The Improvised State: Sovereignty, Performance and Agency in Dayton Bosnia

Political Geography 39 (2014) 26e35

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Review Forum The Improvised State: Sovereignty, Performance and Agency in q Dayton Bosnia, Alex Jeffrey, in: RGS-IBG Book Series. Wiley-Blackwell, Oxford (2012). Neil M. Coe a, *, Jason Dittmer b, Nick Gill c, Anna Secor d, Lynn Staeheli e, Gerard Toal (Gearóid Ó Tuathail)f, Alex Jeffrey g a

National University of Singapore, Singapore University College London, UK University of Exeter, UK d University of Kentucky, USA e University of Durham, UK f Virginia Tech, USA g University of Cambridge, UK b c

Introduction Neil M. Coe Over the past fifteen years Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) has served as a laboratory of techniques to re-establish state sovereignty and foster democratic institutions. The post-conflict intervention in BiH has justifiably received detailed attention from political theorists and scholars of international relations who have explored the limitations to the institutions and policies of international intervention. Alex Jeffrey’s incisive and provocative book, however, starts from a different premise. Rather than examining institutions or charting limitations, it argues for a focus on the enactment of state sovereignty in BiH as it has been practised by a range of actors located both within and beyond the borders of the Bosnian state. In focussing on the state as a process, the book argues that Bosnian sovereignty is best understood as a series of improvisations that have attempted to produce and reproduce a stable and unified state. In this way this book advances state theory through

q The Royal Geographical Society with Institute of British Geographers (RGS-IBG) Book Series is published by Wiley-Blackwell. The Series, launched in 2000, publishes monographs at the cutting edge of geographical scholarship and contains nearly 40 titles. It is developing a strong reputation in the area of political geography. In addition to Alex Jeffrey’s volume, books already published in this field include People-States-Territories: The Political Geographies of British State Transformation by Rhys Jones (2007) and State, Science and the Skies: Governmentalities of the British Atmosphere by Mark Whitehead (2009). 2014 will see the publication of Merje Kuus’ Geopolitics and Expertise: Knowledge and Authority in European Diplomacy. Three other books in this area are under contract and should appear over the next two years: Peopling Immigration Control: Geographies of Governing and Activism in the British Asylum System (Nick Gill), Rehearsing the State: The Political Practices of the Tibetan Government-in-Exile (Fiona McConnell) and Everyday Peace? Politics, Citizenship and Muslim Lives in India (Philippa Williams). * Corresponding reviewer. E-mail address: [email protected] (N.M. Coe).

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2014.01.001

illuminating the fragile and contingent nature of sovereignty in contemporary BiH and its grounding in the everyday lives of the Bosnian people. Using improvisation as a means of understanding the social character of political and cultural practice has a long scholarly lineage, from structural anthropology in the 1960s through to its more recent reworking in post-structural political theory. This book builds upon this work to illustrate the symbolic and material elements of the improvisation metaphor: it is a term that simultaneously evokes performance and resourcefulness. In terms of the former, improvisation highlights the situated and embodied ways in which international agencies have attempted to perform a coherent and stable Bosnian state: from re-naming streets to inventing traditions; from implementing new legal frameworks to re-organizing state services. In terms of the latter, improvisation draws attention to the enrolment of social, cultural and economic resources in conveying and resisting nascent state processes in BiH. Such an argument draws attention to the legacy of Yugoslav pasts and the promise of European futures in validating various styles of intervention, and to the role of non-state agents in subverting and appropriating new state practices in order to convey alternative ideas of the state. The Improvised State therefore provides a grounded and theoretically sophisticated account of the nature and outcomes of Bosnian state practices in the time since the 1995 Dayton Peace Agreement. The utility of this approach, however, is not simply specific to the Bosnian case, but rather to provide a framework for understanding attempts to build state capacity in other settings at other times. Improvisation offers a means through which the production, reception and resistance to evolving state practices may be observed and theorized. It draws into sharp focus the limits of international intervention, the anti-democratic mechanisms such processes can put in place, and the significant scope for resistance to emergent state effects.

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Improvising Balkanism: a theory of politics and a politics of theory Jason Dittmer Alex Jeffrey’s The Improvised State is a thought-provoking contribution to state theory that builds on recent work in political geography to highlight the importance of spatial practices to the production of state effects. It is important not only for its theoretical contribution but also for the geographical sensibility it brings to those interested in such questions. The book is careful, based on extensive fieldwork, and yet also refreshingly punchy and brisk. Rife with ethnographic observations, The Improvised State moves from contests over the specific site of Br cko to national processes of democratization and transitional justice to EU accession politics, somehow managing to sweep along all these topics without any of them feeling underdone. While I am no expert in Bosnian politics, I found it quite convincing. Having said that, I have some concern over the politics of how the theoretical argument is substantiated in the case study. In what remains of this essay, I will first briefly trace the theoretical contribution of the book before articulating the somewhat problematic fusion of this theory to the site of post-Dayton BiH. A theory of politics Jeffrey draws on work in political geography and elsewhere emphasizing the state as an entity continually performed into existence. By focussing on the state effects of practices, he redirects our attention from the macro scale of institutions and legal sovereignty to the micro-scale practices enacting the state. This perspective has become increasingly popular over the past decade or so, but Jeffrey provides an injection of freshness through his turn to Bourdieu and the concept of improvisation. Adopting a relational approach in which the seeming permanence of the state and the ephemerality of improvisation enable one another, Jeffrey sees the state as an ongoing process of bricolage in which a range of actors pull from available resources to legitimate their various state projects. Crucially, he also highlights the methodological importance of particular state projects’ messy and contradictory specificities in comparison to the abstractions of state theory: The key contribution of improvisation is the attempt to disperse state theory through a range of settings, relationships, and dispositions. While the implications of grand historical shifts in [BiH] are clear [.], the lens of improvisation seeks to examine how different interpretations of history and geography are performed in the present, and in doing so to advocate different ideas of the present and future state. This fragments state theory, rather than providing the integrative framework of either the strategic-relational approach or structuration theory. What is left is a sense of the limits to pure theoretical reflection in the absence of empirical engagement and experience. (p. 40) This fragmentation e both spatial and temporal e calls our attention to actors normally not considered within state theory, but who are crucial to Jeffrey’s formulation. He introduces us to NGO grant writers, international administrators, graffiti artists, and others who promote particular visions of BiH. This exciting formulation of the state e as always multiple and tenuous, contested and contextual e is clearly evidenced in his account of post-Dayton BiH, with international administrators struggling to gain legitimacy and various ethnic organizations refusing participation in order to delegitimise (for instance) Br cko’s Western administrators. What plays out through the book is an ongoing struggle to establish authority and legitimacy.

