future of the United Kingdom was the
return of a ‘hard border’ between Northern Ireland and Ireland. The
return of control and checkpoints on those borders—that cross through
farms, fields and villages—would not only disrupt the actual movement
of thousands of people who cross everyday, and the trade of goods—
but would represent a breach to the Good Friday Agreement, the peace
accord signed in 1998 that ended three decades of violence in the region.
Although boundaries persist in Northern Ireland cities, the success of this
post-conflict society is understood to be highly dependable on the absence
of hard borders with the Republic of Ireland.
In Croatia, the situation is quite different since the Serbs, who were
12.2% (581,663) of the total population in the country in 1991, have
mostly left Croatia. According to the 2011 census, only 168,633, or
4.4% of the population living in Croatia, declared themselves to be Serbs.
Before the war, Serbs were not evenly distributed throughout Croatian
territory. Instead, they were present mostly around the borders with
Bosnia and Herzegovina and Serbia, in a territory that later constituted
the self-proclaimed Serb Republic of Krajina, in 1991 (and which lasted
until 1995). However, throughout the war in Croatia and most especially
after Operation Storm (1995), through which the Croatian government
regained Krajina—or almost 20% of its territory—Serbs fled Croatia.
The apex of this movement occurred during the ten days in which
the Operation lasted: it is estimated that between 150,000 and 200,000
Serbs fled the area, while a variety of crimes were committed against
the remaining civilians. Therefore, even though boundaries are an issue
for this post-conflict society—which still considers matters such as the
 1 INTRODUCTION 9

employment of Cyrillic in the streets of Vukovar and the education of

minorities—the consolidation of a hard border with its now neighbours
Bosnia and Herzegovina and Serbia was the direct consequence of the
war in Croatia.
Due to the variety of processes presented above, this book adopts a
wide definition of post-conflict boundaries, which corresponds to those
sets of boundaries that may or may not entail geographic delimitations
and that have been reorganized by the peace agreements and which have
restructured the society in ways that have assured the boundaries a more
prominent role in post-conflict sociopolitical lives. The term enacted, in
turn, denaturalizes the concept of boundaries, highlighting that bound-
aries are dependent on practices and conferring upon them a precarious
status and points to possibilities of change. Boundaries may thus be re-
employed (in the sense of diverting its original meaning and employing
a different one), shifted and displaced, but also much more, as it will
be shown here: they may be crossed, minimized, subverted, dismissed,
disdained, but also reinforced, reaffirmed and celebrated.
It is thus looking at the everyday that I make sense of those bound-
aries, knowing, however, that they are permeated with contradictions and
may be enacted in different ways by different people. I have done my
research mainly in Sarajevo and Mostar, two of the main cities in Bosnia
and Herzegovina, making a clear choice to study urban environments in a
particular post-conflict society. My choice of opting for cities relies on the
notion that they ‘pose the general question of our living together, in a
manner more intense than many other kinds of places’ (Massey 2005:
167). My intention here is not to compare both cities, but to delve
into ‘everyday places’ within those two cities in order to search for the
patterns I have highlighted—and to provide for (attempts at) answers to
the questions outlined.
These efforts are organized as follows: Chapter 2, entitled ‘Enacting
Boundaries’, launches an effort to conceptualizing boundaries, distin-
guishing it from the concept of borders. The chapter discusses the main
recent contributions to the discipline of International Relations in borders
and boundaries study. After discussing the concept of boundaries consid-
ering post-Dayton BiH, the chapter proposes to focus on boundary
enactments, while explaining the consequences of this approach for the
broader analysis with which this book engages.
Chapter 3, ‘The Place(s) of Everyday and Everyday Places’, provides
a contribution to the study of the everyday in order to understand
10 R. SUMMA

international politics. It offers an invitation to look at the everyday,

while explaining this onto-epistemo-methodological choice. After a broad
examination of literature that analyses the everyday, this chapter provides
a working concept of the everyday. It, then, discusses the methodolog-
ical implications of taking seriously the everyday as a field of analysis and
presents the concept of ‘everyday places’ which are crucial to this work. It
also discusses methods such as estrangement, displacement and curiosity
as ways to denaturalize and problematize the everyday.
Chapter 4, ‘Politics of (Im)mobility (or everyday practices around a
coach station)’, provides for an incursion in a suburban area of Sarajevo
which has been administratively divided by the Inter-Entity Boundary
Line (IEBL) into Sarajevo and Istočno Sarajevo (Eastern Sarajevo). By
paying attention to everyday practices and everyday places such as a coach
station, a beauty salon, an informal market area and schools, I discuss how
boundaries have been changing through time and the many meanings
that it has acquired in the everyday life of dwellers from this area. While
paying attention to questions such as crossing and immobility, strategy
and tactics, this chapter also advances the notion of boundary zone as a
meeting place.
Chapter 5, ‘Boundary displacement and displacement as boundary
(or Saturday afternoon in a kafana)’, wonders how the narrative of the
‘divided city’, frequently attributed to Mostar, changes when we take a
closer look at places where those boundaries are being enacted. By taking
seriously everyday practices in places such as an avenue, a square, a pub
and a school, the chapter approaches concepts such as ‘places’ (placing)
and ‘displacement’ (displacing) and suggests alternative narratives for
Mostar.
Chapter 6, ‘Meeting at BBI (or at shopping malls, the local and
the international)’, looks into the city of Sarajevo—and more precisely,
to the shopping mall BBI Centar and its square, in order to examine
how boundaries between the ‘local’ and the ‘international’ are practised,
enacted or dissolved in the urban everyday.
The conclusion (re)opens to more general discussions about the contri-
butions of this book to ongoing debates on borders and boundaries in
post-conflict societies. Before we turn to these chapters, however, there is
a need to make a point about the linguistic issues surrounding this work.
While making the necessary points, I will also connect those linguistic
issues to practices of making and unmaking boundaries.
 1 INTRODUCTION 11

1.1 ‘Gladni smo na tri jezika!’13

This book was written in English by someone whose native language is
Portuguese, about a place where no one fully agrees on the name of the
language spoken there. Since 1993, Bosnia and Herzegovina has three
official languages: Bosnian, Croatian and Serbian. Without going through
all the details about the formation of this (these) language(s), which has
already been done elsewhere,14 claims about the existence of those three
as fully separated and independent languages are both very recent and
very old. Mentions to ‘Croatian language’, ‘Bosnian Slavonic’ and ‘Ser-
bian’ can be found as early as the seventh century (Kamusella 2009: 221).
Since then, they have been through successive attempts to either unify and
standardize them in a single language (usually known as Serbo-Croat or
Croat-Serbian), or, on the contrary, to differentiate them to be able to
tell them apart. As such, the first reference to Serbo-Croat dates back to
1867, the same year where it becomes official in Croatia. Similarly, Serbia
adopted Serbo-Croat as its official language in 1886; Bosnia and Herze-
govina, in 1907, and Montenegro, in 1923. In Bosnia and Herzegovina,
Serbo-Croat has supplanted the official language in place since the last
decades of the nineteenth century, simply called ‘Bosnian’ (ibidem).
As it would happen to the ‘Bosnian’, ‘Croatian’ and ‘Serbian’
languages in the 1990s, Serbo-Croat was part of a political project and, as
such, it has been the subject of countless meetings, discussions and efforts
to formalize it and standardize it. This project gained strength after the
Second World War, fuelled by an even stronger project, Tito’s Yugoslavia.
At that time, as Bugarski (2004) states, ‘there was a growing feeling that
in the new community of friendly nations it (Serbo-Croat) should really
once more be instituted as a single language common to several of these
and hence a welcome bond among them’ (p. 28). The most important
attempt in this sense was the meeting of the leading Serbian and Croa-
tian linguists and writers at Novi Sad (Serbia) in 1954, where the basic
unity of the language was reaffirmed. Throughout Yugoslavia, movements

13 ‘We are hungry in all three languages’, a phrase exhibited in signs

during February 2014 protests.
14 See, for example, Kamusella, Tomasz (2009) The Politics of Language and Nation-
alism in Modern Central Europe. Palgrave Macmillan and Brigitta Busch and Hellen
Kelly-Holmes (2004) Language, Discourse and Borders in the Yugoslav Successor States.
Multilingual Matters.
12 R. SUMMA

of dissent also emerged, especially in Croatia, where, in 1974, there was

an attempt to declare that ‘Croatian’ could not be the same language
as Serbian. In BiH, however, the focus of this work, the terminology
‘Serbo-Croat’ was used officially, although in the 1991 census, on the eve
of war, most citizens of BiH chose ‘Bosnian’, instead of ‘Serbo-Croat’,
as their native language, on the advice of the primarily Muslim Party
of Democratic Action, which led the movement for Independence the
following year (Barbour and Carmichael 2000: 226). After many decades
in which the political project in place stressed and promoted the ‘Serbo-
Croat’ terminology, claims about the existence of three different official
languages instead of one were, therefore, rather new for people living in
BiH on the eve of Bosnian war.
It is not surprising, therefore, that the end of a political project also
engendered the end of a project of a unified language. Indeed, on the
eve of the war, the popular comedy show already mentioned, ‘Toplista
Nadrealista’ did a sketch in which the host explains that there were now
six different languages in the region of (now former) Yugoslavia.15 Then,
they showed a clip of everyday situations where individuals suddenly
no longer understood each other and needed a dictionary or an official
translator, to make fun of the absurdity of this language barrier.
I am not a linguist and it is not my scope here to analyse if the differ-
ences between those three now fully official languages are ‘enough’ to
justify their separate existence. Neither do I have sufficient knowledge of
them in order to state that, in other places, those differences would be
treated as regionalisms, dialects or accents (although I would be inclined
to say so). Therefore, I can only make assessments based on what I read,
what I heard, what I was told and what I experienced. In fact, what I
want to observe, as an arrière-pensée of this work, is how the diversity
of languages involved in this work both enabled and limited it, and how
those different languages had an important role shaping how I came to
think about it.
Reflecting on language(s) and boundaries, I came to identify three
main points in which ‘language’ as such is important to this book. Hence,
my first point is to discuss how the concepts I employ in this book relate
to the language in which this text was written (English), the language in
which I use to think about this work (Portuguese) and the language in

15 The episode is available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dtKQJhJKI58.

 1 INTRODUCTION 13

which the practices analysed here take place (Bosnian? Serbian? Croatian?
Serbo-Croat?). Second, I would like to make clear how my knowledge of
those various languages has shaped—enabling and limiting what I could
do and understand, with whom and in which situations I could speak,
how people would respond to my approach and in which ways would
people talk to me. Third—and this, more than the previous two, adds to
the reflections on everyday boundaries—is how my interlocutors relate to
this/these language(s). What do they call it and what does it mean to
refer to it like they do?
Writing about the first point came as a necessity. For a handful of
reasons, I decided, since the beginning, to write this book in English. I
was a visiting researcher in the UK when I started writing the first chapter
of this book, one that discusses, at one point, the distinction between
‘border’ and ‘boundary’. This distinction has been proven crucial to
my overall argumentation. However, through the years, while discussing
my work in Brazil, it was not always easy to find the exact words in
Portuguese for ‘boundary’. I have tried employing many words that, in
my opinion, do not fully grasp the meanings of ‘boundary’ (and that,
sometimes, express exactly the opposite of what I argue a boundary is):
limite (limit), demarcação (demarcation), linha ( line), divisão (division);
while ‘border’ would be better translated as fronteira.
Little did I know back then that Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian
language(s) experienced the same shortage of words to describe ‘bound-
ary’. Granica is used in both cases, to designate ‘border’ and ‘bound-
ary’. That is usually how my interlocutors would call the bound-
aries I am researching: granica. And this is also the reason why I
employ ‘border/boundary’ when translating interviews that were done in
Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian—because, at that point, my interlocutor has
used the (very imprecise) word granica. A few times, however, my inter-
locutors reacted in a negative way when I employed this word. Some of
them have even argued: ‘but there is no granica anymore’. Indeed, there
are no checkpoints, no ID check.
Once, however, I interviewed a highly educated 27-year-old man living
literally five meters from the Inter-Entity Boundary Line, in Istočno
Sarajevo. Since he spoke English fluently, the interview was entirely
conducted in this language. I was relieved that I could finally use the
word ‘boundary’ instead of a more imprecise word such as ‘granica’. As
I pronounced ‘boundary’ in the middle of a question, nevertheless, he
promptly corrected me: ‘border’. I tried again, ‘…boundary…’. And he
14 R. SUMMA

quickly interrupted me again: ‘border!’. Intrigued, I asked him ‘why’.

