Paper short abstract:

How does an interruption in water provisioning in a postwar city—even one caused by ongoing efforts of infrastructural repair— become deemed a form of political terror? This paper ethnographically examines this question by focusing on the 2017 crisis of water provisioning in postwar Sarajevo.

Paper long abstract:

Infrastructures have played a powerful formative and pedagogical role not only because of their capacity to shape subjectivity and produce specific forms of community, but also because they are sites where certain kinds of social formations and subject positions can be unmade. In Bosnian capital city, Sarajevo, this dynamic was made the most apparent during the 1992-95 Bosnian war, when pressures of survival necessitated that residents of war-torn zones develop new expectations, new attitudes and new practices in response to the breakdown in infrastructural provisioning. Nevertheless, political lessons through and in infrastructure continue to be dealt out in peacetime, as water provisioning and other public things become sites of struggle for defining desirable forms of community, government and the future itself.

In 2017, a crisis in water provisioning in the city made these political and historical tensions apparent, as residents of Sarajevo wrestled with protracted water cutoffs which reminded many of war. This paper asks: what mix of political histories, critical dispositions, and longstanding grievances makes water cut-offs in peacetime feel like war? And how is the political itself transformed by these distinct historical sensibilities and modalities of affect?