What about the workers? Precarity in Post-Conflict Yugoslavia

Difficult to define and measure, precarity is worth analysing for its social impacts. Prior to its collapse, the Yugoslav labour market experienced distress, pummelled by impacts of global integration as well as by management problems. Balkan peace entailed a transformative reordering of the pre-war and wartime political economies. The contention of this presentation is that the post-conflict political economy of labour has been neglected (with notable exceptions), particularly in the conflict studies literature which has focused on war economies. Yet for over twenty years of external intervention and administration in Bosnia and Herzegovina and Kosovo, labour has suffered chronic precarity. And although workers throughout post-conflict Yugoslavia have exerted agency to cope with and resist austerity, labour rights shrank significantly. To what extent is post-Yugoslavian peace disfigurement simply integrated with a global phenomenon of precarity? Did the violence even make a long-term difference, and have the reactions of Balkan workers been moulded by distinctive cultures and identities?

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