Why do you call this a border’? To which he replied: ‘“Boundary” is less
suggestive. Border is the word used for borderlines between countries,
it is much more for real borderlines between some cultures, nationalities
etc.’16
Hence, I am deeply aware of how profoundly related concepts,
languages and contexts are. The very ‘Inter-Entity Boundary Line’, drawn
on a map by the predominantly English-speaking so-called international
community, and which will receive a lot of attention in this work, receives
a different name in Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian: Med-uentitetska linija—
Inter-Entity Line. Thus, there is no sign, whatsoever, of the general
concept of ‘boundary’, even more important to this work than the IEBL
itself.
However, even though the word ‘boundary’ does not find an imme-
diate equivalent in the ‘local reality’ or in the ‘local language’, I still have
decided to use this concept instead of a more rigid term such as ‘border’.
In Chapter 2, I present the theoretical arguments that justify this choice.
Moreover, as I will show in Chapters 4 and 5, although everyday life does
usually ‘happen’ in the ‘local language’ and, therefore, I investigate how
people make sense of those granice (borders, boundaries) that are located
somewhere, the granice have been imagined and materialized by count-
less actors coming from different places, speaking different languages
with different accents. For example, the IEBL, drawn and redrawn upon
maps over tables in the United States, Paris, Ireland, Serbia (by then,
Yugoslavia), Croatia and BiH, is as much a ‘local’ feature as it has been
imagined internationally, in a multiplicity of languages.
The second point I would like to make in this acknowledge-
ment is about the obstacles and opportunities that a foreign language
can impose or offer. This book is only what it is because of
the languages that I can speak, and because of the exact level of
Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian I have. Had I been fluent in this language, the
research would have been different. Had I not spoken one single word
of Bosnian/Serbian/Croatian, the result would be yet another. Hence,
I fully acknowledge that, unfortunately, many things got ‘lost in transla-
tion’ (Summa 2020). I write about that with more details in Chapter 3.
What I would like to stress here, however, is how languages can create

16 Interview with N., April 12, 2015. Istočno Sarajevo. Interview conducted in English.
 1 INTRODUCTION 15

a sense of belonging, if not trust, among people who share them. Not
surprisingly, one of the best interviews I did (with more details, opin-
ions, confessions) was conducted in Portuguese, with a woman living in
Istočno Sarajevo who had long worked for a Portuguese mission in BiH
and spoke the language fluently. Another one was with a young woman
who studies French at the university and was very pleased to spend a
whole afternoon and a few evenings talking with me in French about her
life, boundaries and the problems of BiH. It does not come as a surprise,
therefore, that a shared language is usually perceived as central element
of imagining communities.
This takes me straight to my third point: the very use of language as
boundary(ies) itself. As I have mentioned, BiH is officially composed not
only by three ‘constituent peoples’, but also by three official languages:
Bosnian, Serbian and Croatian. Here, I will not go through the history of
this (these) language(s), as this would amount to another book, and this
work has already been done as I have indicated before. I will, however,
tell two short stories to illustrate my point.
In preparation for my fieldwork, I joined a Croatian language course
in September 2014 at the University of Westminster, in the United
Kingdom. The teacher, born and raised in Belgrade, explained that she
had majored in Serbo-Croat studies, a language that, officially, no longer
exists. She then divided up the class between those who were there
to learn Croatian to the left side, those who were learning Serbian to
the right, and the few who were learning Bosnian had to pick a side.
Despite the Cyrillic script used by the Serbian language, which consti-
tutes a clear visible and symbolic distinction from Croatian, the teacher
kept underplaying and making jokes about the differences between the
languages. Probably, the most important one after the script is the distinc-
tion between the ekavian/ljekavian17 variants of the language. In short,
that means adding or not a j (/j/) in the middle of a series of words, such
as, for example, ovde/ovdje (“here”, respectively, in the ekavian and jeka-
vian variants). Sometimes, after adding a j using a different colour chalk
on the blackboard in the middle of some word, she would ironically state:
‘and this, ladies and gentlemen, is the big difference between Serbian and
Croatian’.

17 A third form would be ikavian, although it is not widely used in BiH.

16 R. SUMMA

From my experience, the emphasis on the sameness or difference of

the language is closely related to one’s political orientation and views of
what BiH should be: a multicultural state or, alternatively, divided into
either two or even three entities.18 Once, a pensioner from Sarajevo who
moved to Istočno Sarajevo, after explicitly telling me that he did not want
to live among Muslims anymore, took a piece of paper and wrote the
word coffee in the three languages (Kafa, Kahva, Kava) to make a point
that they spoke different languages, and therefore, they were not the same
people at all.19
The practice of reinforcing differences through language was especially
acute during the war, when people experienced changes in pronunciation,
vocabulary and greetings (Maček 2009: 136). Indeed, before the war,
religious greetings were restricted to private situations or religious festiv-
ities. During the war, however, choosing the ‘right’ greeting in official
and public situations began to have material consequences. Maček (2009)
suggests that, ‘in the hospital, using the appropriate ethnoreligious form
of greeting would increase a person’s chances of getting good medical
treatment’ (p. 143). Those greeting practices are still performed today:
more than once I saw friends visibly and openly bothered by the use of
selam alejkum as a greeting. In order to reinforce a Bosnian language
distinct from both Serbian and Croatian, linguist Senahid Halilović stated
that the Bosnian language is inseparable from Islamic culture (Maček
2009: 144). While Croat linguists would resort to ancient words in order
to create a language as distinct as possible from the Serbian, Bosnian
linguists adopted many ‘Turkisms’, and introduced the letter ‘h’ to several
words. Maček (2009) reports that, at the beginning, people would still
employ those new grammar rules in many different ways: ‘Eager Muslim
speakers overused the letter “h”, putting it into words where it did not
belong. People who were more relaxed about their language responded in
a joking manner by sticking an extra “h” in every possible word’ (p. 143).
As such, the demarcation of ‘language boundaries’ and the affirmation
of ‘language community’ were not only central concepts in political and
media discourse in the disintegration phase of Yugoslavia, as Busch and
Kelly-Holmes (2004: 3) demonstrate, but it is also a resource used, until

18 Some groups do claim a third, Croatian, entity.

19 Interview with DM., 11 April 2015, Istočno Sarajevo. Interview conducted in BSC.
 1 INTRODUCTION 17

today, to demarcate ‘us’, on this side of the city, from ‘them’, on the other
side.
Similarly, a woman also living in Istočno Sarajevo mentioned that one
of the reasons she would not live in the Federation side of the city,
although she worked there, was that she wanted her kids to be schooled
in the Serbian language.20 As it will be discussed further, like in many
other areas, the Bosnian school system experienced segregation between
ethnonational groups during the war, when each local area adopted its
own curricula and schoolbooks. With the Dayton Peace Agreement, many
political functions, education included, were relegated to local levels.
Although there is a Federal Ministry of Education, Culture and Sport,
the cantonal ministries in Federation and, on the other hand, Repub-
lika Srpska are responsible for making decisions concerning educational
subjects. One of the main claims that sustain a divided educational system
is based on the right of each ethnonational group to be taught in its
respective national language.
More recently, however, yet another controversy emerged when
Republika Srpska decided that all its primary schools should officially
change the name of the language ‘Bosnian’ to ‘Bosniak’. After protests by
Bosniak students and parents living in this entity, Republika Srpska presi-
dent, Milorad Dodik, responded by reiterating his claim that the ‘Bosnian
language does not exist.’21 Name changing, in this case, can be under-
stood as a form of further isolating and alienating non-Serbs that live in
Republika Srpska.
In a different tone, a high-school student at the Catholic School, in
Sarajevo, told me: ‘In our school we study Croatian, but nobody in my
school speaks pure Croatian… we all speak this mixture of everything
(Croatian, Serbian and some Turkish words, as she explained earlier). I
seriously doubt that even our professors speak Croatian…that language
issue has always been pointless to me.’22

20 Interview with D., 15 April 2015, Istočno Sarajevo. Interview conducted in

Portuguese.
21 Panic, Katarina. ‘Bosnian Serbs’ Renaming of Language Angers Bosniaks’. Balkan
Insight, 15 June 2015. Available at: http://www.balkaninsight.com/en/article/bosnia-s-
serb-entity-change-of-language-name-upsets-bosniaks.
22 Interview with S., 7 May 2015, Central Sarajevo. Interview conducted in English.
18 R. SUMMA

Language, therefore, might enact an everyday boundary, when used

and claimed in such a way as to reinforce ethnonational divisions in
BiH. However, the association between ethnonational identification and
language is not so automatic. An Ipsos report from October 2011, that
organized a survey with 1,518 people living in BiH, found that, while
98% of those who consider themselves ‘Bosnians23 ’ state that their mother
tongue or native language was ‘Bosnian’, 20% of the ‘Croats’ and 10% of
the ‘Serbs’ also said that their language was called ‘Bosnian’. Moreover,
4% of ‘Serbs’ and 19% of ‘Others’ − a category usually claimed by those
who come from ‘mixed families’, Roms, or those who are against the
ethnonational categorization as such − claim to speak ‘Serbo-Croat’, a
language that, officially, no longer exists.
Hence, not only do linguistic and ethnonational categories not match
perfectly but also, in everyday life, many people avoid naming ‘this
language’. Some of the tactics they employ are to refer to it —it being
Bosnian, Serbian or Croatian—for example, as ‘this language’ or ‘local
language’. An inclusive way to call ‘this language’ is by employing the
terminology BSC or B/S/C (BSH)—Bosnian/Serbian/Croatian, which
is the terminology I used here. A yet more common way to designate
‘this language’, without having to name it, is by employing the term ‘our
language’ (naš jezik), avoiding, therefore, possible embarrassing situa-
tions. This practice is also not properly recent. Some texts from the 1920s
and 1930s already show that this was a common practice in order to avoid
official designations of the language. In 1932, for example, the Linguistic
Society of Belgrade launched a professional journal of language cultiva-
tion called ‘Naš Jezik’, in search for a more ‘neutral’ approach to the
language issue in the region. The journal is still published today under
the same name (Bugarski, p. 26).24
In BiH, the official division of its population in three different
linguistic groups reinforced the political implications of not explicitly

