Keywords

Information sharing; academic communities; mobilisation of the world; alliances; public representation; conceptual content

Mobilisation of the world

The focus of this loop was on ‘research logistics’, the ways in which participants obtained data and how the world was ‘loaded into discourse’ (Latour, 1999b). During the interviews, most of the participants were emphasising significance of access to instruments and places where data is kept such as libraries, databases, and information and communication technology including the Internet. Some of the most frequently encountered barriers for information practice were in places and situations between circulation in this loop and the loop of alliances. Often the interests of the industry and government organisations, on one side, and the interests of researchers, on the other side, were not able to be combined in a composite goal. Three participants in this research told almost identical stories about how a respected scholar from the university, with strong motives and competences to obtain data, was kept in front of a big factory in order to prevent him entering the factory to investigate an impact of factory’s production on the pollution in the city. Participants stated that the public image of the factory was the most likely reason for this ‘non-collaboration’. All three participants have claimed that the factory has a strong connection with the leading nationalist political party, which dominates the public representation in the city. They thought that the case could be significantly different if this respected academic was not a declared cosmopolitan and a strong opponent of the politics of nationalist parties.

Another scholar, who declared neither as cosmopolitan, nor nationalist, was successful in establishing connection with the factory. By translating his interests to obtain data and the interests of the factory to keep a positive public image, not only he has got a partial access to data but he has also managed to get strong financial support to buy a modern instrument for obtaining the data. Although the academic community did not initially support this compromise with the factory, when it became clear that using this new instrument meant obtaining the data more easily, his profile within the academic community grew. The public was also satisfied with the new instrument because it promised more transparent data since the instrument provided the possibility to display the data on the Internet.

While all participants pointed out that the Internet enabled them easier access to data, and research collaboration with researchers from other countries in the region and Europe, most of the participants (23 from 34) claimed that the Internet did not change essentially the practice of the mobilisation of the world. This may be explained with the ways in which the Internet was used at this university. Participants claimed that the Internet was mainly used as a technological medium for transmitting information, understood as a thing which cannot be interpreted or translated. It is worth noticing that for 10 participants, the Internet played an important role in the middle of 1990s when it was difficult to find information from other national units in BH, and when, according to these participants, national political parties had a full monopoly on media. A participant said: ‘The Internet was a tool to prevail over the monopoly of the nationalist media in the 1990s, when we were not able to travel. During the war, I lost contact with the most of my colleagues from other cities in Bosnia and former Yugoslavia with whom I had a very dynamic collaboration before the war. Without the Internet, I wouldn’t even be able to know if they were still alive. The Internet was the only way to communicate with them, and we started to collaborate again’. However, while the Internet provided these participants with a cosmopolitan place to overcome the constraints of their national settings, some participants noted that the Internet was often used as a medium to mobilise nationalism in order to win research funds from some government agencies.

Such an example was a research project on the so-called Bosnian pyramids. Although they were not directly involved in this project, several participants pointed to this case since it was well documented in both popular and academic literature. The project started in 2005 with claims made by Dr Semir Osmanagić, a US citizen of Bosnian origin, that a roughly pyramid-shaped hill near the town of Visoko in Bosnia and Herzegovina is actually an ancient human-made pyramid. At the time, Osmanagić had no formal training in archaeology, but he had spent a decade exploring pyramids in South America. The first move he made was to create a project team and the project website. From there, he courted top Bosnian business and political figures, and finally, in late 2005, he introduced new claims to a number of international media including BBC, Associated Press, CBS, ABC, the Economist, Times and Washington Post (Bohannon, 2006; Rose, 2006). The new claim was that there was not just one pyramid but a complex of pyramids connected by a network of underground tunnels. Stories with titles such as Indiana Jones of the Balkans (Hawton, 2006) and Experts Find Evidence of Bosnia Pyramid (Markey, 2006) brought not only popularity but also some public credibility to the project. Without doubt, the public representation was an enormous success.

The public representation for an international audience focused on the argument that these discoveries would be a great impact on our understanding of the world prehistory, while the public representation for the Bosnian audience played on the national pride of Bosnians, which had been shaken by the war. The international audience was increasingly getting messages that this complex of pyramids must be the work of a super-civilisation, while Bosnians were feeding off messages that they were descendants of this civilisation. The first kind of messages aimed to bring international tourists to the site, and the second kind of messages had an objective to mobilise Bosnian public to support the project. Together, they enabled Osmanagić’s team (now a foundation) to build an alliance with government agencies.

Due to the complex government system in BH, it is hard to estimate the funds that government agencies provided for the project as well as which agencies were involved in funding the foundation. However, during 2006, the foundation’s scientists and workers as well as numerous volunteers were busy digging the site. A participant’s quote illustrates the political support that Osmanagić enjoyed at the time: ‘I got a call from a senior position at the university to tell me that I should provide Osmanagić with any faculty resources. He told me that Osmanagić had important connection with the government, so his involvement in our faculty could be very good for us’. The ambition of Osmanagić was growing, and in one interview to a Bosnian magazine, he called on the government to devote $100 million to his project (Bohannon, 2008). A Cambridge archaeologist Preston Miracle (as cited in Bohannon, 2008) argues that the major reason for the initial success of the project might be the result of a knowledge vacuum in Bosnian archaeology, created by the war. Miracle claims that while in pre-war years, the archaeology in Bosnia was world class, being a home to archaeological findings that go back 40,000–100,000 years, Bosnian archaeological records were neglected and even endangered after the war. Many leading Bosnian archaeologists had died, and many promising archaeology students left the country. So, there was no academic community around to challenge the project.