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In short, I find Jeffrey’s argument compelling. And he is clear that, while affirming the importance of context in specific state projects, his argument in The Improvised State is about improvised states, plural. While the improvisations are necessarily diverse, all states are improvisations of some kind. In his concluding chapter, for instance, he points to practices of wall-building on the borders of seemingly ‘stable’ states like the USA as a symbol of the need to constantly work at the illusion of coherence even in the heart of the international system. However, this point is not particularly born out in the empirical elements of the book, centred as they are on a single state. A politics of theory I am reminded of how, in the wake of the Cold War, authors from the post-Soviet bloc and the Global South contested both poststructural criticisms of the nation-state as a social construction, and liberal efforts to render sovereignty contingent (through doctrines e since we are on the topic e such as Responsibility to Protect (R2P)). Their complaint was that just as independence, sovereignty, and equality were fully achieved, the goalposts were moved just that much further (Evans, 2008). Of course, social constructionist and liberal criticisms of the state/sovereignty applied to all countries equally. But who would invoke R2P against the United States in order to, for instance, end human rights abuses in Guantanamo Bay? Even imagining this ludicrous scenario shreds the fig leaf of equality offered. Of course, I am not advocating some conspiratorial view of Western social theory, and nor am I remotely implying anything of the sort regarding The Improvised State. Rather, I am noting that social theory has a range of political effects that must be taken into account in the way that theory is articulated. In Chapter 3, Jeffrey traces the history of Balkanism as a geopolitical discourse that marks BiH (and other regional countries) as an internal Orient, one that is not only ‘an inert space within southeast Europe that is a site of primordial deviance’ but also one that ‘has a capacity to draw in others from outside’ (p. 63). It is nevertheless possible to see Jeffrey’s account of the improvised Bosnian state as having Balkanist effects, if not Balkanist intentions. The rich, ethnographic description of the processes serving to produce state effects tacitly undermine BiH’s claim to equality with the more effective states such as the United Kingdom or Germany who intervened in Bosnian politics and whose coherence is taken for granted. Again, Jeffrey’s theoretical discussion makes it clear that this is not his intention. But close attention to Chapter 7, which is about processes of Europeanization occurring in BiH, indicates some of the hazards that are nonetheless present. This chapter has two sections, the first of which shows how the EU dangled eventual accession to motivate Bosnian leaders to implement the Dayton Accords, while the second section shows how Bosnian Serb leaders have improvised with ‘European’ discourse in order to produce their own state visions. In both sections the EU is portrayed as a stable source of power, either intervening in Bosnian politics or serving as a resource from which others can draw in their efforts to produce particular state effects. However, it is equally possible to see the EU at the time of the Bosnian War as a diverse set of actors frantically trying to establish their own state effects, improvising around events in BiH and grasping desperately towards a coherent foreign policy (Dover, 2005). Indeed, both Bosnian and European leaders were reacting to events and one another in parallel efforts to establish legitimacy, authority, and other state effects. Both ‘states’ were becoming together. Going forward Earlier I mentioned that Jeffrey’s theoretical project is about improvised states, in the plural. The problem here is that his

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fieldwork is centred on a singular state (or plural visions of a particular state). What is needed is a theoretical framework that can simultaneously accommodate both the state as emergent from everyday practices of politics, and the state as a body politic (Protevi, 2009) also becoming with other actors (both state and non-state). Such a framework exists, I believe, in assemblage theory (Dittmer, 2013). What is yet to exist, however, is a methodological toolbox enabling us to simultaneously hold the macro (the state) and the micro (improvisational practices) in relation to one another (which Jeffrey does admirably) while also embracing the multiplicity of dynamic relations occurring across borders, so to speak. Such a project is imaginable, but could be unending given the multitude of relations one would have to trace. Further, given the many points of entry to such an assemblage, one must prioritize certain relations, and certain performances. I have no answers here, but clearly experimentation is needed. Jeffrey made quite sensible, pragmatic decisions in his choice of topics and fieldwork sites. Nevertheless, by giving the EU substance in order to see the Bosnian state as improvised and fragile, he risks replicating the Balkanism he so effectively analyzes. Future studies must foreground the politics of their theory and method, not only to produce rigorous research but also to ensure we do not replicate geographical imaginaries that disadvantage Others. The contribution of improvisation to state theoretical debates in geography and beyond Nick Gill This book can be situated in a variety of traditions, and makes a range of contributions. In the area of state rebuilding in postconflict studies, for example, the book takes a specific area e the Balkans e and develops a well-worked national case study. For me though, the book’s most interesting contributions are in the area of state theory. The book continues a tradition within state theory that takes seriously the lived, enacted elements of the state as influences over the eventual forms that states take. States are not just structural, institutional entities: they are peopled (Jones, 2007) and populated with specific materials (Meehan, Shaw, & Marston, 2013, see also Anna Secor’s review below) that animate them and give a particular twist to the way ‘states’ are carried out in local contexts, or ‘performed’ as Jeffrey puts it. What follows from this is that it is often insufficient to think in singular terms about a monolithic structure labelled ‘the state’. Rather what we see are a diversity of practices more or less influenced by the notion of the state, organized in accordance with it, in opposition to it or simply by taking account of it. As Jeffrey makes clear in his second chapter, this innovative way of thinking about the state owes itself in large part to the work of Philip Abrams (1988), who emphasized that the state is as much an organizing notion or an ‘idea’ as it is a concrete set of institutions and practices. Since Abrams’ seminal work a range of geographers and others have pointed to the state idea as a way to explain the fractured nature of the state, its apparent ubiquity, and its socio-cultural status (e.g. Gill, 2010; Mountz, 2010; Painter, 2006). This book begins where these authors left off in a number of respects. First, it is a book about how the state idea gets promulgated. How can a fledgling state establish itself, not only in terms of operational and organizational capacity, but in terms of the sociocultural capital that involves belief in it, confidence in it and taking it seriously among various social actors and groups (for a discussion of the symbolic capital of the state, see Bourdieu, 1994)? Jeffrey has given a detailed account of the way the Bosnian state has sought to establish these forms of its legitimacy at a variety of scales from the local to the international. Consistently, Jeffrey answers the question

