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Paper short abstract

This paper examines East Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, through the analytical lens of generation, foregrounding the city as a socio-temporal landscape shaped by generationally differentiated engagements with historical rupture, family memory, and ethno-national political claims in everyday life.

Paper long abstract

Thirty years after the Dayton Peace Agreement (DPA), the rupture that founded the city of Istočno Sarajevo (East Sarajevo) continues to organize everyday life, including for those generations with no direct memory of it. Drawing on fourteen months of ethnographic fieldwork with forty-seven participants across four generations, including seven multi-generational families, this article examines how the city’s post-war generations, whom I term the Daytonians, relate to the enduring consequences of socialist Yugoslavia’s dissolution, the Bosnian War (1992-1995), and the Dayton settlement that produced their city. Extending Palmberger’s (2016) typology of Yugoslav generations, I distinguish the First Daytonians, whose childhoods unfolded amid post-war instability and who engage the contested past through a defensive orientation, from the Mature Daytonians, who grew up within a consolidated Dayton order and inhabit it through normalization. I argue that each generation inhabits the aftermaths of this politically unresolved rupture from distinct temporal horizons. These differentiated generational positionings take shape within the family, the primary unit of belonging in IS and the principal channel through which the past is transmitted, and among peers, whose shared relation to the post-war period consolidates each positioning. While the Daytonians actively manage this inheritance, their positionings remain situated within the political order established by the DPA, which continues to delimit the futures imaginable within it.