However, by the middle of 2006, the credibility of the project had started to be challenged by a number of international and Bosnian experts, including by scientists who were employees and external collaborators of the Osmanagić’s foundation. In May 2006, a geological team led by Dr Vrabac, professor at the University of Tuzla in BH, which investigated the site on behalf of the foundation concluded that the hill was a natural geological formation, similar to a dozen of sites in the area around Sarajevo (Swelim, 2010). During the summer of 2006, a few scientists resigned from the foundation without presenting to the public the reasons for this. But on November 30, 2007, one of these scientists, Nadija Nukić who was coordinator of the Committee for Geology in the foundation, gave an interview to a Bosnian magazine ‘Dani’, claiming that the foundation did not publish some scientific reports it ordered if the findings were against the hypothesis of the existence of the pyramids (Bačanović, 2007). She also said that some inscriptions on the wall that Osmanagić claimed to be ‘ancient inscriptions’ were actually recently carved by a foundation worker. And generally, her opinion was that the probe holes were opened without a methodology, used by the foundation just to give the impression that some ‘serious work’ was happening. Therefore, while public representation and building alliances were very successful, the mobilisation of the world was not taken seriously, and the support of academic community was not only decreasing but both international and Bosnian experts in archaeology turned against the claims and practice of Dr Osmanagić and his foundation.

First, many archaeologists, which the foundation claimed to be involved in the project, stated that they never participated in the study and they have never visited the site. Salt (2006) shows how Grace Fegan, an Irish archaeologist, was not only initially listed as an employee of the foundation without her knowledge but also her email contact on the foundation’s website was not actually her email which indicates possible fraud by the foundation. Similarly, Chris Muddigler, a Canadian archaeologist, has written to the journal Archaeology stating that he never agreed to work on the project, nor has he endorsed the project, although his name was listed as a foreign expert (Rose, 2006). Then, Abd Alla Barakat, the archaeologist who gave some positive report to Osmanagić’s claims, has been wrongly presented as an archaeologist recommended by Zahi Hawas, secretary general of Egypt’s supreme Council of Antiquities (SCA). In the letter to Mark Rose, editor of Archaeology, Hawas said that Barakat is not an expert on Egyptian pyramids and was not sent by SCA (Rose, 2006). Finally, Anthony Harding, the chair in archaeology at Exeter University and the president of the European Association of Archaeology, has designated the project as ‘the great Bosnian pyramid scheme’ (Harding, 2007). He visited the site in June 2006 and he condemned not only the project as pseudoscience but also the use of nationalism to get support for the project. He pointed out that archaeologists who did not accept the existence of pyramids were targets of the nationalist press and public: Bosnian archaeologists were called ‘traitors’, while foreigners are treated to abuse and ridicule. Harding (2007) also criticised some members of the government for not only giving public support to Osmanagić’s claims but also for funding this project instead of putting their energy behind the heritage protection of their country.

Many other members of the academic community started to remark on serious problems in Osmanagić’s mobilisation of the world and on his skipping the steps in the circulation of references (Latour, 1999b, pp. 24–79), which prevented reality to be loaded into discourse. The style of Osmanagić’s work, revealed by remarks of these scholars, indicates that the mobilisation of the reality for Osmanagić was not as important as mobilisation of the public and the alliances through his discourse of a mysterious super-civilisation and Bosnian national pride. Without mobilising and inscribing the reality, his discourse has become ‘just a talk’, not unlike the letters carved in the stone of his research site in Bosnia which he claimed to be ‘ancient inscriptions’. His theory of Bosnian pyramids (the loop of links and knots) could not be supported by the academic community (the loop of autonomisation) because the reality could not be loaded to his discourse (the mobilisation of the world), which targeted the curiosity of an international audience and the national pride of Bosnians (the loops of public representation and alliances). When it become clear that the international and Bosnian academic community had disproved the claims that the pyramid-shaped hills in Bosnia were human made constructions, Osmanagić and his foundation started to lose support from both the public and alliances. In June 2007, it was reported that government funding for the project was cut (Dalje, 2007). During this fieldwork, the work on the site was still underway, but according to Italian sociologist Massimo Introvigne, the discourse of the foundation slowly moved from a scientific one to a discourse similar to those of New Age religions (as cited in Bohannon, 2008).

Therefore, the circulation within the loop of mobilisation of the world was dependent on the circulation of all other loops. As an example above of investigating pollution in the city indicates, although a researcher can be respected by the public (the loop of public representation); and by the academic community (the loop of autonomisation); although they can have competencies and willingness to obtain the data (the loop of the mobilisation of the world); and to present clear and coherent ‘knowledge claims’ (the loop of links and knots); if they fail to translate their interests and the interests of the actors in control of the place of the research (the alliance loop), the whole system of research collaboration stops circulating. Since the researcher in this case failed to obtain the data, that is to mobilise the world, by failing to make alliance with industry, he was not able to have any impact on the public representation nor was he able to do anything for autonomisation of his academic community.

In contrast, another researcher from the same academic community has managed to make an alliance with the industry despite a limited support of the public and some initial opposition from the academic community, and by doing so, he has managed to obtain an expensive instrument, indispensable for this academic community to mobilise the world. This activated the circulation in the alliance loop, which was a trigger for activation of the circulation in all other loops, linking the interest of the public, the industry and the academic community, and finally the whole system operated again. The world has been mobilised again, and soon the collaboration between researchers from all national units in BH has commenced. Even some researchers, who had some prejudices about the national unit where the University is located, started to visit the University to use the instrument, and slowly trust has grown between researchers from different national units. A participant, who was involved in this project from the beginning said: ‘The researchers from the Serb Republic were coming regularly to our department because of the instrument. They promoted us among their colleagues and students, so we got three research students from there. I can tell you they even started to fight national prejudices in their own community’. Thus, one non-human actor, an instrument, has managed to build a different configuration in the scholarly network, enabling more trust between researchers from different national units. The instrument was a localizer for international standards, and this mediation has enabled the university department of ecology to become an oligopticon for research collaboration in this field in BH. The researchers, involved in this collaboration, were more frequently plugged into a cosmopolitan panorama promoting understanding between different national units in BH. So, the instrument became also a localizer of a cosmopolitan perspective.