of how the state idea gets promulgated through the notion of improvisation. Although he emphasizes various elements to the workings of improvisation including the resourcefulness that it entails, a key geographical argument he makes is that the geographical imaginaries e of the fault-line, the vortex and the barrier e become mobilized as resources to help promote state legitimacy. This is a key insight and will prove valuable for theorists of the state with an anthropological and geographical bent in the years to come. Such an insight, however, raises a series of further questions. One that I pondered while reading the book concerned what being resourceful and improvising says about a state. Does improvisation reflect the actions of a strong and self-confident state, for example? We might opine that it does, since, to extend the analogy with acting or a musical performance, it is usually only very skilful performers who (are able to) improvise. Improvisation in a musical sense is something that is technically difficult to accomplish and therefore underscores the ability of the musician and their mastery of the music. On the other hand, however, Jeffrey is keen not to overstate the abilities of the Bosnian state (he reiterates that it only commands resources within specific constraints, for example). So it might be tempting to conclude that the metaphor of improvisation does not sit too comfortably with the case that is being described. If the Bosnian state is indeed fledgling and if its symbolic capital is still very much being amassed, then to what extent can we use a metaphor that conveys mastery of a difficult set of skills to capture its evolution? Nevertheless, to dismiss improvisation so quickly would not do justice to the richness of the metaphor, because improvisation can also be something that people and organizations resort to in relatively desperate times. As Jeffrey discusses in his early chapters, improvisation can be part of making do when environmental constraints impede the freedom of manoeuvre of particular actors. One only has to think of the erstwhile underprepared lecturer who has to resort to improvisation in the absence of a well-prepared set of slides to appreciate the relationship between a position of relative weakness and the obligation to improvise. So improvisation and state strength interlock in complex, non-linear ways: it is not possible to read one off from the other. A set of related points follow from these reflections. Under what circumstances, and from whose perspective, is it desirable to have a state that improvises? Is improvisation itself somehow calculated or scripted? Does improvisation stand in contrast to choreographic power perhaps, and how might we understand this relationship? And what relationship does improvisation have with other forms of state power? These are intriguing questions that the book raises and that Jeffrey, or others, may wish to reflect upon in more detail in subsequent work. The book also discusses the issue of international aid in Chapter Five, and outlines in some detail the ways in which certain sources of international aid are diverted away from knowledgeable local agencies such as the Mjesne Zajednice (MZs) towards bigger, more professionalized but sometimes more co-opted development agencies. This diversion occurs because of the differential capacity of these organizations to apply for funds, as well as some legislative limitations prohibiting MZs from applying for key sources of funding. This account of the politics of aid chimes with a range of literature about aid that is relatively pessimistic about the ability of humanitarian aid to make a positive contribution to strug gling states. Think of Zi zek’s (2009) damning critique of the hypocrisy of international aid as the mask that hides and justifies exploitative global capitalism, the sometimes condescending and power-laden nature of international aid (Korf, 2007) and the cooptation of humanitarianism by military organizations (Weizman, 2011). But for all this I wondered if the book might

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have offered a more hopeful vision of what else could have been done, if aid is really so flawed. Overall the book is detailed and thought provoking, with lots of empirical detail alongside a clear theoretical focus. It will be interesting in the years ahead to see how Jeffrey’s intellectual project evolves, but suffice it to say that he has opened up a series of engaging areas of discussion that will, I hope, feed debate among state theorists as well as political geographers in the future.

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simple yet surprising for activists to make and circulate. The book thus begins with this chair, rather than an example from BiH, because the chair works to demonstrate resourcefulness and performance, the dual elements of the process that Jeffrey is calling improvisation. The chair is not symbolic of the practices through which the state is provisionally made from what is at hand; rather, it is itself the resource and the performance, a thing that by virtue of being in the right place at the right time operates in the political field, makes things happen. The chair is thus both improvised and improvising.

The things that make the state Anna Secor What does it mean to say that the state is improvised? For Alex Jeffrey, improvisation is ‘a process that combines performance and resourcefulness’ (p. 3); in other words, improvisation involves picking up the objects at hand and enlisting them in the contingent theatre of the state. The Improvised State marks an important contribution, both theoretical and methodological, to work on ‘the everyday state’ that spans geography and anthropology (and indeed, Chapter 2 includes an excellent review of this field). Jeffrey’s in-depth case study of BiH not only demonstrates the contextual embeddedness of the reproduction of state power, but presents unique insights into the role of international money, law, and institutions in BiH. It is an impressive book, and as such lends itself to a range of readings. There is much here to play with, and that is what I intend to do. In this short essay, I will hop over Jeffrey’s text, gathering up some of the things I find and allowing them to perform what I can only call an improvised review. The things I found in Jeffrey’s text turned out to be some very interesting things indeed. They could even be said to be imbued with what Jane Bennett (2010) calls ‘thing-power’ e that is, with ‘the strange ability . to exceed their status as objects and to manifest traces of independence or aliveness, constituting the outside of our own experience’ (p. xvi). I will focus on three such things (mentioning others in passing) and their roles in state performance, improvisation, and the making of stateness. Each of these things is what Robin Bernstein (2009) calls a ‘scriptive thing’, a thing that ‘structures a performance while simultaneously allowing for resistance and unleashing original, live variations that may not be individually predictable’ (p. 69). As such, these things are the material operators that effectively set into motion the improvisation of the state. The three main things that will dance across the stage of this essay (there are others with bit parts, and still others not invited in from the wings) are a chair, a letter, and a grant proposal. It is my hope that their performance will amount to something like a review of the text at hand. The chair that launches the book Although this is a book about BiH, it begins with something different e a Palestinian chair. In 2011, when Mahmoud Abbas was seeking a vote on admitting Palestine to the UN as a member state, activists produced a chair e a blue velour chair with the name Palestine in it and the insignia the UN olive branches encircling another chair with the Palestinian flag printed on it. (I have to admit that I wanted to read that the chair on the chair had a chair printed on it, with a chair printed on it, etc., but apparently the activists rather more soberly chose to arrest the representational regress with a flag instead.) The chair, Jeffrey explains, is symbolic of the seat that Palestinians wanted in the UN, but also of course it is performative, naturalizing the image of Palestine within UN iconography, and also naturalizing assumptions about what UN recognition would mean for Palestine. The chair is something