23 In this report, it is not clear why they use the terminology ‘Bosnian’ (that would
designate a citizen from BiH) instead of ‘Bosniak’ (the ethnonational group formed by
‘Muslims’). It is not clear if that was a translation error or a conscious choice, even
though it is clear that respondents understood it as ‘Bosniaks’
24 Bugarski, Ranko (2004) Language and Boundaries in the Yugoslavian Context.
In: Brigitta Busch and Helen Kelly-Holmes Language, Discourse and Borders in the
Yugoslavian Successor States. Multilingual Matters.
 1 INTRODUCTION 19

referring to ‘this language’ as either ‘Bosnian’, ‘Serbian’ or ‘Croat-

ian’. In everyday interaction and dialogues, people redraw those official
boundaries by employing the term ‘naš jezik’, or ‘naš ’ (ours) even
more frequently than they talk about ‘Bosnian’, Serbian’ or ‘Croatian’
languages. By employing ‘naš jezik’, the boundary is displaced, config-
uring a larger space where the organizing categories are not ethnonational
and not even national. Because it is vaguer, it is also much more inclu-
sive. At the same time, by mobilizing this larger concept, a new binomial
is formed in this case, no longer along ethnonational lines, but between
people from the ‘region’ and those who are foreign (stranci), allowing
for a different imaginary of ‘us’ and ‘them’.

References
Books, Chapters, Articles
Barbour, S.; Carmichael, C. (eds). Language and Nationalism in Europe. Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2000.
Bringa, T. Nationality Categories, National Identification and Identity Formation
in the ‘Multinational’ Bosnia. The Anthropology of East Europe Review, v. 11,
n. 1/2, pp. 80–89, 1993.
Bringa, T. Averted Gaze: Genocide in Bosnia-Herzegovina 1992–1995. Annihi-
lating Difference: The Anthropology of Genocide. Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2002.
Brubaker, R. From the Unmixing to the Remixing of Peoples: UNHCR and
Minority Returns in Bosnia. UNHCR, Research Paper n. 261, 2013.
Bugarski, R. Language and Boundaries in the Yugoslav Context. In: Busch, B.;
Kelly-Holmes, H. (eds). Language, Discourse and Borders in the Yugoslav
Successor States. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters, 2004.
Calame, J.; Charlesworth, E. Divided Cities. Belfast, Beirut, Jerusalem, Mostar,
and Nicosia. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009.
Campbell, D. National Deconstruction: Violence, Identity and Justice in Bosnia.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998.
Gupta, A.; Ferguson, J. Beyond ‘Culture’: Space, Identity and the Politics of
Difference. Cultural Anthropology, v. 7, n. 1, pp. 6–23, February 1992).
Halilovich, H. Places of Pain: Forced Displacement, Popular Memory and Trans-
Local Identities in Bosnian War-Torn Communities. New York: Berghahn,
2013.
Hromadžić, A. Citizens of an Empty Nation. Youth Abd State-Making in Postwar
Bosnia-Herzegovina. Philadelphia: Pennsylvania, 2015.
20 R. SUMMA

Jansen, S. Yearnings in the Meantime. “Normal Lives” and the State in a Sarajevo
Apartment Complex. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2015.
Kamusella, T. The Politics of Language and Nationalism in Modern Central
Europe. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.
Maček, I. Sarajevo Under Siege. Anthropology in Wartime. Philadelphia: Univer-
sity of Pennsylvania Press, 2009.
Massey, D. For Space. London: Sage, 2005.
Summa, R. What Might Have Been Lost: Fieldwork and the Challenges of
Translation. In: Kusic, K.; Zahora, J. (eds). Fieldwork as Failure: Living and
Knowing in the Field of International Relations, 2020.
Toal, G.; Dahlman, C. T. Bosnia Remade. Ethnic Cleansing and Its Reversal.
New York: Oxford University Press, 2011.
 CHAPTER 2

Enacting Boundaries

The point is, precisely, where do you draw the line separating one life from
the other? Politics is about that border. It is the activity that brings it back
into question. (Rancière 2004: 303)

2.1 Introduction
Étienne Balibar once wrote that ‘the idea of a definition of what consti-
tutes a border is, by definition, absurd’. Indeed, as the philosopher goes
on explaining ‘to mark out a border is, precisely, to define a territory,
to delimit it (…) Conversely, however, to define or identify in general is
nothing other than to trace a border, to assign boundaries or borders’.
Thus, the very representation of the border is the precondition for any
definition (Balibar 2002: 75).
In this chapter, I embrace the challenge of a similarly absurd task. Even
if I do not intend to propose a definitive and closed concept of border by
showing what constitutes it, I will present how it has been conceptualized
elsewhere, and how it will be employed in this work. An important part
of this effort will be precisely to demarcate the notion of ‘border’ from
that of ‘boundary’—which, by itself, might be understood as a broader
practice of demarcation rather than a border.

© The Author(s) 2021 21

R. Summa, Everyday Boundaries, Borders and Post Conflict
Societies, Critical Security Studies in the Global South,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55817-8_2
22 R. SUMMA

Although borders have been increasingly depicted as borderscapes and

understood to have been dislocated from their traditional place (from
the shore of the state) to more diffuse sites either inside or outside the
state, they are still presented as intimately related to statist territorial
practices. A border can move inward and become a policy of denial of
rights to migrants and refugees, Soguk (2007: 285) suggests. Or it can
fold outward and translate into a policy of intercepting refugee ships and
forcing them to return to worlds of insecurities (ibidem). However, they
still operate mainly by a territorial logic, entailing processes of belonging
and non-belonging, inclusion and exclusion of a certain state.
Following Walker (2016), I suggest that boundaries are a broader cate-
gory that can be defined as practices of spatiotemporal demarcation and
differentiation, which may or may not entail geographical delimitations,
may or may not be supported by administrative or legal regulations and
may or may not be expressed materially. Thus, while every border is also
a boundary, not all boundaries are borders.
This chapter, however, is not only a theoretical exercise to concep-
tualize boundaries and to examine in detail how they operate. Indeed,
trying to conceptualize borders and boundaries came as a necessity in
order to understand social and political practices of demarcation advanced
as a peaceful solution to conflict societies and, more specifically, to the war
in Bosnia and Herzegovina (1992–1995). The concern for those bound-
aries, which have been strongly translated into spatial practices, is behind
the conceptual efforts made in some sections of this chapter.
Here, I will launch my efforts to understand how those boundaries
operate. Although this effort will be present in all other chapters of this
book, here I would like to lay the foundations to begin this quest. First,
I expose how boundaries have been presented as a solution to the war in
Bosnia and Herzegovina, and what their consequences were in the making
of a new state. Then, I attempt to distinguish borders from boundaries,
and to frame a working definition of the latter. Next, I analyse how
the discipline of International Relations has been studying borders and
boundaries, and I suggest that borders have been increasingly depicted as
boundaries. Finally, by claiming that boundaries are highly dependent on
practices that (re)produce them, I propose to focus on these practices and
on how boundaries are enacted.
 2 ENACTING BOUNDARIES 23

2.2 Dayton Peace Accords:

Boundaries as Solution?
During four years of intense war in Bosnia and Herzegovina (1992–
1995), there was rarely a peace proposal formulated by Western officials
that did not include the redrawing of boundaries aiming to reorganize the
political and social space in Bosnia and Herzegovina. The four main inter-
national plans aiming to bring war to an end—i.e. Cutilero Plan (March
1992), Vance-Owen plan (January–February 1993), Contact Groups Plan
(July 1994) and Dayton Accord (November 1995)—foresaw some degree
of internal division of the Bosnian territory along ethnonational lines,
while preserving the territorial integrity of BiH. The boundaries proposed
by those international sponsored peace plans apparently sought to consol-
idate the results of ethnic cleansing practices that were one of the main
characteristics of the Bosnian war. Indeed, the proposals validated, to
a greater or lesser extent, nationalist claims according to which such
differences were a problem and, therefore, people should live separately
in discrete, ethnicized spaces. According to this idea, peace should be
achieved by the proliferation of boundaries within Bosnia and Herze-
govina, following what were believed to be ‘the new ethnonational
realities on the ground’. Campbell (1998, through pages 115–164) shows
how the Cutilero Plan and several other peace plans after that carried
the ethnicization of Bosnia and Herzegovina in its roots. Even more
important, the maps of a divided BiH, exhibited during international
conferences, became a cause for the recrudescence of war. Indeed, those
maps fed extremists intentions to achieve de jure partition of BiH through
practices of ethnic cleansing (p. 144).
While policy-makers were discussing the most effective ways to draw
(internal) lines in Bosnia and Herzegovina, in order to bring peace
and avoid territorial partition according to their understanding, public
debates in Western countries at the time often evoked a different solu-
tion. While this other solution was also presented in terms of drawing
new lines, those lines would be international borders, dismantling, there-
fore, Bosnia and Herzegovina into two or three different states. In a series
of texts published in daily newspapers in the United States, Mearsheimer
(1993, 1997), for example, argued that the international presence in
BiH should ‘serve not to force people to live together’, but to orga-
nize a peaceful partition of its territory. A few years earlier, the same
author argued in favour of the transfer of whole populations in a way that
24 R. SUMMA

‘ethnonational identities would perfectly match’ the new international

borders he was proposing. Mearsheimeir’s ‘solution’ would probably not
only infringe upon human rights and international laws, but would also
be impossible to be carried out in places like BiH, where a considerable
percentage of the population finds it difficult to identify themselves with
one ethnonationality exclusively.
One character in Dauphinee’s book (2013) illustrates how partitioning
BiH in three with the aim of creating homogeneous states would affect
him: ‘Do you have a chainsaw in your briefcase? (…) Because you will
have to cut me in half if you partition my country. I am half a Serb and
half a Muslim. To which entity do you suppose I belong?’, said one of the
audience participants to the professor who had just given a conference to
support BiH’s partition in 1997 (p. 23).
Redrawing lines, boundaries and borders was mainly the outcome
sought by Serb nationalists and some of their Croatian counterparts
during the war. For instance, in May 1992, Radovan Karadzić, then pres-
ident of the self-proclaimed Serbian Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina,
presented six strategic goals for its new army that would transform multi-
cultural Bosnia and Herzegovina into three separate entities created by the
‘unmixing’ of Bosnian communities and the partition of its territory (Toal
and Dahlman 2011: 5). The first goal would be the prime directive for
ethnic cleansing: Bosnia and Herzegovina’s main ethnonational commu-
nities, or more precisely Bosniaks,1 Serbs and Croats2 —who, until then,
lived intermingled—should be geographically separated (Donia, 1994).
In the long run, according to the plan, Bosnia and Herzegovina would
be split into three fully independent states. These goals were informed by
a key assumption, shared both by nationalists and part of the international
community, that it is necessary to have ‘an alignment between territory
and identity, state and nation, all under the sign of “ethnicity”, supported
by a particular account of history’ (Campbell 1998: 80). Drawing on
Derrida, Campbell suggests that such assumptions are based on the
‘ontopology’, or the ‘connection of the ontological value of present-being
to its situation, to the stable and presentable determination of a locality,

