Paper short abstract:

Based on auto ethnography and interviews amongst local people engaged in internationally funded (mostly peacebuilding) projects in Sarajevo, BiH, the proposed paper explores how this kind of employment shapes people's lives, planning, hope. What old/new temporalities this kind of work produces?

Paper long abstract:

The proposed paper explores relationship between international intervention and reconfigurations of labour in post-war, post-socialist and internationally supervised Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina. Focussing on short-term project-based employment under the umbrella of a postwar humanitarian, peacebuilding, democratizing intervention, the study asks: what changes has such employment produced in understandings of work as such, life trajectories and subjectivity? On the basis of interviews with local people engaged on these projects for at least 15 years and auto ethnography I trace interlocutors' working trajectories as strategies of social reproduction. How do project-based employment experiences and project logics impact on these workers' broader temporal reasoning? Disclosing both contents and form of their project work, the paper consists of three parts: perceived disadvantages of this kind of work, advantages (that prevail) and identified specific strategies people working on short-term contracts has employed during the last 20 years to 'accumulate continuity', which takes the major part of the paper. Instead of interpreting it against traditional permanent work only (and progressive/linear temporality) or some 'new normal' in labour relationships (see e.g. Ikonen 2018), this paper discloses living between multiple intersecting (often conflicting as well) temporalities reflecting in this way complexities of BiH socio-political context (e.g.as a permanent 'state of exception', legacy of socialist past, etc.) coupled with inevitable global neoliberal influences.