The letter that launches a man’s political career, a new set of coordinates of governance, and a discussion of performance and performativity The second thing is a framed letter displayed on the wall of the mayor of Br cko. It turns out it is a letter from the Office of the High Representative announcing his appointment as mayor. But more than that, it marks an occasion, a scene, which the mayor acts out for Jeffrey, in which the District Supervisor pointed at him and made him mayor. Jeffrey describes the mayor’s animated reaction to his question about the letter: ‘The letter?’, he said, rising to his feet..At this point he took the letter from the wall and began to ‘act out’ the following scene, describing his appointment: ‘It was quite an occasion’, he said. ‘Three of us were in the room and the District Supervisor.entered and pointed to each in turn: you will be mayor, you will be Speaker of the Assembly and you will be Deputy Speaker.’ (p. 20). A man in a dingy office with a framed letter that pulls him to his feet, where he re-enacts the gesture of a higher official: how can one not think of Kafka? Dusty, shabby and dark, the world of the offices and registries is one in which ‘each gesture is an event e one might even say a drama e in itself’ (Benjamin 1999 [1934]: p. 802). As Jeffrey writes, the letter on the wall demonstrates the man’s legitimacy, grounding the authority that was vested in him by the District Supervisor’s gesture. Yet, the letter is more than merely the artefact of this event; it is that which provides the occasion for the mayor to leap to his feet and re-enact the event for his interviewer. The letter thus both results from and initiates this scene within which the authority of the mayor is (repetitively, performatively) founded. The proposal that launches desire There are many more things that improvise the state in this tale. Most of these things are actual things, such as the Office of the High Representative (OHR) supervisory order that performs both the administrative unity and the subjective reality of the Brcko district of BiH. Or consider the copy machines that become the sine qua non of NGO existence, both the condition of possibility for donor funding and that which donors are asked to fund. But the final thing that I wish to let loose in this improvisational theater is one that may or may not be actualized: that is, the ‘one good proposal’ that Jeffrey calls ‘cultural capital.in material form’ (p. 121). This is the NGO’s proposal to international funding agencies or donors. As a material form, the document is not taken to be some kind of organic or transparent expression of the NGOs mission or plan, but rather it is a performative object, like the chair or the letter or the decree, an object that calls forth certain kinds of legitimacy and, by attracting funding, makes certain things appear or occur. Through the proposal, the NGO as an agent and a symbol is set into motion. In fact, the power of the material object is such

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that it is in some ways distracting for indeed the offices themselves, Jeffrey points out, come to hold cultural capital; as mentioned above, the appearance and performance of being an NGO is tied up with the copy machine. But there is something different about the ‘one good proposal.’ Unlike the chair or the OHR order, we do not have a picture of one, and there is no one particular proposal that features as a specific agent in Jeffrey’s revealing tale of how civil society is made. The proposal is a thing that operates virtually. The ‘one good proposal’ names both a material object and a desire e the desire for (and of) the ideal image of the NGO projected before the international Other. The things that we encounter in Jeffrey’s book are active. A UNlooking chair on tour performs international legitimacy in its very ordinariness. A framed letter on the mayor of Br cko’s wall is not, after all, a static document, but initiates the becoming-official of the man in the office as he re-enacts the founding of his authority in the gesture of the higher-up. A supervisory order ostensibly establishing the district of Br cko situates the law in the materiality of a decree that must endlessly reiterate its founding performance (rather like the mayor). We have cycles of civil society funding animated by copy machines. And finally, we have the grant proposal that promises to solidify the cultural capital of the NGO in material form, yet itself is no more solid than a desire projected within the field of the international gaze. Through this multitude of things, Jeffrey’s book throws open the ordinary, contingent, repetitive, and material improvisation of the state. Improvised civil society and the possibilities for democratic politics in BosniaeHerzegovina Lynn Staeheli Alex Jeffrey has provided a compelling account of state building in post-Dayton BiH. The Improvised State provides a rich account that: details the use of spatial metaphors in explaining conflict; traces the process of creating e or in his terms, performing and improvising e a district that accommodates ethno-religious communities; analyzes the ways in which civil society is built in the context of a country that had become distinctly uncivil; questions the role of a justice system that is largely imposed from above; and explores the lure of ‘Europe’ in creating a new democratic country. It is a surprisingly short book, given the terrain that is covered. And it is a book that could only have been written on the basis of sustained engagement with BiH, the people, the institutions, and the practices and performances within it. There is a lot in this book, but it nevertheless raises even more questions. For me, these are questions about the possibilities for democracy and the multiple roles of civil society. The book is not very optimistic in this regard (even if accurate), as it points to the intransigence of certain actors and interests, be those ethno-national parties that seem undeterred in their efforts to sustain nationalist practices and ethnically-cleansed territories, or be they international organizations that seem to have a fixed idea about how BiH should be constituted. While one might be tempted to think that BiH is somehow unique or hope that the stories Alex recounts are most pertinent to a recent history of conflict, I think his detailed accounting of post-Dayton BiH raises important questions for future performances of democracy, there and beyond. Reading the book, it becomes clear how difficult it is to imagine and to improvise a state after such a bloody conflict. Richard Holbrook was fond of saying that the Dayton Accord at least stopped the killing, and that is undeniably important. But it is also argued that a sustainable democracy requires agreement on a common or agreed upon national narrative, even if it is a myth. What the post-Dayton period demonstrated was how difficult it was to find