1 ‘Bosniak’ and ‘Bosnian’ mean two different things. While the former refers to the
group that shares a Muslim identity, here comprising those people who are not religious,
the latter refers to all people who have the citizenships of Bosnia and Herzegovinian state.
2 Those three are the major groups that form BiH’s population.
 2 ENACTING BOUNDARIES 25

the topos of territory, native soil, city, body in general’ (Campbell in

Derrida 1998: 80).
However totalizing those plans were, Karadzić’s plan was never
completely fulfilled, but the ethnic cleansing campaigns have profoundly
altered space in BiH3 and in the post-Yugoslav space more broadly.
Although the Dayton Peace Accords (1995) assured territorial integrity,
one of the main features of the peace agreement was the creation of
the Inter-Entity Boundary Line (IEBL), dividing Bosnia and Herze-
govina internally into two4 political entities—the Federation of Bosnia
and Herzegovina and the Republika Srpska. The IEBL, for the most part,
runs along the ceasefire line established by the Dayton’s Accords. In some
places, the boundary has been a visible line with the Dayton agreement
securing demilitarized ‘zones of separation’; in others, it is virtually invis-
ible (Global IDP Project: 2005). According to the Annex 2 of the General
Framework for Peace in Bosnia and Herzegovina, NATO’s Implemen-
tation Force Commander had the final say on boundary line changes
(Dayton Accord, annex 2). In the first few years after Dayton, the IEBL
functioned as a de facto border as Toal and Dahlman (2011) describe:

Key bridges had been intentionally demolished by the armies to separate

their areas of control. Railways had been similarly sabotaged. Landmines
were a constant danger (…) Where infrastructure permitted movement,
local authorities erected barriers. Across Republika Srpska, police moved
quickly to harden the IEBL. (pp. 172–173)

The Dayton Peace Accords—and, more specifically, the IEBL—played

a preponderant role in shaping a new ethnoterritorial configuration

3 Either by human distribution, ethnonational diversities, but also by new meanings

ascribed to certain spaces. It will probably take a long time until ‘Srebrenica’ is not
automatically associated with massacres, for example.
4 Although the IEBL agreed at Dayton divided BiH into two political entities, nowadays,
the state is composed of the two entities and the Brčko district. The status of Brčko—a
considerably rich port city located strategically by the Croatian and Serbian borders—was
left undecided at the Dayton negotiations, because no agreement of each of the warring
parties could be reached. US mediators persuaded the parties at Dayton to accept that
the final status of Brčko should be the product of ‘international arbitration’ through an
international, private, arbitration tribunal. In 1999, the tribunal established that Brčko
should become a ‘district’, supervised by an international supervisor. Hence, Brčko does
not belong to either of the two entities. It is considered a de facto ‘city-state’ (Parish
2010: xii).
26 R. SUMMA

in post-Dayton Bosnia and Herzegovina and consolidating the ethnic

cleansing that took place during the war. Indeed, Bosnia and Herze-
govina’s population composition went through major transformations.
Immediately before the war, in 1991, BiH’s population was 4374 million
people, of which 43.7% considered themselves Muslims (later estab-
lished as ‘Bosniaks’), 31.2%, Serbians, and 17.3% Croatians and 5.54%
Yugoslavs. Therefore, unlike the other federations in Yugoslavia, Bosnia
and Herzegovina was formally composed not by one, but by three so-
called constituent people (Muslims, Serbians and Croatians), since none
of the three formed a majority. On the other hand, the 2013 census
revealed that the Bosnian population shrunk to 3829 million. Bosniaks
now make up 50.1% of the population, Serbs, 30.78% and Croats,
15.43%. Some 2.7% of the population are categorized as ‘others’, the
official term for national minorities and people who do not identify with
any of the three constitutive peoples.
Moreover, and more relevant to the point I emphasize in this section,
those different groups are nowadays distributed spatially along ethnona-
tional lines. Indeed, the two entities that compose post-Dayton Bosnia
and Herzegovina have a clear ethnonational structure: 92.1% of all those
who consider themselves Serbs live in Republika Srpska, 91.3% of Croats
and 88.2% of Bosniaks live in the Federation of Bosnia-Herzegovina.5
This represents a major shift not only regarding population composition,
but also in the imagination of BiH space. Spaces were ethnicized during
the war, and they continue to be.
Those official lines were followed by the multiplication of many other
less institutionalized boundaries. For instance, while the IEBL has divided
the country internally into two political entities, many other boundaries
have emerged, permeated and shaped social, political and spatial life in
post-Dayton Bosnia. Hence, cities like Sarajevo and Mostar have been
pervaded by invisible but very performative boundaries, which organize
urban spaces mainly in ethnonational terms. Particular places, neigh-
bourhoods and even buildings inside those cities have also been crossed
by similar boundaries. Many schools were divided, with students from
different ethnonational backgrounds entering the building from distinct
doors, or having classes and breaks in different hours of the day to avoid
contact between them.

5 According to 2013 census, available here: http://www.popis2013.ba/.

 2 ENACTING BOUNDARIES 27

Other forms of boundaries are not as easily grasped spatially. Thus,

where there used to be one official language (Serbo-Croat), now there
are three (Serbian, Bosniak and Croatian).6 English is also widely used
among international officers, and many official documents are produced
in English, also. Radio stations, TV channels and soccer clubs also
emerged in post-Dayton BiH aiming to represent specific ethnonational
categories. Nowadays, most political parties also identify themselves with a
specific ethnonational affiliation. The important and widespread presence
of ‘international workers’ aiming to construct a Bosnian state, especially in
bigger cities such as Sarajevo, Banja Luka and Brčko, produces yet other
forms of boundaries.7
Bringa (1993a) argues that ethnonational groups demarcated them-
selves during the pre-war period, but those boundaries were not enacted
in a conflictual way, and they varied a lot from each other in different
social spaces. In some mixed villages, before the war, the two ethnona-
tional groups8 had their defined village area, for example, each end of
the village or each side of a river, although that was not always the case
(Bringa 1993a: 82). Also, in rural areas, people from each group usually
dressed differently, had different customs and holy days, but those differ-
ences were respected by the other group and considered to have the same
legitimacy as their customs and holy days (ibidem: 83). Communities
usually cooperated in all kinds of secular activities and interacted at all
secular times (ibidem). Nevertheless, the ultimate boundary between the
groups in the village was intermarriage—this practice being very rare in
rural environments, or even considered ‘non-negotiable’ (ibidem: 84).
In cities, those boundaries were negotiated differently. In cities such
as Sarajevo, Mostar and Tuzla, according to the 1991 census, up to
30% of the marriages were ‘mixed’. Intermarried couples would usually
choose ‘neutral’ first names for their children, and neighbourhoods and
residential buildings were mixed. People from all ethnonational groups
used to live intermingled in Sarajevo. Sarajevans and inhabitants from
rural areas alike acknowledge that, in the capital, ethnonational belong-
ings were not very important in everyday life and usually were not

6 See Chapter 1.
7 See Chapter 6.
8 Usually villages were composed mainly either by Muslims and Serbs or Muslims and
Croats. That was different in the cities.
28 R. SUMMA

the first source of one’s identity. In many cases, class, background and
perceived cultural status mattered more. Indeed, for many in the city,
their status as Sarajevans placed them in a higher moral and cultural cate-
gory compared to people living in other parts of Bosnia and Herzegovina
(Maček 2009: 189). They perceived the local culture as tolerant and open
to both Eastern and Western influences, a trait they did not recognize in
other parts of BiH. Even among the same ethnonational groups, such
as Muslims, for example, Sarajevans would think of themselves as not
belonging to ‘the same culture’ as those coming from villages. Some of
the capital inhabitants would even think of themselves as standing above
BiH. This might be a reason why Sarajevo had one of the highest numbers
of people who declared themselves ‘Yugoslavian’: 16.43% in the centre
of Sarajevo, according to the 1991 census. No ethnonational group was
majoritarian in the capital.
A different aspect constituted the main boundary of demarcation
between insiders and outsiders in Sarajevo. The boundaries were drawn
between those who considered themselves modern, civilized and urban
and those who were called papci ( or, literally, ‘pig feet’), indicating a rural
origin (Toal and Dahlman 2011: 72). Cultural status was (and still is)
deemed higher among the urban inhabitants in relation to those who live
in rural areas. While those who were associated with the bourgeois urban
space were represented (and represented themselves) as more educated
and civilized, ‘the rural order’ has been considered ‘backwards’, ‘unciv-
ilized’ and even ‘barbaric’ (Hromadžić 2018). Much has been written
about the differences between urban and rural settings in BiH, both
before (see, for example, Bringa 1993b) and after the war. Many authors
have been analysing how the great number of internal displaced people
from rural areas has altered the social fabric in the cities and how it leads
to cultural transformations and different divides between ‘us’ and ‘them’
(Hromadžić 2018; Jansen 2005, 2015; Maček 2009). In many occa-
sions both during and after the war, displaced people from rural areas
were perceived to be disturbing or even threatening urban life, bringing
a different, more backwards and intolerant life style which could erode
urban culture. Many jokes concerning the lack of intimacy of rural people
with urban codes and equipments reproduce these discriminations.

