A discourse on State Souvereignity Through the Lens of Biopolitics
A discourse on State Souvereignity Through the Lens of Biopolitics

Summary/Abstract: Contemplating the sovereignty of Bosnia and Herzegovina requires overcoming the formal-legal framework and confronting complex anti-Bosnian biopolitical processes that shape the collective Bosnian Herzegovinian existence. In modern power theories, sovereignty does not solely rest on institutions and laws. It is reflected in the political community’s ability to think of itself, that is, to articulate its own past, present, and possible horizons and perceptions of the future. Therefore, an analysis of Bosnian sovereignty must also examine how life and identity in Bosnia and Herzegovina are subject to long-standing biopolitical strategies of control from outside of Bosnia, surveillance, and symbolic shaping that are neither related to nor part of Bosnian forms of understanding life. Special focus is given to uncovering sophisticated biopolitical regimes that, through normalization and discursive practices, produce forms of power that operate imperceptibly but profoundly. Such strategies often result in the reduction of political subjectivity and the suppression of authentic Bosnian discourse into a zone of silence, collective forgetting, and self-reproach. Critical analysis of these patterns points to the danger that Bosnian existence is reduced to a passive object of manipulation, thereby losing the capacity for self-understanding and resistance against the multiverse of anti-Bosnian biopolitical strategies. Therefore, in this paper, we affirm the concept of political care/concern as an autonomous responsibility towards one’s own existence and community, which goes beyond mere emotional/affective reflexes and becomes an act of political resistance. Sovereignty, in this light, appears as a process rather than a state: as a constant struggle for the right to one’s own voice, naming, meaning, understanding, and self-definition. Thus, it is important to highlight the need to decolonize Bosnian political thought and to open space for authentic modalities of political subjectivation that do not reproduce the ideological matrices of foreign/ anti-Bosnian discourses. In contrast to passivization and disciplining, the affirmation of Bosnian political subjectivity involves a dual strategy: demystifying hegemonic power patterns and simultaneously establishing a foundation for a new political self-awareness. Our intention leans toward a kind of dual reflection—one that exposes the antiBosnian structures of symbolic violence that have long persisted, and another that charts possible paths to the liberation of Bosnian sovereignty through intellectual, cultural, and political resistance to everything that leads to the hypertrophy of the Bosnian bios.

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