‘The state killed my child’: security, justice and affective sociality in the European periphery

When the small gatherings of concerned citizens started at the main Krajina square in Banja Luka, following the disappearance of the 21-year-old electrical engineering student, David Dragičević, on 18 March 2018, nobody could have predicted that they would evolve into large-scale and the longest-lasting protests in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) with the Justice for David (JFD) and Justice for Dženan movements crossing BiH’s administrative and ethnic borders. David’s case, allegedly at the hand of some of the Republika Srpska police members, was brought into connection with another unresolved murder case, the one of the 22year-old Dženan Memić who died in February 2016 in Sarajevo under suspicious circumstances, allegedly at the hand of people close to the ruling Party of Democratic Action (SDA). Both cases faced attempted silencing, tampering with evidence and altogether lacked proper police investigation or prosecution by the judiciary for months on end, spurring the social protests against the current state structures. As the constitutional design plays a crucial role within the ongoing crisis of the country, it is important to give the contours of BiH setup. After the 1992–1995 war, the country has been divided into the two entities and Brčko district and has since Dayton Peace Agreement (Dayton) been ruled by ethnonationalist political elites, most notably the SDA and the SNSD. The two fathers organising the protests, Davor Dragičević and Muriz Memić, blamed the dominant political parties in the two entities, SDA in the Federation of BiH and SNSD in the Republika Srpska (RS), including the entity police and judiciary for what happened to their children. Amidst negligence and lack of due procedure necessary to resolve the cases, citizens of Banja Luka and Sarajevo joined the protests, symbolically and organically uniting Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) for the first time. These two cases also forged new relationships and forms of affective sociality within which security-related stakes and concerns rearticulated security as care but also the meaning social justice in this European periphery. Photo 1 by Aleksandar Trifunović, Buka magazine