that commonality. In their efforts to find it, however, international organizations drew on one of the most reliable resources in their toolkit: civil society. The early 1990s were times of optimism with the post-socialist transitions that, while undeniably difficult, seemed to reinforce the belief that civil society could be the basis upon which more democratic governance structures could be built; the question of whether there was really evidence to support that is different to the resources provided through this belief. The ‘democracy industry’ developed training manuals and programming to ‘teach’ civil society in places where it was argued not to have previously existed, and universities offered degrees in conflict resolution, peace-building and human rights that relied upon civil society. It is a truism to say that Poland is not BiH, but the methodology of civil society nevertheless seems broadly consistent across the countries in which the democracy industry operates. Yet BiH posed e and continues to pose e a challenge. Arguably, the issue was not so much how to build a civil society where none had existed, but rather how to overcome or bypass a ‘bad’ civil society that had come into being through the war. Alex’s account is clear in detailing the steps taken by international donors to create, legitimate, and regulate a particular kind of civil society, as well as the exasperation they express when the form of civil society they desire is actually created. The exclamation ‘not another copier!’ can be heard throughout the donor world, and not just with respect to BiH. Furthermore, his account of contradictory roles enacted by NGOs and other organizations is apt. It is tempting to describe their roles as paradoxical and perhaps unintended: organizations may attempt to hold the state to account, even as they compensate for a state apparatus that is dysfunctional by providing services directly to the population. Yet one suspects that this dual role was recognized, if not necessarily desired. It was improvised in the specific sense of the term as Alex uses it: a performance drawing on the resources at hand, rather than in terms of being an ad hoc or impromptu invention. The state that was designed by international powers was intentionally weak, in large measure to buy agreement. Yet it was designed at a time when ideologies underpinning governance internationally and within donor communities emphasized a smaller role for government in terms of social welfare provision, more active forms of citizenship, and a reliance on civil society for service provision; in other words, neoliberalism and reliance on post-democratic practices of governance were key resources for this improvisation. Indeed, it is possible to tell a story of post-politics and neoliberalism as civil society was institutionalized in its particular forms in BiH and as the state was designed, performed, improvised. Alex does not use those terms directly, but it is easy to narrate the institutionalization of civil society and the state. Yet there is also a story to tell about the incompleteness of these projects, a story that Alex hints at, but does not really tell. This may be because it is not the story he wants to tell, because his empirical work had moved on as he focused on other aspects of state formation (e.g., through the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, or ICTY), or for any number of other reasons. It is, however, an interesting story, because it highlights the ambiguity of civil society, even when regulated. More than a story of the incomplete project of institutionalization (as with the Roma), it is a story of the impossibility of completely regulating civil society and of the ambiguity of the e potentially unruly e politics of agents within civil society, despite the efforts to depoliticize the sphere. The evidence of this incompleteness and ambiguity surfaced in the summer and autumn of 2013, after the book was published.1 During June and July, some of the largest protests since the war were held outside the Parliament. The structure of the parliament makes it easier for MPs to block legislation than to pass it, and MPs repeatedly failed to renew the legislation that allowed identity

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numbers to be issued for newly born children. These identity numbers were required for babies to gain access to health care, either in the country or to leave the country for care. In the absence of the identity numbers, one baby died and another baby nearly died before an emergency bill was passed. The so-called ‘babies protests’ attempted to force the parliament to take action, but ultimately seem to have withered. While the protests were underway, however, organizers from registered NGOs that received international funding could be seen. When asked about it, one representative explained that the movement was organized by about seven people, six of whom were NGO people. The NGOs did not overtly support the protests, but it seemed that there was some logistical support. Furthermore, the organizers were clear that the issue that mobilized people was not just about babies and identity numbers, but was about fundamental issues of government accountability and legitimacy, which were the reasons the NGOs attracted donor funding in the first place. If the protests were successful, however, there was a possibility that the scaffolding of government could have collapsed. What this example points to is the incompleteness of gentrification processes in civil society and the tension between donors’ strategy of using civil society to both hold the state to account and to sustain it. Furthermore, seemingly banal, ordinary acts of the improvised state may prove to be its undoing e or at least require further improvisations. The first census since 1990 has just been completed. There is some worry that if significant numbers of people eschew ethno-religious identities, the complex balancing act that sustains the state will collapse. In a trial of the census questionnaire, for instance, 35 percent of respondents self-identified as ‘Bosnia and/or Herzegovinian.’ Worried this suggested a growing portion of primarily young people were identifying as citizens of the country rather in terms of nationality, nationalist parties e in a moment of unity e worked to exclude the category in the final census questionnaire (Pasic, 2013). In response, some civil society organizations launched campaigns to encourage young people to ‘be yourself’ and not succumb to nationalist parties’ efforts to force ethno-religious identification. As above, some of these organizations received funding from international donors that were also involved in constructing the scaffolding of the government, a scaffolding that in many ways relied on stable ethnoreligious identification, as least at the moment it was constructed. It is in this context that the concept of ‘improvisation’ is so powerful. Using the political and financial resources available at the time, international and national organizations and agents constructed something that performed e poorly perhaps, but performed nevertheless e as a state. Importantly, however, it seems that there are alternative performances and improvisations that simultaneously sustain and undermine the state, and that draw on the same pool of resources provided to the state. While Alex notes the competing understandings of the state, it was not really his purpose to explore the temporality of state improvisations. This seems, however, a useful idea to take forward and to attend to the multiple improvisations e as discordant as they may seem e that civil society and non-state agents attempt. It may be through the cacophonous improvisations of civil society in relation to the state and political action that the possibilities of democratic politics can be assessed. Legitimacy questions Gerard Toal (Gearóid Ó Tuathail) In the sumptuous office of Milorad Dodik, President of Republika Srpska (RS), there is a framed passage of text from former High