On the other hand, another non-human actor, the Internet, did not produce the same effect. Participants suggested that the Internet was used merely as a technological extension of their identities: ‘The Internet in Bosnia is not much different from the life in Bosnia. It helps to connect the people who already had similar ideas, but it does not change the people. So, Bosnian scholars enjoy benefit of the Internet to connect them with other like-minded scholars, but it can’t do more than that. It can’t do anything about divided communities. Cosmopolitans are collaborating with cosmopolitans, nationalists are collaborating with nationalists’. While some participants did use the Internet to overcome national constraints, the Internet was also used to mobilise nationalism, in order to promote ‘dubious knowledge claims’ to the public and alliances. The case of ‘Bosnian pyramids’ shows how this was possible because of the lack of an oligopticon within the autonomy loop, an academic institution that will circulate standards to the loop of alliances and the loop of public representation. The case also shows the power of the plasma. The public was initially ready to accept the new unusual claims about entities that are not yet formatted and not yet investigated. However, the credibility of the claims did not last for long. For a claim to be durable, it needs to mobilise the world through a cascade of references, loading the claim, bit by bit, with reality.

In short, the mobilisation of the world was successful if the reality was loaded to knowledge claims through a cascade of references and if different interests, circulating through all loops, have been translated to new common interests. When the knowledge claims were directly translated to the interests of the public and alliances, without mobilising the world, the circulation did not last long such as in the case of ‘Bosnian pyramids’. Without circulation in the loop of alliances, the world could not be mobilised such as in the case of obtaining the ecological data from the factory. In both cases research collaboration was not possible because the objects, which would make knowledge claims durable and mobile, were not mobilised. In the first case, the academic community could not provide knowledge claims with credibility without mobilised reality. In the second case, the academic community could not mobilise the world without support from alliances. When alliances were finally mobilised, the academic community was provided with both access to data and an advanced instrument for obtaining the data. This instrument, as a localizer of international standard, has enabled research collaboration between different national units in BH. As a mediator, which allowed translation of different interest into a composite goal, the instrument was able to promote a cosmopolitan perspective in the research community.

Autonomy

Controversies between nationalism and cosmopolitanism were more visible in the circulation of the autonomisation loop. A large part of the Bosnian academic community was visibly ethnically divided, reflecting the division of Bosnian territory on three ethnic spaces. At the time of this study, these three spaces were clearly defined. Each participant could instantly recognise which university, university department or another academic institution was a Serb, Croat or Bosniak institution. The university that was focus of this study was recognised by all participants as a Bosniak national institution. The main management positions at the university were nominated by the two leading national Bosniak parties through the cantonal government. The management of the university consisted of the rector and three vice-rectors. While there was no official procedure to enforce ethnic balance, there was an unofficial rule to have at least one vice-rector who was not a Bosniak.

Regarding their concerns about national issues, scholars from this university could be roughly classified into three groups. Those who made up the first and the most powerful group could be dubbed as ‘ethno-intellectuals’. This controversial term was coined by Gajo Sekulić, a philosopher from Sarajevo, to describe intellectuals from former Yugoslavia, who served the new ethno-national elites by legitimising their ethno-violence (Delibašić, 2008, pp. 124–127). Mujkić (2006) claims that many such scholars and intellectuals, particularly those from humanities, saw themselves as some kind of archaeologists, digging up authentic elements of national identities, and in doing so, giving a scientific legitimacy to ‘ethno-politics’. While, according to participants, it could not be said that there was a greater number of such scholars coming from humanities, it could be argued that they were more visible and more aggressive. Many participants had experienced the rude behaviour of two such scholars from this university: one coming from the field of Bosnian literature and language, another coming from the field of history.

However, the majority of scholars at the university belonged to the second group that could be named as a ‘non-aligned group’. This group, although in the majority, did not have much power, at least officially. Most of the scholars from this group did not want to be involved in politics, or as many of them said: they just want to do their job. They were also less keen to participate in this study. However, once they agreed to participate, they were giving valuable information for this study. Most of them explicitly stated that they don’t like to be involved in politics in general, including ethno-politics that dominated Bosnia and Herzegovina. A small number of them could be defined as ‘disappointed nationalists’ and ‘disappointed cosmopolitans’. Disappointed cosmopolitans were fairly active in social life before the war and extremely disappointed in their ‘cosmopolitan’ colleagues who ‘have changed the sides’ during the war becoming radical nationalists. Disappointed nationalists were mainly religious scholars disappointed with involvement of official religions in ‘dirty games’ during the war. They were disappointed with the involvement of religion in politics, in general, and in the university politics, in particular. While they were still considering themselves as nationalists and cosmopolitans, they have lost trust in declared nationalists and cosmopolitans respectively.

The third group was made up of scholars that considered themselves as cosmopolitans. While they were the smallest group in number, they gained more official power at the university than the second group. This might be explained by their very active involvement in university politics. Although not aligned formally, they were very active in supporting each other, particularly in situations in which one of them was applying for a university position or being in a public debate with nationalists. They often used the rules, according to which a position was reserved for a certain nationality for their benefit. While these positions were not so powerful as to be able to change the system or institutions, they were powerful enough to gain some control over procedures in teaching and research activities. These positions enabled them to keep collaboration with overseas researchers, particularly with those from the former Yugoslavia. They were also very active in supporting the public representations of each other. They frequently organised public promotions of their works and the works of authors from other parts of Bosnia. While they have limited influence on official academic and political institutions and less frequent formal communication than the group of ‘ethno-intellectuals’, their informal communication was very rich, frequently creating close friendships, involving people from other parts of BH and former Yugoslavia, and even their families.

Most of the participants reported that they have mainly experienced a pressure from ‘their own nationalism’. This might be explained by already completed ethno-division of Bosnian territory and related ethno-division of all institutions in BH, including academic institutions (Delibašić, 2008). As one participant said: ‘Nationalists completely dominate their faculties and their departments. In Banja Luka if you are Bosniak or Croat, you don’t have a chance to get a top position at the university; in Mostar if you are Serb, you wouldn’t even ask to get it at the Croat university; and in Zenica, if you are Croat, and especially a Serb, you may get it if you want to betray any kind of your academic dignity. The funny thing is that nobody complains about this, although you can hear this in the pub after few drinks… I think everyone gave up… everyone accepted the situation… for the sake of their own peace, academics don’t argue with nationalists. If you are ‘wrong nationality’, you just play a low profile… So, paradoxically, Serb, Croat, and Bosniak nationalists, who hold high positions, implicitly accept each other, and each others’ space. Now, when everyone has a national space, the enemy comes from inside’.

