Opening of the KotorArt Philosophers’ Square

How does it happen that refugees spend two decades in a refugee camp run by humanitarians? What does life look like when humanitarians – and not governmental institutions – are in charge of providing education, healthcare and even employment to refugees? I will explore the answer to this question on the example of the Roma people and the Balkan Egyptians who fled Kosovo in 1998 and 1999 and lived in the Konik refugee camp in Podgorica until 2018. For some fifteen years, refugees at the Konik camp had an ambivalent legal status that prevented them from accessing the public education, healthcare, or the employment system. Although their political life (bios) was not enabled, they still had more than bare life (zoe). Life at the Konik camp was organized outside the political community, but cannot be represented through a figure of homo sacer. State institutions, as representatives of the political order, were selectively present, choosing when and how to direct their attention to the refugees, and when to look away. Ethnographically following the efforts of humanitarians to “change the minds” of the residents at the Konik camp, and the selectively present attention of the state, I will argue that there was a specific citizenship policy at the Konik camp whose subjects were understood as pre-political beings. They first had to be taught how to behave before being allowed to participate in the Montenegrin political community as equal members.

 

ČARNA BRKOVIĆ is Assistant Professor at the Department of Cultural Anthropology and European Ethnology at the University of Göttingen. She graduated in Ethnology and Anthropology from the University of Belgrade and holds her PhD in Social Anthropology from the University of Manchester. As an ethnologist and anthropologist, Čarna is engaged in exploring new forms of power and alternative forms of political imagination, observing how people care for one another outside the welfare state model. So far, she has written about how ethics and politics intertwine on the examples of humanitarianism, LGBT activism and clientelism in Southeast Europe. Čarna is the author of the ethnographic monograph Managing Ambiguity (Berghahn, 2017) and co-editor of the collection of papers Negotiating Social Relations in Bosnia and Herzegovina (Routledge, 2016).