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Representative Paddy Ashdown’s memoir Swords and Ploughshares. Ashdown writes about a favour he asked of his countryman Chris Patton, British EU Commissioner for External Relations from 2000 to 2004: I rang and asked him if he would weigh in as Commissioner and say that these reforms were required if BiH wanted to join Europe. As always he agreed, and we drafted a letter for him to send to the presidents along these lines, which received a lot of press and gave us crucial support at a key time (Ashdown, 2007: p. 249). Herein is the corruption and double standards of the international community in BiH as Dodik sees it: using a private connection to give an unelected official’s personal policies an official European imprimatur irrespective of the opinion of BiH’s elected politicians. Abusing and exceeding his powers in BiH, according to Dodik, Ashdown made it up as he went along. Improvisations of power, and their legitimacy, are central to political debate in contemporary BiH. That BiH, nonexistent between 1929 and 1944, could be an independent state was strongly rejected by Serb and Croat nationalist forces in 1991. To them BiH was an ‘artificial’ republic. Codifying a legal framework for managing the dissolution of Yugoslavia, the Badinter Commission announced consideration of applications of intent for independence on 10 January 1991. BiH’s government submitted one on 20 December 1991. Nationalist Serbs responded by declaring a Republic of Serb BiH on the day before the deadline: 9 January 1992. Thereafter war erupted between what was a legally recognized independent state of BiH and two secessionist entities, RS and Herceg Bosna, both of which enjoyed support from neighbouring Serbia and Croatia respectively. The Dayton Accords give international legal legitimacy and considerable power to RS as an entity in the new BiH it sanctioned but invested sovereignty with weak power resources in a central state. Since then BiH has struggled to reconcile the state aspirations and power resources of RS with legal but weak central state sovereignty. Dodik’s critique of Ashdown was yet another skirmish in this struggle, one which turns on questions of legitimacy, legality and relative power resources to perform ‘stateness.’ Alex Jeffrey’s The Improvised State: Sovereignty, Performance and Agency in Dayton Bosnia provides a partial investigation of BiH’s rich case history of state improvisation while offering a much broader argument about state building and legitimacy. Beginning with the case of a non-recognized state (the Palestinian Authority), the argument is thus: ‘performance is at the heart of attempts to convey state legitimacy. States are improvised. Their legitimacy and ability to lay claim to rule rely on a capacity to perform their power’ (p. 2). Note that ‘sovereignty,’ a term that requires consideration of international law, is missing from this claim though it is the first term in the book’s subtitle. (Dodik would be pleased with this definition.) Performance and agency in the production of legitimacy is Jeffrey’s core interest. He restates this general theory in conclusion: ‘All assertions of statehood are improvisations, since statehood is secured through repeated performances of power. That such improvisations do not appear impromptu and contested is an illustration of the unequal power position of different states and their ability to present their actions as uncontested and timeless’ (p. 178). There is no distinction between performance and improvisation here. A narrower understanding of ‘improvisation’ as a subset of performance as a general category, a particular form of performance marked by a certain transparency of purpose and lingering legitimacy questions, is not what Jeffrey addresses. The other form of performance, fully discussed but not cited as a distinctive form in the book, is legally recognized ritualized tradition, the scripted acts of statecraft that have achieved legitimacy.

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Both are collapsed into the notion of the ‘improvised state,’ with ‘legitimacy’ (including internationally recognized legal sovereignty) in a condition of aspiration (‘to convey’) rather than achievement. Jeffrey’s elaboration of this as ‘adaptive resourcefulness’ drawing upon Levi-Strauss and Bourdieu is sophisticated but the book’s argumentative claim is a very general one. Perhaps a different way of stating the argument is that all states ‘fake-it-to-make-it’ but that only some e with greater power resources and practice, with perhaps slicker production capacities e actually become legitimated sovereign states. The above phrase ‘unequal power position of different states’ elides a great deal of geography and geopolitics that could have used greater elaboration in the book. There is a surprising absence of discussion of the process by which state sovereignty is recognized in certain cases but not in other cases. Certain improvisations of the state successfully produce legitimacy in the form of internationally recognized legal sovereignty over delimited territory by many members of the international community (e.g. Kosovo, which is now recognized by 105 states) whereas other effort-full improvisations by de facto states acquire little (e.g. Abkhazia, South Ossetia) or no international recognition (e.g. Transnistria, the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic). Legitimacy, however, is a slippery notion involving much more than the ‘external legitimacy’ that comes from recognition of sovereignty under international law. Most de facto states have genuine local ‘internal legitimacy’ that is a product of multiple factors: their foundational myths, their ethno-territorial claims, their performance of state activities, their practices of democracy, etc. Yet even ‘internal legitimacy’ needs to be disaggregated (Baake, O’Loughlin, Toal, & Ward, 2013). Further, some state improvisers are rich yet lack widespread recognition (e.g. Taiwan) whereas others enjoy de jure sovereignty but are relatively impoverished (e.g. Moldova, which lacks de facto sovereignty over its internationally recognized territory). There are many permutations and possibilities. BiH is an excellent research site to explore the difference between de jure and de facto state improvisation, the scalar paradoxes of legitimacy, differential power resources between centre and entity, and the contradictions of internationally-sponsored state building. Jeffrey’s account largely explores only the latter, in effect a case study within a case study. There is reference but little systematic discussion of RS’s twenty-year history of state improvisation. Instead, Jeffrey’s object of analysis, and critique, is the international community’s role in state building Dayton BiH. Here the book comes into its own and we encounter the legitimacy questions that bother Jeffrey the most: democracy, accountability and international state building. Jeffrey’s limited focus is understandable given how complex ‘Dayton Bosnia’ was when created and became thereafter. Jeffrey’s locations of state improvisation are the production of the Br cko District, the effort by the Br cko Supervisory Authority to incite a ‘civil society’ it could deal with in the area, and the establishment of the BiH State War Crimes Court. In each case, the argument is rich and compelling. Chapter 4, “Producing the Brcko District’, is an excellent introduction to this most unusual space. The dilemmas of setting up a ‘third space’ local government are laid out very well, and the ‘social engineering’ trap that it quickly created for the international community. Chapter 5 explores how the District sought to justify its rule in ‘civil society’ and how this ended up inducing certain practices by local NGOs to affirm this ‘democratization without elections’ policy. The key notion of ‘gentrifying’ civil society, however, is underspecified. The conclusion here strikes me as harsh, and perhaps more formulaic than BiH specific (p. 130). Chapter 6 e on notions of justice and processes of contestation e is a terrific chapter, the best in the book, and one that underscores a fundamental issue in BiH. As interviewee Sanela says (p. 148): ‘People don’t trust