This shift of nationalists’ target from ‘others’ to ‘the enemies from the inside’ was the most visible in academic debates within the field of language and literature. During the last years of Yugoslavia, there were endless debates about which writer belonged to which national literature. The issues were: Was that writer Serb, Croat, Bosniak or simply a Yugoslav writer? Which language was spoken in Yugoslavia? The official language was called, depending on the federal state, Serbo-Croatian or Croato-Serbian. This language was considered as one language with two standards: the western standardisation was spoken in Croatia and in parts of BH; the eastern standardisation was spoken in Serbia, Montenegro and parts of BH. The division of this language and Yugoslav literature started before the war, and now there are three languages and three national literatures in BH: Serbian, Croatian and Bosnian. However, one writer still creates controversies, 30 years after his death, as he did through his entire life. His name is Ivo Andrić, born in Bosnia as a Croat, declared as a Serb, who wrote mostly about Bosniaks.

Ivo Andrić, a novelist and 1961 winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, was born in 1892 in a Catholic family of Bosnian Croats. After completing high schools in his native Travnik and Sarajevo, he was the student of several universities in Zagreb, Vienna, Krakow and Graz. For his pro-Yugoslav political activities, he was twice imprisoned by the Austrian government during WWI. After the war, he became a civil servant in the newly formed Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes (later the kingdom of Yugoslavia). His last position between the two world wars was a position of Yugoslav ambassador in Berlin, which ended up with the German invasion of Yugoslavia in 1941. During the war, he lived in Belgrade where he wrote his three most famous novels, including The Bridge on the Drina for which he won the Nobel Prize for Literature. After WWII, he held many ceremonial posts in the new socialist Yugoslavia, where he was respected as a classic author; particularly after winning the Nobel Prize, which he donated for the improvement of libraries in BH.

During his life, he was both celebrated and criticised by different nationalists in former Yugoslavia. He was celebrated by Croats for he was born to a Bosnian Croat family and criticised for strongly opposing a Croatian national hero, Stjepan Radić. He was celebrated by Serbs for identifying himself as a Serb and criticised for not being Serb. He was celebrated by Bosniaks for he was born and wrote mostly about Bosnia, and criticised for portraying Bosniaks ‘stereotypically in a hostile manner’. While all these controversies around Andrić remained mostly within parts of academic communities during the former Yugoslavia, the Bosnian war brought them to the public, particularly in the Bosniak community. The main proposition of the Bosniak nationalists was that the work of Andrić portrayed Bosniaks in such a manner which demonstrated his extreme chauvinism. At the beginning of the war, a Bosniak nationalist publicly destroyed a monument of Andrić with a hammer. After the war, Bosniak nationalists tried to remove his name from the name of any street or institution. In a proposal to remove his name from the name of a street, a president of a Bosniak cultural association stated: ‘If he were alive, we would probably initiate an investigation of his responsibility for crimes in Bosnia, for all horrors which befell the Bosniak people’ (as cited in Stojic, 1999). Many Bosniak scholars criticised Andrić, although in rather academic style, as having bias about Bosniaks, while many cosmopolitan scholars, including Bosniaks, argued that those critics had bias against Andrić.

Such a debate took place during this fieldwork in the Bosnian daily newspaper ‘Oslobodjenje’ from July to August 2009. While several scholars were involved in this debate, the main protagonists were Dr Esad Duraković, a professor of Oriental studies at the University of Sarajevo, and lvan Lovrenović, writer and prominent intellectual from Sarajevo. It started with a text of Esad Duraković (2009) in which he tried to criticise Lovrenović’s (2008) essay Ivo Andrić, a paradox of silence for its methodological weaknesses. The essay, which has won a literature prize from Bosnian PEN center in 2008, criticised the ideological reading of lvo Andrić with a focus on a nationalistic interpretation of this work. One of the targets of this critic was a Duraković’s (2000) text Ivo Andrić in the ideology of eurocentrism. Lovrenović argued that this text represents only a mirror of interpretations of Andrić’s work by Serb nationalists but now from the point of view of Bosniak nationalism. Lovrenović was particularly amused by Duraković’s proposal to educate teaching personnel to teach Andrić as a negative example of euro-centrism. On the other hand, Duraković avoided talking about his ideas and the conceptual content of Lovrenović’s essay. Instead he focused on the methodology and writing style of Lovrenović. He tried to show that Lovrenović’s methodology is not consistent. He said that Lovrenović complained in one part of the essay about Duraković’s use of Said’s orientalism in interpretation of Andrić, and in the other part of the essay he agreed with two other authors (Kazaz and Lasic, established experts in Bosnian literature) that there are elements of orientalism in the work of Andrić. In response to Duraković, Lovrenović (2009) showed that he said in his essay that Duraković’s application of Said’s orientalism was too rigid, not that he shouldn’t have applied it. Later, one of the two literature experts, Enver Kazaz (2009b), pointed out that Duraković wrongly cited both him and Lasic, in order to make his argument more powerful. For Kazaz, this was a serious methodological inconsistency in Duraković’s text in which he wrongly cited other authors to make his own point of view.

According to Beganović (2009), who also took a part in the debate, this debate was just a final stage of controversy that started with a text of a Bosniak poet Nedžad Latić, whose aim was to discredit Lovrenović’s essay in the public, as it was clear that this essay discredited the whole project of Bosniak nationalists about Andrić as an enemy of Bosnia. The project resulted with the publication Andrić and Bosniaks (Maglajlić, 2000), the collection of papers, which tried, according to Kazaz (2009b), to set the norms for reading Andrić in schools, based on right-wing nationalist ideology. Lovrenović’s essay discredited the conceptual content of this project and the literature prize of Bosnian PEN club for the essay discredited the public representation of the project.