In the city, nationality categories were hybrid, fluid and confused: it was
not possible to reliably affix nationality by appearance and accent (it was
easier to affix cultural status). Nevertheless, even if there were only certain
 2 ENACTING BOUNDARIES 29

moments and spaces where ethnonationality “happened” or where resi-

dents “did” ethnicity, citizens were interpellated by nationality categories
by birth, and it was constantly “called out” by institutions and “hailed” in
bureaucratic contexts. (Toal and Dahlman 2011: 73)

Through the war, nevertheless, ethnonational boundaries were mobi-

lized in a way that being on one side or the other could be a matter of life
or death. Undeniably, those ethnonational boundaries have become more
pervasive and rigid, and have emerged as the driving characteristic that
organizes social, political and spatial life in post-Dayton Bosnia, although
they are not the only one (Bose 2002; Bougarel et al. 2007; Bringa
2002; Toal and Dahlman 2011; Ullen 2013). Ethnonational categories
have become the backbone of post-Dayton Bosnia and Herzegovina state
organization and, since then, have shaped political life, state institutions,
spatial configurations and urban realities (although, as I suggest in this
book, we should not reduce life to this particular practice of demarcation).
Before boundaries are drawn or ethnic cleansing practices are adopted,
spaces needed to be imagined in ethnic terms, as if they ‘belong’ to a
certain group in the form of a historical or spiritual homeland (Toal and
Dahlman 2011: 5). From there, what followed in BiH was the expulsion
or extermination of individuals from the other groups.
By drawing boundaries on BiH’s official map, the Dayton Peace Agree-
ment institutionalized the results of the ethnic cleansing process and, in
some cases, it allowed for enhancing it, for many people who suddenly
became a ‘minority’ crossed boundaries to live at their ‘proper’ entity.
In many occasions, therefore, boundaries agreed at Dayton played a role
of performing the nationalists’ project (never completely achieved) of
homogenizing spaces in BiH.
More than twenty years after the signing of the Dayton Peace Agree-
ment, the IEBL is still an everyday reality in BiH though it no longer
constitutes an internal barrier to free movement, as it happened in the first
few years after the war. Its materiality has changed through time, as well as
the meanings Bosnians attribute to them, and the practices and relations
Bosnians undertake around and towards them. The IEBL acquires a very
strong meaning because it crosses 42 municipalities in the whole BiH9

9 Karabegovic, Dzenana. ‘Med-uentitetska linija: Dnevni boravak u Federaciji, spavaća

sobauRS’. RadioSlobodnaEvropa, 23 February 2012. Available at: http://www.slobodnae
vropa.org/content/medjuentitetska_linija_jos_se_ceka_na_crtanje_karti/24494227.html.
Another random document with
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him with the fate of Stephen, had not the disciples heard of the
danger which threatened the life of their new brother, and provided
for his escape by means not less efficient than those before used in
his behalf, at Damascus. Before the plans for his destruction could
be completed, they privately withdrew him from Jerusalem, and had
him safely conducted down to Caesarea, on the coast, whence, with
little delay, he was shipped for some of the northern parts of Syria,
from which he found his way to Tarsus,――whether by land or sea,
is unknown.

his visit to tarsus.

This return to his native city was probably the first visit which he
had made to it, since the day when he departed from his father’s
house, to go to Jerusalem as a student of Jewish theology. It must
therefore have been the occasion of many interesting reflections and
reminiscences. What changes had the events of that interval
wrought in him,――in his faith, his hopes, his views, his purposes for
life and for death! The objects which were then to him as
idols,――the aims and ends of his being,――had now no place in
his reverence or his affection; but in their stead was now placed a
name and a theme, of which he could hardly have heard before he
first left Tarsus,――and a cause whose triumph would be the
overthrow of all those traditions of the Fathers, of which he had been
taught to be so exceeding zealous. To this new cause he now
devoted himself, and probably at this time labored “in the regions of
Cilicia,” until a new apostolic summons called him to a distant field.
He was yet “personally unknown to the churches of Judea, which
were in Christ; and they had only heard, that he who persecuted
them in times past, now preached the faith which once he destroyed;
they therefore glorified God on his account.” The very beginnings of
his apostolic duties were therefore in a foreign field, and not within
the original premises of the lost sheep of the house of Israel, where
indeed he was not even known but by fame, except to a few in
Jerusalem. In this he showed the great scope and direction of his
future labors,――among the Gentiles, not among the Jews; leaving
the latter to the sole care of the original apostles, while he turned to
a vast field for which they were in no way fitted, by nature, or by
apostolic education, nor were destined in the great scheme of
salvation.

his apostolic labors in antioch.

During this retirement of Saul to his native home, the first great
call of the Gentiles had been made through the summons of Simon
Peter to Cornelius. There was manifest wisdom in this arrangement
of events. Though the original apostles were plainly never intended,
by providence, to labor to any great extent in the Gentile field, yet it
was most manifestly proper that the first opening of this new field
should be made by those directly and personally commissioned by
Jesus himself, and who, from having enjoyed his bodily presence for
so long a time, would be considered best qualified to judge of the
propriety of a movement so novel and unprecedented in its
character. The great apostolic chief was therefore made the first
minister of grace to the Gentiles; and the violent opposition with
which this innovation on Judaical sanctity was received by the more
bigoted, could of course be much more efficiently met, and
disarmed, by the apostle specially commissioned as the keeper of
the keys of the heavenly kingdom, than by one who had been but
lately a persecutor of the faithful, and who, by his birth and partial
education in a Grecian city, had acquired such a familiarity with
Gentile usages, as to be reasonably liable to suspicion, in regard to
an innovation which so remarkably favored them. This great
movement having been thus made by the highest Christian authority
on earth,――and the controversy immediately resulting having been
thus decided,――the way was now fully open for the complete
extension of the gospel to the heathen, and Saul was therefore
immediately called, in providence, from his retirement, to take up the
work of evangelizing Syria, which had already been partially begun
at Antioch, by some of the Hellenistic refugees from the persecution
at the time of Stephen’s martyrdom. The apostles at Jerusalem,
hearing of the success which attended these incidental efforts,
dispatched their trusty brother Barnabas, to confirm the good work,
under the direct commission of apostolic authority. He, having come
to Antioch, rejoiced his heart with the sight of the success which had
crowned the work of those who, in the midst of the personal distress
of a malignant persecution, that had driven them from Jerusalem,
had there sown a seed that was already bringing forth glorious fruits.
Perceiving the immense importance of the field there opened, he
immediately felt the want of some person of different qualifications
from the original apostles, and one whose education and habits
would fit him not only to labor among the professors of the Jewish
faith, but also to communicate the doctrines of Christ to the
Grecians. In this crisis he bethought himself of the wonderful young
convert with whom he had become acquainted, under such
remarkable circumstances, a few years before, in
Jerusalem,――whose daring zeal and masterly learning had been
so signally manifested among the Hellenists, with whom he had
formerly been associated as an equally active persecutor. Inspired
both by considerations of personal regard, and by wise convictions
of the peculiar fitness of this zealous disciple for the field now
opened in Syria, Barnabas immediately left his apostolic charge at
Antioch, and went over to Tarsus, to invite Saul to this great labor.
The journey was but a short one, the distance by water being not
more than one hundred miles, and by land, around through the
“Syrian gates,” about one hundred and fifty. He therefore soon
arrived at Saul’s home, and found him ready and willing to undertake
the proposed apostolic duty. They immediately returned together to
Antioch, and earnestly devoted themselves to their interesting
labors.

“Antioch, the metropolis of Syria, was built, according to some authors, by Antiochus
Epiphanes; others affirm, by Seleucus Nicanor, the first king of Syria after Alexander the
Great, in memory of his father Antiochus, and was the ‘royal seat of the kings of Syria.’ For
power and dignity, Strabo, (lib. xvi. p. 517,) says it was not much inferior to Seleucia, or
Alexandria. Josephus, (lib. iii. cap. 3,) says, it was the third great city of all that belonged to
the Roman provinces. It was frequently called Antiochia Epidaphne, from its neighborhood
to Daphne, a village where the temple of Daphne stood, to distinguish it from other fourteen
of the same name mentioned by Stephanus de Urbibus, and by Eustathius in Dionysius p.
170; or as Appianus (in Syriacis,) and others, sixteen cities in Syria, and elsewhere, which
bore that name. It was celebrated among the Jews for ‘Jus civitatis,’ which Seleucus
Nicanor had given them in that city with the Grecians and Macedonians, and which, says
Josephus, they still retain, Antiquities, lib. xii. cap. 13; and for the wars of the Maccabeans
with those kings. Among Christians, for being the place where they first received that name,
and where Saul and Barnabas began their apostolic labors together. In the flourishing times
of the Roman empire, it was the ordinary residence of the prefect or governor of the eastern
provinces, and also honored with the residence of many of the Roman emperors, especially
of Verus and Valens, who spent here the greatest part of their time. It lay on both sides of
the river Orontes, about twelve miles from the Mediterranean sea.” (Wells’s Geography New
Testament――Whitby’s Table.) (J. M. Williams’s Notes on Pearson’s Annales Paulinae.)

Having arrived at Antioch, Saul gave himself, with Barnabas,

zealously to the work for which he had been summoned, and labored
among the people to good purpose, assembling the church and
imparting to all that would hear, the knowledge of the Christian
doctrine. Under these active exertions the professors of the faith of
Jesus became so numerous and so generally known in Antioch, that
the heathen inhabitants found it convenient to designate them by a
distinct appellation, which they derived from the great founder and
object of their religion,――calling them Christians, because the
heathen inhabitants of Syria were not acquainted with the terms,
“Nazarene” and “Galilean,” which had been applied to the followers
of Christ by the Jews, partly from the places where they first
appeared, and partly in opprobium for their low provincial origin.

The name now first created by the Syrians to distinguish the sect, is remarkable,
because being derived from a Greek word, Christos, it has a Latin adjective termination,
Christianus, and is therefore incontestably shown to have been applied by the Roman
inhabitants of Antioch; for no Grecian would ever have been guilty of such a barbarism, in
the derivation of one word from another in his own language. The proper Greek form of the
derivation would have been Christicos, or Christenos, and the substantive would have been,
not Christianity, but Christicism, or Christenism,――a word so awkward in sound, however,
that it is very well for all Christendom, that the Roman barbarism took the place of the pure
Greek termination. And since the Latin form of the first derivative has prevailed, and
Christian thus been made the name of “a believer in Christ,” it is evident to any classical
scholar, that Christianity is the only proper form of the substantive secondarily derived. For
though the appending of a Latin termination upon a Greek word, as in the case of
Christianus, was unquestionably a blunder and a barbarism in the first place, it yet can not
compare, for absurdity, with the notion of deriving from this Latin form, the substantive
Christianismus, with a Greek termination foolishly pinned to a Latin one,――a folly of which
the French are nevertheless guilty. The error, of course, can not now be corrected in that
language; but those who stupidly copy the barbarism from them, and try to introduce the
monstrous word, Christianism, into English, deserve the reprobation of every man of taste.

“Before this they were called ‘disciples,’ as in this place――‘believers,’ Acts v.

14――‘men of the church,’ Acts xii. 1――‘men of the way,’ Acts ix. 2――‘the saints,’ Acts ix.
13――‘those that called on the name of Christ,’ verse 14――and by their enemies,
Nazarenes and Galileans, and ‘men of the sect;’――but now, by the conversion of so many
heathens, both in Caesarea and Antioch, the believing Jews and Gentiles being made all
one church, this new name was given them, as more expressive of their common relation to
their Master, Christ. Whitby slightly alludes to the prophecy, Isaiah lxv.” (J. M. Williams’s
Notes on Pearson.)