anybody.the biggest problem is that we are traumatized, we are all victims.’ In all chapters there is a pull-back summary that retreats a bit too far from the empirical case, in my opinion, to overly broad generalizations. One could argue that the ‘improvisation’ analytic in the book is both under-utilized relative to BiH’s history as a whole and deployed in too undifferentiated a manner in the study site chapters. By definition, these sites do not provide a ‘big picture’ view of BiH’s experience over the last two decades. Just as BiH is a very distinctive case in the world of states, Br cko is a very unusual place in BiH. Chapter 7 on Europeanization seeks to pull back somewhat and, while valuable, disappointingly does not engage the growing literature on EU enlargement and conditionality in the Balkans. Jeffrey is clearly troubled by the legitimacy of international led state building in BiH: about the lack of democratic governance in Br cko in the early years of the District, about democratic governance that closes down debate (p. 130), about the compromised nature of transitional justice, about enduring Balkanist imaginaries in the process of Europeanization. Are the international community’s efforts in BiH, therefore, illegitimate? Jeffrey never tells us for the book largely avoids taking any position on the broader politics of state improvisation in BiH and the Gordian knot of dilemmas facing contemporary BiH (academic literature discussion has priority throughout). In advancing a very general theory of state improvisation, it does not equip us well to see certain performances as illegal improvisations and others as legal performances grounded in international law. This is good news for Milorad Dodik. In building an elaborate governmental complex in Banja Luka, demonstratively demarcating the RS’s ‘borders’ and calling for a referendum on the RS’s status in 2014, Dodik is continuing the practice of improvising (in the narrow sense) RS to simulate stateness (Toal, 2013). But where legally recognized sovereignty resides matters. Dodik and Ashdown may appear to be equivalently improvising a state but we would do well to have theory that can clearly distinguish between them and their sources of legitimacy. Politics, time and materials Alex Jeffrey These commentaries reanimate a series of lively debates regarding the nature of a state’s existence, how ideas of the state are asserted and the political implications of subsequent knowledge claims. I am indebted to the authors for their close reading of The Improvised State and their diverse and insightful reflections. It is an enviable position to be able to write a response; it cultivates a sense of the book as a point of departure rather than a moment of closure. I should perhaps start by addressing the comments of Jason Dittmer and Gerard Toal who constructively point to the potential political interpretations of e or silences within e The Improvised State. While Dittmer suggests my argument could be read as bolstering Balkanism (an imagined geography of a regressive and deviant Balkans in contrast to a positive image of the West), Toal argues that the analysis edges towards a form of relativism which fails to discern between the claims to statehood of the RS (the territory within BiH established at the 1995 Dayton Agreement politically aligned to Serb causes) and the internationally-sponsored BiH state. Balkanism is an important discursive backdrop to the events analyzed in the book. It is a psychological framework that has been materialized in BiH society and politics through the ethnic matrix of institutions and territories established at the General Framework Agreement for Peace (GFAP). It stalks conversations about BiH, fostering as it does a belief in the inevitability of violence in tandem with an erasure of the complex histories and

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geographies of the region (see Todorova, 1997). There is certainly a risk of reproducing a sense of the fragility of the BiH state through the emphasis placed on improvisation. Dittmer is right that arguing for the improvised nature of the BiH state almost invites a mental hierarchy between the imagined scripted statehood of Western Europe elevated above the successor states of Yugoslavia (or elsewhere in Eastern Europe or the former Soviet Union). But this is not the interpretation in the book; it is a reflection of the durability of Balkanism in the interpretive framework of the reader. My concern with Dittmer’s suggestion is that it assumes that the use of improvisation in the book is either pejorative or exclusive: I argue in the conclusion that all states are improvised since it is a means through which assertions of statehood are made legible. The lens of improvisation is a means of analyzing performances of power and the forms of resources on which they are based, rather than a judgement upon the legitimacy or otherwise of certain state projects (and this causes problems, see the discussion on Toal’s comments below). That this is more evident in the case of BiH is a consequence of the plural claims to statehood that coexist and the experimental nature of state building undertaken since 1995s GFAP. Performances by more established states could be understood as more ‘scripted’, but this is a reflection of their greater symbolic and material resources. It is a reflection of power rather than evidence of a different species of political entity. Central to the responses of Toal and, to a lesser extent, Dittmer is the question of what claims can be made following the research in BiH, and the allied issue of the generalizability of the concept of improvisation. Here I am reminded of James Ferguson’s (2006) Global Shadows where he traces a choice facing anthropologists between retreating to intellectually-satisfying ethnographic specificity or the uncertain project of contributing to debates on regional and global politics. From the outset I envisaged improvisation as a means through which all claims to the state may be illuminated as embodied and material practices that assert legitimacy of rule. In this regard I grateful for Anna Secor’s and Dittmer’s interventions which illuminate respectively the benefits of a more avowedly material or assemblage-based understanding of these processes. But this leads to a problem of relativism; that discerning between different improvisations of the state becomes difficult. Not least, as Toal illustrates, we come to the problem of how we differentiate between an internationally-sponsored BiH state and the exclusionary nationalism of the RS. Toal argues that ‘we would do well to have theory that can clearly distinguish between them and their sources of legitimacy.’ This point strikes at the heart of both the concept of the improvised state and the purpose of theory in general. There are a number of potential responses. The first would be to argue that the job of theory is not to help with questions of morality of this kind (see Caveraro, 2002). In this framework I could argue that there is no natural basis upon which the legitimacy of a state may be justified. Legitimacy is itself a resource (since it secures a social contract internally and leads to international recognition externally) and consequently it is internalized within an understanding of improvisation that incorporates both performance and resourcefulness. Therefore the means of distinguishing between states is based on how observers (both internally and externally) recognize legitimacy. But before I continue down this path, the dangers of this are clear: it can lead to the sorts of relativism that not only permitted international observers to delay intervention in the conflict in BiH but it is also a form of politics that stalks revisionist histories of the conflict itself (see, for example, Johnstone, 2002). So a second response would be that I am less neutral concerning claims to statehood than Toal suggests. There are important moments, under-emphasized in Toal’s eyes, where the legitimacy of different claims to statehood is illuminated. Placing

