Paper short abstract:

This paper (re)turns to the study of everyday diplomacy. It focuses on a dervish lodge and a Franciscan soup kitchen as ‘the gastro-diplomatic sites’ to elucidate the ethical-diplomatic assemblages that mediate encounters between various Others in a post-cosmopolitan town in postwar Bosnia.

Paper long abstract:

This paper contributes to the debates on the nature of diplomacy in the modern world which seek to critically examine 'the sites' where diplomacy actually takes place. One such 'site' which epitomises the quintessence of diplomatic practice is dining and food sharing - 'gastro-diplomacy'. By amplifying this axiom beyond state-level diplomacy, this paper ethnographically elucidates the ethical-diplomatic assemblages of hospitality, charity and good-heartedness as the idioms of shared civility and the sites of everyday (gastro-)diplomacy in postwar Bosnia. Following the debates on the post-cosmopolitan cities, I discuss two 'pockets' of shared urban civility in a 'mixed town' in Central Bosnia. First 'pocket' is a dervish lodge, and the hospitality idiom of 'sofra' (dining cloth) through which the labour of mediation between multiple Others (ethnic, religious, linguistic) is enacted and articulated. Second one is a Franciscan soup kitchen feeding anyone who is hungry and who lives in precarious conditions, and yet relying on the generosity of anyone who can give articulated in the idiom of 'merhamet'/ being 'merhametli' (good-heartedness). In considering how these 'gastro-diplomatic sites' afford to forge and mediate relationships between various 'Others' locally and transnationally, I shall outline some of the shared sensibilities and values of living together with difference in the post-cosmopolitan urban spaces more generally.