Dissatisfied citizens: Ethnonational governance, teachers’ strike and professional solidarity in mostar, Bosnia–Herzegovina

This ethnographic and anthropological study documents the contours of professional solidarity among teachers in postwar and postsocialist Bosnia-Herzegovina. The article illustrates how ethnically divided Croat and Bosniak teachers at the first ‘reunified’ school in postwar Bosnia and Herzegovina – the famed Mostar Gymnasium – came together to strike together, and to voice their profession-shaped citizen demands. These teachers frequently referred to themselves as nezadovoljni gradani or dissatisfied citizens, stressing the generational, moral and economic aspects of their predicament. The combined feelings of citizen-dissatisfaction, loss of social status and being left out of administrative procedures – which enable access to rightful entitlements – led to the formation of a teachers’ protest group across the lines of ethnic citizenship. These joint actions generated a shift in the teachers’ political subjectivities, however provisional, and they probed the horizon of ethnic politics in postwar and postsocialist Bosnia.