This study examines the impact of reconfigurations of work and foreign interventions in contemporary social transformations. Specifically, it explores how a new, foreign-funded project-based employment sector contributes to the reconfiguration of social inequalities in postwar, postsocialist, internationally-supervised Sarajevo. Positioned primarily against those in permanent publicly-funded jobs, still widely regarded as a norm, this local category is marked by permanent insecurity, a project-to-project way of life – a specific precarity along with certain privileges, produced by the transformation of labour under the umbrella of postwar humanitarian, peacebuilding, democratising intervention. Are they a distinct social group? How do project-based work experiences affect broader temporal reasoning? I will trace work trajectories as strategies of social reproduction, with special focus on possible changes in socio-economic status and in heteronormative patriarchal kinship relations.

A full-length study is available here.