Many participants in this research, and not only from the field of the literature, were very keen to comment on this debate. One group pointed out that Bosniak nationalists, and for that matter Serb and Croat nationalists, did not understand Andrić, and probably did not want to understand his writing, because Andrić supported the Yugoslav idea. A scholar from the literature field argued: ‘It’s very amusing that such a small people like Bosniaks do not want to take a Nobel Prize winner as their own writer. I mean, I almost daily get requests from international scholars and readers for information about Andrić, not to mention scholars from Serbia and Croatia. Andrić is probably a topic with the most potential for collaboration with international academic community within this field. I can’t understand how a serious Bosniac intellectual can ignore all this as a kind of international conspiracy against Bosniaks and to read Andrić as an inspiration for war criminals. It is amusing that these are the thoughts of the highest cultural institution of our people’. Another group insisted on the academic credibility of Duraković, as a member of Bosnian Academy of Art and Science, and his focus on methodological issues in Lovrenović’s paper. While they were trying to put emphasis on the loops of autonomisation and mobilisation of the world, they were avoiding discussing circulations in other loops, particularly in the loop of links and knots.

On questions about the conceptual content of this debate, they frequently replied that content had no significance, but the issue was rather who was reading it and how. Two scholars from the field of literature argued that Andrić should be taught in Bosnian schools as a negative example, which corresponds to the original Duraković’s (2000) thesis. On the question of whether there are some projects on this topic in which scholars from other ethnic groups participate, they both said that they had not collaborated with other ethnic groups in the last 15 years. One said: ‘It is not possible to collaborate with Serb scholars. They use Andrić as a proof that Bosniaks are, as they say a genetically error of Serbs. But, you know… They have right to read it how they want… and we Bosniaks have right to read it as we want… it’s all… you know… socially constructed’. On the question: ‘You said that Serb have right to read Andrić as someone who hates Bosnia. Why don’t you criticise them instead of Lovrenović, who argues that Andrić loved Bosnia? he replied: ‘See, Lovrenović’s reading is more dangerous for Bosniaks than that of Serb nationalists. His reading makes Bosniaks not attentive to the constant danger that comes from Serbs and Croats. One good thing that came with the last war is that Bosniaks become attentive to this danger. They suffered because of their trust in their neighbours. So, they don’t need such a reading of Andrić that will make them again naive’.

There was almost an unspoken rule between nationalists to avoid debate with scholars from other national units in BH. A participant described this situation: ‘Bosnian academic community is completely divided in three ethnic communities. They don’t have any connection points. They are three continents. They don’t collaborate nor do they debate. It’s more likely to find Bosniaks to collaborate in a research project with Swedish or German researchers than their Serb and Croat neighbours, who speak the same language. Only some projects funded by European Union forced them to collaborate’.

One such project was a project about social work that put together researchers from Sweden, Italy and three countries from the former Yugoslavia: BH, Serbia and Macedonia. A research team from this university presented BH in this project. The leader of this team, declared cosmopolitan, argued that he could select only two members, and the other two members are selected from the camp of ‘ethno-intellectuals’ because, as he said, of a complex network of financial interests and organisational power. The main initial problem was informal communication with international scholars. While all members of the team had a basic skill in English language and there was always an interpreter during the formal meetings, that was not enough for informal communication after the meetings. He said: ‘With our skill in English, we couldn’t talk everyday topics… So, we felt isolated during the first 2-day meeting in Sweden. The first day the Swedes organised a dinner party… and while all talked to each other… we were just sitting there. And this has just destroyed a little confidence we had. The next day we hesitated to take part in discussion… However, when we came on the next meeting, and we got close to Serbian colleagues, we and Serbs became a centre of informal communication in the project. Serbs spoke good English, so they help us to communicate with others, which helped us to gain some kind of power in making decisions. Through this informal communication, first Serbs started to respect our ideas… and then all others. In this stage of the project, I could say that most of our ideas have been accepted, and everyone always waits to hear what we think about their ideas. Our opinion has become more respected. So, yes… we have gained some kind of power in this project’.

Another participant confirmed this and he said that his main worry was the members of team who were known to him as nationalists. He said that these ‘ethno-intellectuals’ played, at the beginning, a low profile in the cosmopolitan atmosphere of the project. Their interest was only to be involved in an international research project, as they had very little international references in their CVs. However, as the project went on, they became more open and friendlier with other researchers. The participant said: ‘I was worry at the beginning they would show some animosity against scholars from the Serbian team because they used to openly show it at our university in the past. During the first meeting in Sweden, they were very reserved to Serbian colleagues, and all this seemed to me like a bomb waiting to explode. And then, after a few meetings they became very friendly with Serbian colleagues. I thought that maybe these cosmopolitan meetings made them lose their prejudices. However, when we came back in Bosnia, they showed their old attitudes. I asked one of them about it and he said: I have never changed my attitude about Serbs. I just need them for my international references. When I go to these meetings, I just play my role. Don’t be naive, they do the same. They just play a cosmopolitan image because they need us for their references’.

Apparently, this way of obtaining references was a typical behaviour of nationalists scholars. Most of the participants claimed that nationalists scholars were trying to be linked with cosmopolitan scholars, and not the other way around. In fact, all scholars who considered themselves as cosmopolitan were trying to avoid any link with nationalists. A good example was recounted by a professor, who was forced to have for his assistant a PhD student who was infamous for his extreme and radical nationalism and his offensive public comments, particularly against citizens of Sarajevo, yet who was very influential among some Bosnian politicians. The professor said: ‘When I heard who was going to be my assistant, I was afraid how that could work. I knew him from the media as very aggressive man with disgusting political views. So, I’ve made decision to have extremely professional relations with him, and to avoid any private or informal communication. From the first meeting, I was greeting him with ‘Sir’ in almost any sentence… and he accepted this… You know, whatever I think about him, he is a clever man… I think he knew what I thought about him, but he was also a professional. He did very good job as my assistant. Once, we had a lunch together. It was a Christmas day and he was in good mood talking about old good days in Sarajevo. You can feel, he enjoyed pre-war cosmopolitan Sarajevo. I asked him about it, and he said: ‘Yes, I loved Sarajevo, but don’t be naive. The multicultural Sarajevo exists no more…’. But mostly we had professional relations. He was doing his PhD at that time, and he would ask me for some information sometimes. However, when he published his first book he asked me to help him to promote it. My first excuse was that I am too busy. I didn’t want to put my name on whatever he wrote. His name had such meaning in the region, that I would need a long time to wash my name from his fascism. I was sure, it’s better to lose a job than link myself to his reputation’.