While Saul was thus effectually laboring in Antioch, there came

down to that city, from Jerusalem, certain persons, indued with the
spirit of prophecy, among whom was one, named Agabus, who,
under the influence of inspiration, made known that there would be a
great famine throughout the world;――a prediction which was
verified by the actual occurrence of this calamity in the days of
Claudius Caesar, during whose reign,――as appears on the
impartial testimony of the historians of those times, both Roman and
Jewish,――the Roman empire suffered at different periods in all its
parts, from the capital to Jerusalem,――and at this latter city, more
especially, in the sixth year of Claudius, (A. D. 46,) as is testified by
Josephus, who narrates very particularly some circumstances
connected with the prevalence of this famine in Jerusalem. The
disciples at Antioch, availing themselves of this information,
determined to send relief to their brethren in Judea, before the
famine should come on; and having contributed, each one according
to his ability, they made Barnabas and Saul the messengers of their
charity, who were accordingly dispatched to Jerusalem, on this noble
errand. They remained in Jerusalem through the period of Agrippa’s
attack upon the apostles by murdering James, and imprisoning
Peter; but they do not seem to have been any way immediately
concerned in these events; and when Peter had escaped, they
returned to Antioch. How long they remained here, is not recorded;
but the date of subsequent events seems to imply that it was a
space of some years, during which they labored at Antioch in
company with several other eminent prophets and teachers, of
whom are mentioned Simeon, who had the Roman surname of
Niger, Lucius, the Cyrenian, and Manaen, a foster-brother of Herod
the tetrarch. During their common ministrations, at a season of
fasting, they received a direction from the spirit of truth which guided
them, to set apart Saul and Barnabas for the special work to which
the Lord had called them. This work was of course understood to be
that for which Saul in particular, had, at his conversion, been so
remarkably commissioned,――“to open the eyes of the
Gentiles,――to turn them from darkness to light, and from the
dominion of Satan to God.” His brethren in the ministry therefore,
understanding at once the nature and object of the summons, now
specially consecrated both him and Barnabas for their missionary
work; and after fasting and praying, they invoked on them the
blessing of God, in the usual oriental form of laying their hands on
them, and then bade them farewell.

“That this famine was felt chiefly in Judea may be conjectured with great reason from the
nature of the context, for we find that the disciples are resolving to send relief to the elders
in Judea; consequently they must have understood that those in Judea would suffer more
than themselves. Josephus declared that this famine raged so much there, πολλῶν ὑπό
ἐνδείας ἀναλωμάτων φθειρομένων, ‘so that many perished for want of victuals.’”

“‘Throughout the whole world,’ πᾶσαν τὴν οἰκουμένην, is first to be understood, orbis
terrarum habitabilis: Demosthenes in Corona, Æschines contra Ctesiphon Scapula. Then
the Roman and other empires were styled οικουμένη, ‘the world.’ Thus Isaiah xiv. 17, 26, the
counsel of God against the empire of Babylon, is called his counsel, ἐπὶ τὴν ὅλην οἰκουμένην,
‘against all the earth.’――(Elsley, Whitby.) Accordingly Eusebius says of this famine, that it
oppressed almost the whole empire. And as for the truth of the prophecy, this dearth is
recorded by historians most averse to our religion, viz., by Suetonius in the life of Claudius,
chapter 18, who informs us that it happened ‘ob assiduas sterilitates;’ and Dion Cassius
History lib. lx. p. 146, that it was λιμὸς ἰσχυρὸς, ‘a very great famine.’ Whitby’s Annotations,
Doddridge enumerates nine famines in various years, and parts of the empire, in the reign
of Claudius; but the first was the most severe, and affected particularly Judea, and is that
here meant.” (J. M. Williams’s notes on Pearson.)

his first apostolic mission.

Going from Antioch directly eastward to the sea, they came to

Seleucia, the nearest port, only twelve miles from Antioch, and there
embarked for the island of Cyprus, the eastern end of which is not
more than eighty miles from the coast of Syria. The circumstance
that more particularly directed them first to this island, was probably
that it was the native home of Barnabas, and with this region
therefore he would feel so much acquainted as to know its peculiar
wants, and the facilities which it afforded for the advancement of the
Christian cause; and he would also know where he might look for the
most favorable reception. Landing at Salamis, on the south-eastern
part of the island, they first preached in the synagogues of the Jews,
who were very numerous in Cyprus, and constituted so large a part
of the population of the island, that some years afterwards they
attempted to get complete possession of it, and were put down only
by the massacre of many thousands. Directing their efforts first to
these wandering sheep of the house of Israel, the apostles
everywhere preached the gospel in the synagogues, never forsaking
the Jews for the Gentiles, until they had been driven away by insult
and injury, that thus the ruin of their nation might lie, not upon the
apostles, but upon them only, for their rejection of the repeated offers
of salvation. Here, it would seem, they were joined by John Mark, the
nephew of Barnabas, who was probably staying upon the island at
that time, and who now accompanied them as an assistant in their
apostolic ministry. Traversing the whole island from east to west,
they came to Paphos, a splendid city near the western end, famed
for the magnificent temple and lascivious worship of the Paphian
Venus, a deity to whom all Cyprus was consecrated; and from it she
derived one of her numerous appellatives, Cypris being a name
under which she was frequently worshipped; and the females of the
island generally, were so completely devoted to her service, not
merely in temple-worship, but in life and manners, that throughout
the world, the name Cyprian woman, even to this day, is but a polite
expression for one abandoned to wantonness and pleasure. The
worship of this lascivious goddess, the apostles now came to
exterminate, and to plant in its stead the dominion of a faith, whose
essence is purity of heart and action. At this place, preaching the
gospel with openness, they soon attracted such general notice, that
the report of their remarkable character soon reached the ears of the
proconsul of Cyprus, then resident in Paphos. This great Roman
governor, by name Sergius Paulus, was a man of intelligence and
probity, and hearing of the apostles, soon summoned them to his
presence, that he might have the satisfaction of hearing from them,
in his own hall, a full exposition of the doctrine which they called the
word of God. This they did with such energy and efficiency, that they
won his attention and regard; and he was about to profess his faith in
Jesus, when a new obstacle to the success of the gospel was
presented in the conduct of one of those present at the discourse.
This was an impostor, called Elymas,――a name which seems to be
a Greek form of the Oriental “Alim” meaning “a magician,”――who
had, by his tricks, gained a great renown throughout that region, and
was received into high favor by the proconsul himself, with whom he
was then staying. The rogue, apprehending the nature of the
doctrines taught by the apostles to be no way agreeable to the
schemes of self-advancement which he was so successfully
pursuing, was not a little alarmed when he saw that they were taking
hold of the mind of the proconsul, and therefore undertook to resist
the preaching of the apostles; and attempted to argue the noble
convert into a contempt of these new teachers. At this, Saul, (now
first called Paul,) fixing his eyes on the miserable impostor, in a burst
of inspired indignation, denounced on him an awful punishment for
his resistance of the truth. “O, full of all guile and all tricks! son of the
devil! enemy of all honesty! wilt thou not stop perverting the ways of
the Lord? And now, lo! the hand of the Lord is on thee, and thou
shalt be blind, not seeing the sun for a time.” And immediately there
fell on him a mist and a darkness; and turning around, he sought
some persons to lead him by the hand. At the sight of this manifest
and appalling miracle, thus following the denunciation of the apostle,
the proconsul was so struck, that he no longer delayed for a moment
his profession of faith in the religion whose power was thus attested,
but believed in the doctrine of Jesus, as communicated by his
apostles.

“Seleucia was a little north-west of Antioch, upon the Mediterranean sea, named from its
founder, Seleucus.――Cyprus, so called from the flower of the Cypress-trees growing
there.――Pliny, lib. xii. cap. 24.――Eustathius. In Dionysius p. 110. It was an island, having
on the east the Syrian, on the west the Pamphylian, on the south the Phoenician, on the
north the Cilician sea. It was celebrated among the heathens for its fertility as being
sufficiently provided with all things within itself. Strabo, lib. xiv. 468, 469. It was very
infamous for the worship of Venus, who had thence her name Κύπρις. It was memorable
among the Jews as being an island in which they so much abounded; and among
Christians for being the place where Joses, called Barnabas, had the land he sold, Acts iv.
36; and where Mnason, an old disciple, lived; Acts xxi. 16.――(Whitby’s Table.) Salamis
was once a famous city of Cyprus, opposite to Seleucia, on the Syrian coast.――(Wells.) It
was in the eastern part of Cyprus. It was famous among the Greek writers for the story of
the Dragon killed by Chycreas, their king; and for the death of Anaxarchus, whom
Nicocreon, the tyrant of that island, pounded to death with iron pestles.”――(Bochart,
Canaan, lib. i. c. 2――Laert, lib. ix. p. 579.) Williams’s Pearson.

Proconsul.――The Greek title Ανθυπατος, was applied only to those governors of

provinces who were invested with proconsular dignity. ‘And on the supposition that Cyprus
was not a province of this description, it has been inferred that the title given to Sergius
Paulus in this place, was a title that did not properly belong to him. A passage has indeed
been quoted from Dion Cassius, (History of Rome, lib. liv. p. 523, edited by Hanoviae,
1690,) who, speaking of the governors of Cyprus and some other Roman provinces, applies
to them the same title which is applied to Sergius Paulus. But, as Dion Cassius is speaking
of several Roman provinces at the same time, one of which was certainly governed by a
proconsul, it has been supposed, that for the sake of brevity, he used one term for all of
them, whether it applied to all of them or not. That Cyprus, however, ought to be excluded,
and that the title which he employed, as well as St. Luke, really did belong to the Roman
governors of Cyprus, appears from the inscription on a coin belonging to Cyprus itself. It
belonged to the people of that island as appears from the word ΚΥΠΡΙΩΝ on the reverse:
and, though not struck while Sergius Paulus himself was governor, it was struck, as appears
from the inscription on the reverse, in the time of Proclus, who was next to Sergius Paulus
in the government of Cyprus. And, on this coin the same title ΑΝΘΥΠΑΤΟΣ, is given to
Proclus, which St. Luke gives Sergius Paulus.’ (Bishop Marsh’s Lecture part v. pp. 85, 86.)
That Cyprus was a proconsulate, is also evident ♦from an ancient inscription of Caligula’s
reign, in which Aquius Scaura is called the proconsul of Cyprus. (Gruteri Corpus
Inscriptionem, tom. i. part ii. p, cccix. No. 3, edited by Graevii Amsterdam, 1707.) Horne’s
Introd.

♦ “lrom” replaced with “from”

 his change of name.

In connection with this first miracle of the apostle of Tarsus, it is

mentioned by the historian of the Acts of the Apostles, that Saul
thenceforth bore the name of Paul, and the reader is thence fairly led
to suppose, that the name was taken from that of Sergius Paul, who
is the most important personage concerned in the event; and being
the first eminent man who is specified as having been converted by
the apostle, seems therefore to deserve, in this case, the honor of
conferring a new name on the wonder-working Saul. This
coincidence between the name and the occasion, may be justly
esteemed sufficient ground for assuming this as the true origin of the
name by which the apostle was ever after designated,――which he
applies to himself in his writings, and by which he is always
mentioned throughout the Christian world, in all ages. With the name
of “Saul of Tarsus,” there were too many evil associations already
inseparably connected, in the minds of all the Jewish inhabitants of
the east, and the troublesome character of those prevalent
impressions having been perhaps particularly obvious to the apostle,
during his first missionary tour, he seized this honorable occasion, to
exchange it for one that had no such evil associations; and he was
therefore afterwards known only by the name of PAUL.

