Paper short abstract:

Geopolitics has been understood as the "spatial organization of power" on a global scale. But how does something seemingly so far beyond the individual become an emically articulated concern for people in their everyday lives? This paper takes affect as a modality of engagement with geopolitics.

Paper long abstract:

Geopolitics has been understood as the "spatial organization of power" on a global scale. But how does something seemingly so far beyond the individual become an emically articulated concern for people in their everyday lives? Or, in other words, how does geopolitics become “real”? Building on ethnographic fieldwork with Kosovar youth between 2018 and 2019, this paper takes affect as a modality of engagement with geopolitics. Tracing the emic articulation of a collectively felt boredom within the café routine of Kosovar youth, this paper explores how the geopolitically produced spatiotemporal hierarchies of worthiness—the world system of ranking that assigns value to different locations—are experienced in sites of everyday sociality.

In the relatively newly independent state of Kosovo, prosperity, stability and state-building are intricately linked to future EU membership. This positiontality, however, has in the local imagination rendered the polity a “not-yet,” stagnant spatiotemporal location with a felt dissonance between the actual and the possible. I trace how Kosovar youth geopoliticise the affect of boredom as a byproduct of inhabiting a “not-yet” spatiotempoal location that limits their access to the promised “European” futures. In taking seriously how youth “sense” the geopolitical positionality of their state, the paper considers affect as constitutive not only of the political, as anthropologists have long emphasized, but also of the geopolitical (Navaro-Yashin 2005; Jansen 2009; Laszcakowski and Reeves 2015). The paper also questions the possibility of maintaining two productive domains of geopolitics: as an etic, analytical category, and as an emic, lived reality.