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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

This paper explores how the city of East Sarajevo is lived, narrated, and consolidated through generationally differentiated ways of inhabiting the post-Yugoslav present in contemporary Bosnia and Herzegovina. Drawing on fourteen months of ethnographic fieldwork, it examines how this newly built city emerges as a socio-temporal formation in which the aftermaths of socialist Yugoslavia, the Bosnian War (1992-1995), and the political order produced by the Dayton Peace Agreement (1995) are continuously negotiated in everyday life.

Building on the concept of generational positioning (Palmberger 2016), the paper traces how experiences of historical rupture are interpreted and reworked across different life-course positions and within intimate family relations. Rather than treating generations as fixed cohorts, it shows how generational temporalities are relationally produced through socio-historical experience, everyday practices, and intergenerational encounters. The family emerges as a key mediating site through which past, present, and future orientations are negotiated, shaping attachments to place and legitimizing East Sarajevo as a distinct “Serbian” urban space.

Foregrounding the city as a relationally constituted socio-temporal landscape, the study demonstrates how personal biographies, inherited memories, and political claims become entangled in the domain of the everyday. By tracing the generationally differentiated and intimately situated practices of (non-)remembering, it shows how the contemporary ethno-national reality is both normalized and, at moments, unsettled through everyday temporal orientations. The findings illuminate how these orientations tend to sustain the present Dayton order by constraining political imagination and delimiting future horizons, while simultaneously creating fragile openings of possibility within and across generations.