Embarking at Paphos, the apostles, after doubling cape Acamas,

the most western point of the island, sailed northwestward, towards
the northern coast of Asia Minor,――and after a voyage of about two
hundred miles, reached Perga, a city in Pamphylia. This place was
not a sea-port, but stood on the west bank of the river Cestrus, about
eight miles from the sea. It was there built by the Attalian kings of
south-western Asia, and was by them made the most splendid city of
Pamphylia. Near the town, and on a rising ground, was a very
famous temple of Diana, to which every year resorted a grand
religious assembly, to celebrate the worship of this great Asian
goddess. In such a strong hold of heathenism, the apostles must
have found much occasion for the preaching of the gospel; but the
historian of their Acts gives no account of anything here said or done
by them, and only mentions that at this place their companion, John
Mark, gave up his ministration with them, and returned to Jerusalem.
Paul and Barnabas then went on without him, to the north, and
proceeded, without any material delay, directly through Pamphylia,
and over the ranges of Taurus, through Pisidia, into Phrygia
Katakekaumene, where they made some stay at the city of Antioch,
which was distinguished from the great capital of Syria bearing the
same royal name, by being called “Antioch of Pisidia,” because,
though really within the boundaries of Phrygia, it was often
numbered among the cities of the province next south, near whose
borders it stood, and was therefore associated with the towns of
Pisidia by those who lived south and east of them. At this place the
apostles probably arrived towards the last of the week, and reposing
here on the sabbath, they went into the Jewish synagogue, along
with the usual worshiping assembly, and took their seats quietly
among the rest. After the regular service of the day (consisting of the
reading of select portions of the law and the prophets) was over, the
minister of the synagogue, according to custom, gave an invitation to
the apostles to preach to the people, if they felt disposed to do so. It
should be noticed, that in the Jewish synagogues, there was no
regular person appointed to preach, the minister being only a sort of
reader, who conducted the devotions of the meeting, and chanted
the lessons from the Scriptures, as arranged for each sabbath.
When these regular duties were over, the custom was to invite a
discourse from any person disposed or qualified to address the
people,――the whole being always thus conducted somewhat on
the plan of a modern “conference meeting.” On this day, the minister,
noticing two grave and intelligent-looking persons among the
worshipers, joining devoutly in the service of God, and perceiving
them to be of a higher order than most of the assembly, or perhaps
having received a previous hint of the fact that they were well-
qualified religious teachers, who had valuable doctrines to
communicate to the people,――sent word to them, “Brethren! if you
have any word of exhortation for the people, say on.” Paul
then,――as usual, taking the precedence of Barnabas in speaking,
on account of his own superior endowments as an
orator,――addressed the meeting, beginning with the usual form of
words, accompanied with a graceful gesticulation, beseeching their
favor. “Men of Israel! and you that fear God! give your attention.” The
two different classes of persons included in this formula, are
evidently, first, those who were Jews by birth and education, and
second, those devout Gentiles who reverenced the God of Israel and
conformed to the law of Moses, worshiping with the Jews on the
sabbath. Paul, in his sermon, which was of considerable length,
began in the usual form of an apostolic discourse to the Jews, by
recurring to the early Hebrew history, and running over the great
leading events and persons mentioned in their sacred writings, that
might be considered as preparing the way for the Messiah. Then,
proceeding to the narration of the most important points in the history
of the new dispensation, he applied all the quoted predictions of the
inspired men of old, to the man Christ Jesus, whom they now
preached. The substance of his discourse was, that in Jesus Christ
were fully accomplished those splendid prophecies contained in the
Psalms, concerning the future glories of the line of David; and more
especially that by his attested resurrection he had fulfilled the words
spoken by the Psalmist, of the triumphs of the “Holy One” over the
grave and corruption. Paul thus concluded,――“Be it known to you
therefore, brethren, that through this man is preached to you
forgiveness of sins; and every one that believes in him is justified
from all things, from which you could not be justified by the law of
Moses. Beware therefore, lest that come upon you which is spoken
by the prophets,――‘See! you despisers! and wonder and be
amazed; for I will do a work in your days, which you shall not believe,
even if one should tell it to you.’” These denunciatory concluding
words are from the prophet Habakkuk, where he is foretelling to the
Israelites of his day, the devastating invasion of the Chaldeans; and
the apostle in quoting them, aimed to impress his hearers with the
certainty of similar evils to fall upon their nation,――evils so
tremendous, that they might naturally disbelieve the warning, if it
should give them the awful particulars of the coming ruin, but whose
solemn truth they would, nevertheless, too soon learn in its actual
accomplishment. These words being directed in a rather bitter tone
of warning to the Jews in particular, that portion of the audience do
not appear to have been much pleased with his address; but while
the most of them were retiring from the synagogue, the Gentiles
declared their high satisfaction with the discourse, and expressed an
earnest desire that it might be repeated to them on the next
sabbath,――a request with which ministers in these modern times
are very rarely complimented by their congregations. After the
meeting broke up, many of the audience were so loth to part with
preachers of this extraordinary character, that they followed the
apostles to their lodgings. These were mostly the religious proselytes
from the heathen who worshiped with the Jews in the synagogue,
but some even of the Jews were so well satisfied with what they had
heard, that they also accompanied the throng that followed the
apostles. Paul and Barnabas did not suffer this occasion to pass
unimproved; but as they went along, discoursed to the company,
exhorting them to stand fast in the grace of God. They continued in
the city through the week, and meanwhile the fame of their doctrines
and their eloquence extended so fast and so far, that when on the
next sabbath they went to the synagogue to preach according to
promise, almost the whole city came pouring in, along with them, to
hear the word of God. But when the Jews, who had already been
considerably displeased by the manner in which they had been
addressed the last sabbath, saw the multitudes which were
thronging to hear these new interlopers, they were filled with envy,
and when Paul renewed his discourse, they openly disputed
him,――denied his conclusions, and abused him, and his doctrine.
Paul and Barnabas, justly indignant at this exhibition of meanness,
that thus set itself against the progress of the truth among the
Gentiles, from whom the Jews, not content with rejecting the gospel
themselves, would also exclude the light of the word,――boldly
declared to them――“It was necessary that the word of God should
be first spoken to you; but since you have cast it off, and thus evince
yourselves unworthy of everlasting life,――behold, we turn to the
heathen. For thus did God command us, ‘I have set thee for a light to
the heathen, that thou mightest be for their salvation, even to the
uttermost part of the earth.’” And the heathen hearing this, rejoiced,
and glorified the word of the Lord, and many of them believed, to
their everlasting salvation. And the word of God was spread
throughout that whole country; but the opposition of the Jews
increasing in proportion to the progress of the faith of Christ, a great
disturbance was raised against the apostles among the aristocracy
of the city, who favored the Jews, and more especially among the
women of high family, who were proselytes; and the result of the
commotion was, that the apostles were driven out of the city. Paul
and Barnabas, in conformity to the original injunction of Jesus to the
twelve, shook off the dust of their feet, as an expressive testimony
against them,――and turning eastward, came to another city, named
Iconium, in Lycaonia, the most eastern province of Phrygia.

Lycaonia is a province of Asia Minor, accounted the southern part of Cappadocia, having
Isauria on the west, Armenia Minor on the east, and Cilicia on the south. Its chief cities are
all mentioned in this chapter xiv. viz., Iconium, Lystra, and Derbe. They spake in the
Lycaonian tongue, verse 10, which is generally understood to have been a corrupt Greek,
intermingled with many Syriac words.――Horne’s Introduction.

Iconium was the capital of Lycaonia, and is mentioned by the

Grecian and Roman writers, before and after the apostolic times, as
a place of some importance; but nothing definite is known of its size
and character. It appears, at any rate, from the apostolic record, that
this flourishing city was one of the numerous centers of the Jewish
population, that filled so much of Asia Minor; and here, according to
their custom, the apostles made their first communication of the
gospel, in the Jewish synagogue. Entering this place of worship, they
spoke with such effect, that a great number both of Greeks and Jews
were thoroughly convinced of the truth of the Christian doctrine, and
professed their faith in Jesus. But, as usual, there was in Iconium a
great residue of bigoted adherents to the Mosaic faith, who could
appreciate neither the true scope of the ancient dispensation, nor the
perfection of gospel truth; and a set of these fellows undertook to
make trouble for the apostles, in the same way that it had been done
at the Pisidian Antioch. Not having power or influence enough
among themselves to effect any great mischief, they were obliged to
resort to the expedient of exciting the ill-will of the Gentile inhabitants
and rulers of the city, against the objects of their mischievous
designs,――and in this instance were successful, inasmuch as “they
made their minds disaffected against the brethren.” But in spite of all
this opposition, thus powerfully manifested, “long time they abode
there, speaking boldly in the Lord,” who did not fail to give them the
ever-promised support of his presence, but “gave testimony to the
word of his grace, and caused signs and miracles to be done by their
hands.” The immediate effect of this bold maintenance of the truth
was, that they soon made a strong impression on the feelings of the
mass of the people, and created among them a disposition to defend
the preachers of the word of heavenly grace, against the malice of
their haters. The consequence of course was, that the whole city
was directly divided into two great parties, one for and the other
against the apostles. On one hand the supporters of the Jewish
faction were bent upon driving out the innovators from the city, and
on the other, the numerous audiences, who had been interested in
the preaching of Paul and Barnabas, were perfectly determined to
stand by the apostles at all hazards, and the whole city seems to
have been on the eve of a regular battle about this difference. But it
did not suit the apostles’ scheme to make use of such means for
their own advancement or defence; and hearing that a grand crisis in
affairs was approaching, in the opposition of the Jewish faction, they
took the resolution of evading the difficulty, by withdrawing
themselves quietly from the scene of commotion, in which there was
but very little prospect of being useful, just then. The whole gang of
their opponents, both Gentiles and Jews, rulers and commonalty,
having turned out for the express purpose of executing popular
vengeance on these odious agitators, by abusing and pelting them,
the apostles, on getting notice of the scheme, moved off, before the
mob could lay hands on them, and soon got beyond their reach, in
other cities.