In short, Bosnian academic community was divided formally in three ethnic academic communities. Each ethnic academic community was informally divided into three groups: nationalists, who hold the official power; cosmopolitans, who were actively opposing the nationalists; and the majority of scholars, who I described as ‘non-aligned’, made up the third group. Such division has created a huge gap between formal and informal research collaboration in BH. Although nationalists hold the official power, which in the most cases created barriers for formal collaboration between researchers from different national units in BH, they frequently tried to link themselves to cosmopolitan networks, in order to increase the credibility of their research and its conceptual content (loop of links and knots). Their power came primarily from the national parties, which hold all levels of the government in BH (alliances loop) and ethnically divided media (public representation loop). They hold almost all important positions in Bosnian academic institutions (autonomy loop), which enabled them to have more access to data and research instruments (mobilisation of the world loop). This power was mostly used to move the circulation of their theoretical claims (loop of links and knots) with an objective to provide scientific legitimacy to ethno-politics (Delibašić, 2008).

However, their power was coming almost exclusively from the formal political and academic institutions in Bosnia. This was not enough to provide credibility of their research in the eyes of international academic community, which was a valuable reference for building alliances with institutions of EU. For this reason, they frequently tried to enrol themselves in informal cosmopolitan academic groups. They did this in two ways. One way was to provide academic positions for cosmopolitans, hoping that with a cosmopolitan public representation they could build alliances with EU agencies. Another way was to temporary ‘plug’ into cosmopolitan perspectives (panoramas) to maintain international collaborations. They often described cosmopolitans as ‘being naive’. They argued that scholars from other nations merely used cosmopolitan networks for their national interests. However, cosmopolitans argued that nationalists’ perception of them as ‘being naive’ actually helped them to gain some official power in the academic community. A participant who regarded himself as a cosmopolitan said: ‘Nationalists think that we are naive, but we use their own rules, which we cannot change, and their needs for the public relations to gain official positions at the university. Plus, we use our personal connections with EU researchers to dominate informal academic communication’.

Therefore, nationalism at this university has created barriers for research collaboration not only between scholars from different national units but also between scholars prescribed to a nationalist perspective (panorama) and those who were prescribed to a cosmopolitan one. These barriers have been overcome only in situations when the interests of the two groups were able to create a composite goal. Nationalists frequently ‘plugged’ into a cosmopolitan panorama in order to get some credibility from the larger academic community, while cosmopolitans often used the circulation in the public representation loop to gain some academic positions.

Alliances

The main actors that made up the circulation of the alliances loop within scholarly communities at this university were some EU agencies, different levels of governments in BH and an international corporation that dominated the city’s economy. The steel factory, with about 25,000 employees before the war, was always the heart of the city with a population of 150,000. Every single family had someone who worked in the factory, and most often whole families were employed there. Most of the public buldings, sport objects, theatres and other institutions in the city were built and funded by the factory. A prestigious metallurgy research institute and faculties of engineering and metallurgy, which will serve as foundations for establishing the university, were also formed by the factory. However, after the war, the factory changed its owners from the government to several international corporations, and the ownership stabilised in the hands of a big international corporation during the last 10 years. While it is still the most important actor in the city’s economy, the factory has lost its international prestige, and it employs only 4000 people today.

This is a typical story for any industry in BH. According to Tihi (2009), the partition of former Yugoslavia has caused more economic damage to BH than the war itself. Before the war, economy and geography were well balanced in BH and in former Yugoslavia. BH was very dependent on exchange with the region which comprised 80% of GDP (57% with former Yugoslav republics). The partition of former Yugoslavia and BH, on the ethnic and political bases, has created a situation in which many local levels of government tended to substitute resources and infrastructure that were previously coming from former Yugoslavia. Such a situation resulted in unnecessary multiplication of resources and infrastructure. Tihi also notes that this was a main reason for the dramatic drop in employment as factories remained in one administrative entity, and management and resources in other entities. His analysis shows that BH is losing 40.56% of its potential because of the lack of integration between economies of its major cities compared with pre-war years when they were integrated.

A report of an EU agency on the national research landscape of BH (ERA-WESTBALKAN, 2006) claims that only 0.3–0.5% of Bosnian GDP is allocated to research compared with 1.5% of GDP shortly before the war, while the GDP in 2001 was only about 40% of that from 1990. The report points out that from this statistic and the fact that BH has not any funds on the state level, it could be concluded ‘that the total research and development spending in Bosnia-Herzegovina at the present is meagre’ (ERA-WESTBALKAN, 2006). Moreover, this very small fund is further divided on different levels of government. Most of the participants argued that the research funds are extremely low. Point 4.1 of the report states that funds coming from the entity and cantonal level of government are periodic and minor, and that BH ‘does not have any science funds at the state level whatsoever’.

When social democrats won the 2001 election, one of their objectives was to integrate academic institutions in BH. The ministry of education formed a commission to draft and propose the Framework Law on Science at the state level. The commission consisted of lawyers, politicians, and academics, including one representative of scholars from the Serb entity, and another from the federation of Bosniaks and Croats, who was a participant in this study. The participant said that one morning he got a phone call from the Ministry of Education to offer him this position. But he was surprised when they asked him whether he was a Croat or not. When he replied that he was a Croat, but he doesn’t feel strongly about it, they told him that they were actually looking for a moderate Croat, not someone who felt strongly about it. As they were social democrats, they did not focus on nationality; however, they had to respect procedures that require a proportional number of members for each of three nations. ‘So, I’ve got this position as a Croat, for which I didn’t feel so strongly’, he said, ‘but I felt very strongly about the objectives of this commission to integrate education and research in BH. I have to say, I’ve got the full freedom from the Ministry to do this job. Nobody from the government has ever put any pressure on me. So, I was very optimistic about the project. The objectives were pure professional to create integrated institutions at the state level. Not only that this could make education more rational, so it could mean more money for research; but, with an integrated academic community, we could be stronger in negotiations with the government. I was sure if we were successful we could gain again 1.5% of GDB for research. Moreover, united we could get more international funds. I thought, we could be back in ‘old gold times’ in few years’.

