An Ideal Direction? The Nobel Prize to Peter Handke

Last week, the Nobel Prize for Literature 2019 was awarded to the Austrian Peter Handke for “an influential work that with linguistic ingenuity has explored the periphery and the specificity of human experience.” However, beyond his literary merit, Handke is well-known for his revisionist interpretation of the 1990s conflict in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Against a background of …

Esperimenti di politica umanitaria

Negli ultimi quindici anni, le politiche del lavoro in Bosnia-Erzegovina hanno conosciuto un processo di umanitarizzazione. Con ciò mi riferisco al crescente utilizzo di sentimenti morali nelle rivendicazioni politiche dei lavoratori, in particolare l’uso delle emozioni che dirigono la nostra attenzione alla sofferenza degli altri e ci fanno desiderare di porvi rimedio (Fassin 2012: 1). …

Worker experiments in humanitarian politics

This post is part of a series linked to the workshop “Assessing the Anthropology of Humanitarianism: Ethnography, Impact, Critique”. ————————————————– Over the last decade and a half, labor politics in Bosnia-Herzegovina has become humanitarianized. By humanitarianize I mean the increasingly common deployment of moral sentiments in worker actions and political campaigns, particularly the “emotions that …