These fugitives from popular vengeance, after having so narrowly

escaped being sacrificed to public opinion, turned their course
southward, and stopped next on their adventurous route at the city of
Lystra, also within Lycaonia, where they preached the gospel, and
not only in the city and its immediate vicinity, but also throughout the
whole surrounding region, and in the neighboring towns. In the
progress of their labors in Lystra, they one day were preaching in the
presence of a man who had been lame from his birth, being in
exactly the same predicament with the cripple who was the subject
of the first miracle of Peter and John, in the temple. This unfortunate
auditor of Paul and Barnabas believed the word of truth which they
preached; and as he sat among the rest, being noticed by the former
apostle, was recognized as a true believer. Looking earnestly on
him, Paul, without questioning him at all as to his faith, said to him at
once, in a loud voice, “Rise, and stand on thy feet.” Instantly the man
sprang up, and walked. When the people saw this amazing and
palpable miracle, they cried out, in their Lycaonian dialect, “The gods
are come down to us in the likeness of men.” Struck with this notion,
they immediately sought to designate the individual deities who had
thus honored the city of Lystra with their presence; and at once
recognized in the stately form, and solemn, silent majesty of
Barnabas, the awful front of Jupiter, the Father of all the gods; and
as for the lively, mercurial person attending upon him, and acting, on
all occasions, as the spokesman, with such vivid, burning
eloquence,――who could he be but the attendant and agent of
Jupiter, Hermes, the god of eloquence and of travelers? Full of this
conceit, and anxious to testify their devout sense of this
condescension, the citizens bustled about, and with no small parade
brought out a solemn sacrificial procession, with oxen and garlands,
headed by the priests of Jupiter, and were proceeding to offer a
sacrifice in solemn form to the divine personages who had thus
veiled their dignity in human shape, when the apostles, horror-struck
at this degrading exhibition of the idolatrous spirit against which they
were warring, and without a single sensation of pride or gratitude for
this great compliment done them, ran in among the people, rending
their clothes in the significant and fantastic gesture of true Orientals,
and cried out with great earnestness, “Sirs! what do you mean? We
also are men of like constitutions with yourselves, and we preach to
you with the express intent that you should turn from these follies to
the living God, who made heaven and earth and sea, and all that is
in them.――He, indeed, in times past, left all nations to walk in their
own ways. Yet he left himself not wholly without witness of his being
and goodness, in that he did good, and gave us rain from heaven,
and fruitful seasons, filling our hearts with food and gladness.” With
these words of splendid eloquence and magnificent conception
bursting from their lips in the inspiration of the moment,――the
apostles, with no small ado, stopped the idolatrous folly of the
Lystrans, who probably felt and looked very silly, when the mistake
into which they had been drawn by a mere mob-cry, was shown to
them. Indignant, not so much at themselves, who alone were truly
blamable for the error, as against the persons who were the nobly
innocent occasions of it,――they were in a state of feeling to
overbalance this piece of extravagance by another,――much more
wicked, because it was not mere nonsense, but downright cruelty.
When, therefore, certain spiteful Jews came to Lystra from Antioch
and Iconium, from which places they had been hunting, like hounds,
on the track of the apostles, and told their abusive lies to the people
about the character of these two strange travelers, the foolish
Lystrans were easily persuaded to crown their absurdity by falling
upon Paul, who seemed to be the person most active in the
business. Having seized him, before he could slip out of their hands,
as he usually did from his persecutors, they pelted him with such
effect that he fell down as if dead; and they, with no small alacrity,
dragged him out of the city as a mere carcase. But the mob had
hardly dispersed, when he rose up, to the great wonder of the
brethren who stood mourning about him, and went back with them
into the city. The whole of this interesting series of events is a firm
testimony to the honesty of the apostolic narrative, exhibiting, as it
does, so fairly, the most natural, and at the same time, the most
contemptible tendencies of the human character. Never was there
given such a beautiful illustration of the value and moral force of
public opinion! unless, perhaps, in the very similar case of Jesus, in
Jerusalem:――“Hosanna,” to-day, and “Crucify him,” to-morrow. One
moment, exalting the apostles to the name and honors of the highest
of all the gods; the next, pelting them through the streets, and kicking
them out of the city as a nuisance. The Bible is everywhere found to
be just so bitterly true to human nature, and the whole world cannot
furnish a story in which the character and moral value of popular
movements are better exhibited than in the adventures of the
apostles, as recorded by Luke.

Acts xiv. 12. “It has been inquired why the Lystrans suspected that Paul and Barnabas
were Mercury and Jupiter? To this it may be answered, 1st. that the ancients supposed the
gods especially visited those cities which were sacred to them. Now from verse 13, it
appears that Jupiter was worshiped among these people; and that Mercury too was, there is
no reason to doubt, considering how general his worship would be in so commercial a tract
of Maritime Asia. (Gughling de Paulo Mercurio, p. 9, and Walch Spic. Antiquities, Lystra, p.
9.) How then was it that the priest of Mercury did not also appear? This would induce one
rather to suppose that there was no temple to Mercury at Lystra. Probably the worship of
that god was confined to the sea-coast; whereas Lystra was in the interior and mountainous
country. 2. It appears from mythological history, that Jupiter was thought to generally
descend on earth accompanied by Mercury. See Plautus, Amphitryon, 1, 1, 1. Ovid,
Metamorphoses, 8, 626, and Fasti, 5, 495. 3. It was a very common story, and no doubt,
familiar to the Lystrans, that Jupiter and Mercury formerly traversed Phrygia together, and
were received by Philemon and Baucis. (See Ovid, Metamorphoses, 8, 611, Gelpke in
Symbol. ad Interp. Acts xiv. 12.) Mr. Harrington has yet more appositely observed, (in his
Works, p. 330,) that this persuasion might gain the more easily on the minds of the
Lycaonians, on account of the well-known fable of Jupiter and Mercury, who were said to
have descended from heaven in human shape, and to have been entertained by Lycaon,
from whom the Lycaonians received their name.

“But it has been further inquired why they took Barnabas for Jupiter, and Paul for
Mercury. Chrysostom observes, (and after him Mr. Fleming, Christology Vol. II. p. 226,) that
the heathens represented Jupiter as an old but vigorous man, of a noble and majestic
aspect, and a large robust make, which therefore he supposes might be the form of
Barnabas; whereas Mercury appeared young, little, and nimble, as Paul might probably do,
since he was yet in his youth. A more probable reason, however, and indeed the true one,
(as given by Luke,) is, that Paul was so named, because he was the leading speaker. Now
it was well known that Mercury was the god of eloquence. So Horace, Carmen Saeculare,
1, 10, 1. Mercuri facunde nepos Atlantis Qui feros cultus hominum recentum Voce formasti
cantus. Ovid, Fasti, 5, 688. Macrobius, Saturnalia, 8, 8. Hence he is called by Jamblichus,
de Mysteriis, θεὸς ὁ των λόγων ἡγεμὼν, a passage exactly the counterpart to the present one,
which we may render, ‘for he had led the discourse.’” (Bloomfield’s Annotations, New
Testament, Vol. IV. c. xiv. § 12.)

“They called Paul Mercury, because he was the chief speaker,” verse 12. Mercury was
the god of eloquence. Justin Martyr says Paul is λόγος ἑρμηνευτικὸς καὶ πάντων διδάσκαλος,
the word; that is, the interpreter and teacher of all men. Apology ii. p. 67. Philo informs us
that Mercury is called Hermes, ὡς Ἑρμηνέα καὶ προφήτην τῶν θειων, as being the interpreter
and prophet of divine things, apud Eusebius, Praeparatio evangelica, Lib. iii. c. 2. He is
called by Porphyry παραστατικὸς, the exhibitor or representor of reason and eloquence.
Seneca says he was called Mercury, quia ratio penes illum est. De Beneficiis, Lib. iv. cap.
7.――Calmet, Whitby, Stackhouse.
 All this pelting and outcry, however, made not the slightest
impression on Paul and Barnabas, nor had the effect of deterring
them from the work, which they had so unpropitiously carried on.
Knowing, as they did, how popular violence always exhausts itself in
its frenzy, they without hesitation immediately returned by the same
route over which they had been just driven by such a succession of
popular outrages. The day after Paul had been stoned and stunned
by the people of Lystra, he left that city with Barnabas, and both
directed their course eastward to Derbe, where they preached the
gospel and taught many. Then turning directly back, they came again
to Lystra, then to Iconium, and then to Antioch, in all of which cities
they had just been so shamefully treated. In each of these places,
they sought to strengthen the faith of the disciples, earnestly
exhorting them to continue in the Christian course, and warning them
that they must expect to attain the blessings of the heavenly
kingdom, only through much trial and suffering. On this return
journey they now formally constituted regular worshiping assemblies
of Christians in all the places from which they had before been so
tumultuously driven as to be prevented from perfecting their good
work,――ordaining elders in every church thus constituted, and
solemnly, with fasting and prayer, commending them to the Lord on
whom they believed. Still keeping the same route on which they had
come, they now turned southward into Pamphylia, and came again
to Perga. From this place, they went down to Attalia, a great city
south of Perga, on the coast of Pamphylia, founded by Attalus
Philadelphus, king of Pergamus. At this port, they embarked for the
coast of Syria, and soon arrived at Antioch, from which they had
been commended to the favor of God, on this adventurous journey.
On their arrival, the whole church was gathered to hear the story of
their doings and sufferings, and to this eager assembly, the apostles
then recounted all that happened to them in the providence of God,
their labors, their trials, dangers, and hair-breadth escapes, and the
crowning successes in which all these providences had resulted; and
more especially did they set forth in what a signal manner, during
this journey, the door of Christ’s kingdom had been opened to the
Gentiles, after the rejection of the truth by the unbelieving Jews; and
thus happily ended Paul’s first great apostolic mission.

Bishop Pearson here allots three years for these journeys of the apostles, viz. 45, 46,
and 47, and something more. But Calmet, Tillemont, Dr. Lardner, Bishop Tomline, and Dr.
Hales, allow two years for this purpose, viz. 45 and 46; which period corresponds with our
Bible chronology. (Williams on Pearson.)

the disputes on the circumcision.

The great apostle of the Gentiles now made Antioch his home,
and resided there for many years, during which the church grew
prosperously. But at last some persons came down from Jerusalem,
to observe the progress which the new Gentile converts were
making in the faith; and found, to their great horror, that all were
going on their Christian course, in utter disregard of the ancient
ordinances of the holy Mosaic covenant, neglecting altogether even
that grand seal of salvation, which had been enjoined on Abraham
and all the faithful who should share in the blessings of the promise
made to him; they therefore took these backsliders and loose
converts, to task, for their irregularities in this matter, and said to
them, “Unless you be circumcised ♦according to the Mosaic usage,
you can not be saved.” This denunciation of eternal ruin on the
Gentile non-conformists, of course made a great commotion among
the Antiochians, who had been so hopefully progressing in the pure,
spiritual faith of Christ,――and were not prepared by any of the
instructions which they had received from their apostolic teachers,
for any such stiff subjection to tedious rituals. Nor were Paul and
Barnabas slow in resisting this vile imposition upon those who were
just rejoicing in the glorious light and freedom of the gospel; and they
at once therefore, resolutely opposed the attempts of the bigoted
Judaizers to bring them under the servitude of the yoke which not
even the Jews themselves were able to bear. After much wrangling
on this knotty point, it was determined to make a united reference of
the whole question to the apostles and elders at Jerusalem, and that
Paul and Barnabas should be the messengers of the Antiochian
church, in this consultation. They accordingly set out, escorted