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‘resourcefulness’ at the heart of improvisation is not simply a claim to economic resources, but is rather a means through which the wide array of social and cultural attributes of state claims may be evaluated (literally granted value). The RS has prevailed as a political project through the creation of ethnocratic political institutions at both entity and municipal levels, where ethnic identity and assertions of rule are entwined (a process meticulously illuminated in Toal & Dahlman, 2011). The legitimacy of these practices is questioned in almost every chapter of the book. Ethnocracy is based on claims to primordial ethnic difference (which I undermine in discussions of the illusory historical basis of ethnicity), the veracity of historical antagonisms (which I expose as e at best e simplifications) and the prosecution of mass violations of humanitarian law (which I argue have been suppressed within internal political debate within the RS). Indeed, it is a lens of improvisation which allows us to contest the RS’s claim to statehood. That it also highlights the potential fragility of an internationally-sanctioned BiH is not a claim of relativism, but rather a chance to illustrate the more robust resources on which BiH is based (for example a civic conception of citizenship, a desire to prosecute crimes of the past, or an assertion of universal jurisdiction of law across BiH territory). It is here that I can also respond to Nick Gill’s important point: improvisation requires certain skills, as in the case of the jazz musician with an understanding of melody and chord-scale systems. But this is the point behind the emphasis on resourcefulness; certain state practices have become reified as the legitimate articulation of rule, whether this be a necessity for democratic participation (so central to discourses of international intervention), freedom of association (at the heart of attempts to foster civil society), the recognition of certain rights (the application of rule of law and the implementation of the European Union Framework on Human Rights) or ensuring responsibility for security (the establishment of an integrated and professionalized armed forces with an aspiration for NATO membership). In Bourdieu’s terminology these are the credentials to lay claim to state making. It is such elements of state practice that ensure recognition of external sovereignty, and thus are themselves crucial elements to successful improvisations of the state. Toal is right: improvisation does not provide a toolkit for arbitrating on the legitimacy of states, but in The Improvised State the relative abilities to lay claim to legitimacy are placed under scrutiny. Lynn Staeheli’s comments are a reminder that sovereignty is secured over space through claims of immutability, where legitimacy is derived from the state’s imagined archaic historical roots. For example, while the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus declared its independence in November 1983 its website’s chronological history begins at 8500 BC with the arrival of hunter gathers on the island of Cyprus (Cypnet.co.uk, 2013). Perhaps the ultimate expression of timeless legitimacy is classical Greek interpretations of autochthony, where the bodies of the polity are imagined to have literally emerged from the soil, thereby entwining the flesh and the earth (see Elden, 2013). It is for this reason that museums and maps hold such significance in Anderson’s (1991) imagined communities, as sites where a coherent narrative of existence may be traced through material artefacts. But the most tangible signs of contestation surely exist when such performances of permanence are inscribed on a material as ephemeral as the human body. The census, another key moment in Anderson’s schema of collective imagination, involves such a practice and has consequently become a fraught arbiter of the legitimacy of the state in the fragmented political landscape of BiH. This contestation reflects another key challenge of temporality: the census will fix the ethnic breakdown and become the framework upon which a whole series of ethnic algorithms function in Dayton BiH (as has been the case with the 1991 Yugoslav census, so talismanic in GFAP negotiations). It is

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precisely this concern e alongside serious domestic political opposition e that delayed the carrying out of the census, since it may well reify the demographic changes wrought through ethnic cleansing during the 1990s. This points to a second aspect of temporality raised by Staeheli: when can we draw conclusions over practices of state building? The language of ‘exit strategy’, ‘mission accomplished’ and ‘completion mandate’ reflect a desire amongst international intervening agencies to impose a clear chronology on the uncertain temporalities of state reconstruction. It is a discourse of finality that is reassuring both to intervening agents and domestic electorates. In contrast, it is important to conceive of these practices as unfinished, and I agree with Staeheli that the ambiguities and continuities in the nature of BiH civil society need to be traced forward through time. In this sense the purpose of foregrounding improvisation is to remain vigilant to these re-performances of the state and consequently trace the (often gradual) reformulation of expectations of civil society. Staeheli’s comments gesture at one of the difficulties of writing about project-cycles, reporting to donors, funding proposals and roundtables e taking these seriously can begin to reify these practices as the only activities of such organizations: we start seeing like a state (Scott, 1998). Instead, and following Corbridge, Williams, Srivastava, and Véron (2005), we need to see these forms of bureaucratic and administrative performance in the context of the personal biographies of those involved; the regulatory frameworks that they are challenging; their links with formal political parties, and their international links with global sponsors. I illuminated some of these issues in The Improvised State, but as Staeheli rightly points out, there is more work to be done tracing the practices of civil society in BiH. The final task is to reflect on the question of materiality. As claims of timelessness attempt to stabilize the state in time, so the materialization of the state are performances that attempt to fix it in space. To use another military term, producing appropriate materials ensures the state becomes a ‘fact on the ground’. It is for this reason I am indebted to Secor’s illumination of the material traces of statehood as they are explored in the book. The book lacks a systematic engagement with the politics of materiality and, in particular, the hybrid geographies of state making involving both human and non-human actors. I have tried to begin to address this elsewhere (Jeffrey & Jakala, 2014) but this remains a significant theoretical and empirical challenge, not least gaining access to the resources needed to conduct a long-term ethnography of things (Latour, 2010). But one of the emerging concerns (and returning to the question of temporality) is that a focus on materials can grant these objects permanence and stability. Instead we need to be attentive to the different phases of material existence (Anderson & Wylie, 2009), emphasized when speaking of the decay of human bodies (both alive and dead), the deterioration of past state symbols (encapsulated in Yugo-nostalgic images of the crumbing 1984 Winter Olympics venues in and around Sarajevo) or the growth of wildlife around the heavily-mined former frontlines. In these terms materiality affords a series of new lines of analysis, for example foregrounding the role of decomposition of materials and bodies as a form of non-human agency, a process that Caitlin DeSilvey (2006: p. 323) notes may not be dismissed as ‘erasure’ but rather as ‘generative of a different kind of knowledge.’ I would like to end by thanking again the five commentators and Neil Coe for organizing the forum and the session at the 2013 Annual Meeting of the Association of American Geographers in Los Angeles on which it is based. Inevitably this piece provides an inadequate response to the wide range of issues raised in this forum. Instead it offers some sightlines of future directions for the concept of improvisation and points to its limitations. Of course,

each of these is embedded in range of disciplinary contexts. The question of the politics of the improvised state strikes at concerns of normativity that have emerged over the last decade in feminist geopolitics. The centrality of time and temporality encourages reflection on rhythms, cycles and imaginaries of progression that have been critiqued in post-colonial and post-development literature. And the significance of materiality reflects the profound convergence that has taken place between cultural and political geography in recent years. Hopefully concepts such as improvisation provide an opportunity to trace across these varied intellectual concerns and consider their implications for practices of politics after violence. Endnote 1

Support for the research in 2013 was provided by European Research Council grant ERC-2011-AdG-295392, YouCitizen.

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Toal, G., & Dahlman, C. (2011). Bosnia remade: Ethnic cleansing and its reversal. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. Todorova, M. (1997). Imagining the Balkans. New York: Oxford University Press. Weizman, E. (2011). The least of all possible evils: Humanitarian violence from Arendt to Gaza. New York: Verso Books.  Zi zek, S. (2009). Violence: Six sideways reflections. London: Profile Books.