ESPOSITOOVA PARADIGMA IMUNIZACIJE I POSTPANDEMIJSKA POLITIKA CIJEPLJENJA U ZAPADNOM BALKANU: INVERZNI IMUNITARNI PARADOKS
ESPOSITO'S IMMUNIZATION PARADIGM AND POST-PANDEMIC VACCINATION POLITICS IN THE WESTERN BALKANS: THE INVERSE IMMUNITARY PARADOX

Summary/Abstract: The article develops a precise theoretical-empirical thesis that emerges at the intersection of Roberto Esposito's late conceptual apparatus — the paradigm of immunisation, the opposition between communitas and immunitas, and the etymological core of munus as the common root of both categories — and the documented trajectory of pandemic vaccination policy in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, and Croatia across the 2021–2024 interval: how is one to explain a configuration in which the refusal of vaccination, expected on Esposito's classical model as an option of individual immunitary autonomy against an excessive communal demand, in the actual reality of the Western Balkan population does not emerge as a defence of the individual body against collective immunisation, but is systematically legitimised precisely through the language of community — family, faith, people, ethnicity, war-stored collective trauma? Starting from Esposito's paradigm of immunisation, the article develops the concept of the inverse immunitary paradox as a sociological-philosophical category for a situation in which the rejection of medical immunisation becomes a means of affective re-immunisation of the community against a perceived state-medical intrusion. The original contribution of the article is the elaboration of the inverse immunitary paradox through a typology of five recurrent forms: (1) familial-relational re-immunisation, in which vaccine refusal is legitimised as “protection of the family”; (2) confessional re-immunisation, in which the religious community is articulated as a counter-immunity against medical-state intrusion; (3) ethno-national re-immunisation, in which “the people” is thematised as an immunitary subject with its own body that must be protected from a “foreign” vaccine; (4) anti-elitist-populist re-immunisation, in which vaccine refusal is bound to movements that construct medical-state actors as an internalised threat; and (5) posttraumatic re-immunisation, in which collective war-pandemic traumatic memory becomes the medium through which the present medical intervention is recognised as a repetition of an earlier existential threat. The central finding of the article is that the post-pandemic subject of the Western Balkan population is not less biopolitically structured than Esposito's classical paradigm would expect, but is structured in a qualitatively different way — through a configuration in which the community immunises itself precisely by refusing medical immunisation.

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