However, as time passed, he felt more and more pressure from nationalists. They used their power at the cantonal levels, which directly funded universities, to disrupt the project. They recruited more and more scholars and even students at the universities to oppose the project. The participant argued that this was due to fears of ‘ethno-intellectuals’ losing the power they gained in the mess they had created. ‘They could never get such positions in a normal system’, he said, ‘During a meeting a very senior official of one Croat dominated university sat next to me and told me to consider Croat interests because, after all, I am a Croat. He was obviously trying to put the pressure on me. Only a month later, when my vote was important for a leading Bosniak party, one of its members, who was on the high position in the party, offered me a government car to travel to an important meeting. I have avoided travelling with him because I knew he would try to buy my vote. I have even avoided being too early on the meeting, so I came to the meeting room only 5 min before the start. But he used those 5 min to remind me how I should vote’.

While the pressure on members of the commission did not work, slowing down the projects by avoiding making some decisions, has worked. The proposition for the new Framework Law on Science at the state level was not discussed at all levels of the parliament during the short period that social democrats hold power. When national parties came back again in the government, they continued the proposal and created a new Framework Law on Science. The participant said: ‘They used all our hard work to even more divide the academic community in BH, just by replacing everything in our proposal that refer to the state level to refer to the ethnic level. It is very disappointing. This will eventually kill any research in BH’.

Nine participants claimed that the aim of ‘ethno-intellectuals’ was not to serve the academic community of their nations, but rather to keep their ethno-elites in power. A participant said that there was no other reason to keep academic life in such limbo with such poor funding than to keep national parties in the government. ‘Not only that those funds are so small’, she said ‘but they are not appropriately used. Who can explain spending money on such crazy projects like the one on Bosnian pyramids, which was supported by the most powerful politicians in this country… or, I saw the government funded a project with a title The impact of 7th Muslim brigade on defence of Sarajevo. I mean, is that a project that needs to be a priority… and then, they fund some so abstract projects so that they can say not all projects were nationalist. Why do we need all those projects about some abstract issues when the real community is waiting for industry to start working’. Many participants argued that nationalism did not create explicit barriers to collaboration projects with researchers from other national units in Bosnia, but by creating such a poor funding system, they have created barriers to any research project. Most of them did not count much on government funding for research projects. ‘You can sometimes get some money for a research project from cantonal or federal governments if you are lucky’ one participant said, ‘but those funds are not enough for a serious research project. It covers the costs of your writing and going to a conference. In a normal country, such funds are provided to students. If you really want to do a serious project then you have to apply for funds from the European Union’.

The ERA WESTBALKAN report (2006) claims that one of the most promising moves for research in Bosnia was its inclusion in the FP6 framework of EU. The report shows that while the governments’ budget for science was less than 3 million Euros, only one FP5 project of EU in which BH participated was funded by EU with more than 4 million Euros, and most frequently EU funded several hundred thousands of Euros for a single project. A participant compared funding of EU and Bosnian government: ‘Projects funded by Bosnian governments in comparison with projects funded by European Union are like school assignments’. To be involved in an EU research project was considered a great success. Such researchers were respected in both the academic community and the city. Such projects usually involved advanced research instruments and a well-developed methodology, but to be involved in these projects, researchers had to propose ideas, concepts or theoretical claims that will contribute to general knowledge. So, the main criteria to win such proposals were scientific ones.

However, one desirable criterion, or a recommendation to win proposals, was interesting for the researchers from the Balkans. A recommendation for many EU projects was that they should involve regional collaboration. This meant, in the Balkan region, involving collaboration between researchers from the former Yugoslavia. This recommendation was usually taken so seriously that most participants in this research thought it was an essential criterion. They thought that this was an explicit political act of EU to contribute to the reconciliation of the people in the Balkans. One participant said: ‘No, it is not about essential criteria. Some projects require involvement of several countries. So, as we know researchers from Serbia and Croatia and we can speak the same language, it is logical to join together to make proposal for EU projects’. Most of the participants, who were involved in EU projects, have already gained experience in collaborative projects with researchers from Europe and former Yugoslavia. However, the war and financial situation in post-war years stopped all research collaboration with the outside world. The only link was ‘academic diasporas’, as a participant called it, which was a rather one-way communication, from the world to Bosnia. Scholars, who left Bosnia during the war and found their place in overseas academic communities, frequently provided their friends in Bosnia with the latest information from their academic disciplines. So, research projects, funded by EU, were for many participants the first experience of international collaboration in the last 15 years.

While there were some scholars who just wanted to temporarily ‘plug-in’ to a cosmopolitan atmosphere of these international projects in order to use circulation from autonomisation loop for promotion of their research (as described in the previous section), most of these scholars considered themselves as cosmopolitans. They might be classified into two subgroups. The first group was often described as ‘Yugo-nostalgic’ by nationalists. While this term was meant to be offensive, designed to describe people who cannot accept the reality that Yugoslavia does not exist anymore, these scholars accepted the term almost as a self-identification. One of them explained it: ‘Yes, I’m Yugo-nostalgic. Those nationalists think I am going to be offended by that. To the contrary, I’m proud of that. My identity is Yugo-nostalgic. You see, before the war when nationalists started destroying Yugoslavia, they used the phrase: Yugoslavia is an artificial construction. Like, their Serbia, Croatia and Bosnia are natural entities’. Another group might be called ‘Europhiles’. They were mostly those who have completed their studies at a European university or those who spent the time during the war in a European city and returned to Bosnia after the war. They spoke one or more foreign languages and have friends in different European countries. While the first group was creating their cosmopolitan networks with scholars from the former Yugoslavia, the second group used their language skills to build the cosmopolitan networks with scholars from different European universities. Thus, former Yugoslavia was the cosmos for the first group; for the second group, the cosmos was limited to Europe. For instance, a participant from the second group, in the very sentence in which she criticised nationalists, complained that they sold the city’s factory to the ‘Indian gypsies’. Such a comment could not be anticipated from someone regarded by others as a cosmopolitan and someone who identified herself as a cosmopolitan, although many participants expressed some kinds of frustration with building academic alliances with this factory.

The factory was historically a source of controversy in the city. On one hand, it fed the city; on the other, it polluted it. With one hand, the factory provided the autonomy of this university, with another it took the autonomy away. The building alliances between the factory and the department of ecology have been already described in the section on the mobilisation of the world. All that happened a year before the start of this fieldwork. The successfully built alliance provided the circulation within all other loops with fresh blood. The instrument provided by the factory enabled the Department of Ecology to become an oligopticon for theoretical claims in the region (loop of links and knots), as they were able to obtain the data (mobilisation of the world loop) and convince the colleagues in their claims (autonomisation loop). Citizens were also satisfied as they were promised more transparent data (public representation loop). This success resulted in very active collaboration between scholars coming from different national units in BH.

Everything changed a year later when the public turned against the use of the instrument. First, the media started to report daily that the instrument was not used for its first objective to inform the public about pollution in the city. They often presented photos of the instrument locked in a garage space of the university institute when it was supposed to be in the specific locations in the city. Then, eco-groups investigated the use of the instrument and came to the same conclusion. At the same time, media reported another issue in building alliances between the factory and academic community, this time in the field of medicine. The media reported that the managing director of the cantonal clinic for industry medicine refused to provide data to scholars from the faculty of medicine about the impact of the pollution on the health of the factory’s workers, because the factory is the main financial source of funding for this clinic. Just a few months before this, the factory had donated new equipment to the clinic. It was also reported that the factory was regularly paying for special health checks for their workers. All this slowed down the circulation of the public presentation, and as a result the circulation of the whole system had slowed down.

Therefore, the circulation in the loop of alliances has also been dependent on the circulation in all other loops. It was not enough to start the circulation and, once the alliance was built, leave it to the flow of inertia. It was crucial to maintain the circulation regularly. While it was enough to make a convincing promise from the ecology department about the public benefits of using the instrument to start the circulation in the loop of the public representation, it was not enough to maintain the circulation. When the public found that its interest was betrayed, the circulation in this loop ceased, and the circulation of the whole system slowed down. In order to maintain the positive image of their work in the public, other scholars started avoiding alliances with the corporation, which was the main polluter in the city. Thus, maintaining the circulation only in the loop of alliances was not enough to keep the circulation of the system moving. Similarly, scholars, who tried to integrate the academic community in BH, could not maintain the circulation of the whole system because they were not able to enrol local public and local alliances, despite the full support of alliances at the state level. National parties were slowing down the circulation of the system because their interests were not incorporated. On the other hand, agencies of the EU were successful in maintaining the circulation of collaboration between researchers coming from different national units in BH, but also from different countries created on the space of the former Yugoslavia. The rules for building alliances, set up by these agencies, were flexible enough to allow different identities to compromise their interests into composite goals. While some cosmopolitans were allowed to define the cosmos as Europe and others as former Yugoslavia, nationalists were allowed to temporarily ‘plug’ into a specific cosmos created by a specific project.

Public representation

Nuhanović (1998) claims that the political power of Bosniak, Serbian and Croatian national parties, based on ethnic homogenisation and exclusion, led to an absolute marginalisation of the public political domain. While there is freedom of speech, in which media regularly accuse powerful political officials of corruption and conflicts of interests, there is no public domain that would react to these accusations. Instead, there are three ethnic public domains that react only if their ethnic interests, or more precisely, their ethnic leaders, are questioned in the media. The most usual image projected through these three ethnic public domains (three panoramas) is a picture of ‘our leader fighting for our national interest while their leaders are just criminals’. In such situations, any critic of leaders from a different ethnic space makes those leaders more powerful in their ethnic public domain. This differentiation of ‘us’ and ‘them’ has created an atmosphere that even when ethnic leaders are jailed for war crimes, they are frequently presented as martyrs (Delibašić, 2008, pp. 121–123). It is common knowledge in Bosnia that national political leaders like to be criticised by the public of other ethnic spaces because this can only enhance their profile in their own ethnic public domains. A participant said: ‘It is like the circle of evil. Whatever you do, you do wrong. If you don’t criticise a corrupted politician, he will stay in power. If you criticise him he will gain even more power. So, there is almost no critic from the other side. It’s an unspoken rule that you criticise only politicians from your nationality and this practice has some little effects, but not much… because they dub you as a traitor. Usually they find something in your biography to link you with another ethnic group… like you work for them, you publish a book there… or even family links. But when you are ‘clean’ of all such accusations and they can’t find anything to link you to the other nationalities, they describe you as naive… So, they present you as some kind of loser. And this is the same for all three nationalities and all three religions’.

Curak (as cited in Delibašić, 2008) argues that there are very strong connections between the Islamic Society of BH and the Bosniak national party, between the Catholic Church and the Croatian national party, and between the Orthodox Church and the Serbian national party in BH. He claims that these connections have established three autonomous zones of ethno-religious communities. The university, investigated in this study, was in the zone of Bosniak-Muslim community. The public domain of this zone was strongly influenced by Bosniak national parties and the institutions of the Islamic community. This ethno-religious elite tried to influence the public and scholars both through official institutions and media, and through informal town groups.

They formally nominated the top management of the university through the two dominant national parties (SDA and SBH) which hold power in the cantonal government, the major founder of the university. They had a great impact on the curriculum and organisation of the university. The Islamic Society, a major institution of Bosnian Muslims, has founded the Islamic college of education, which was an associate member of the university but it enjoyed a special status being funded by both the cantonal government and the Islamic community of BH. Even scholars who had problems with the organisation of this college did not refuse to work there as the college paid more money for teaching than other faculties at the university. The main problem for many scholars was that some ‘secular courses’, such as educational psychology and pre-school education, were taught at the Islamic college while these courses were not available at the faculty of education. Most of participants argued that these courses should be taught at the faculty of education and that is not appropriate that Islamic college educate staff who will work with kids in a multicultural and multi religious society such as Bosnia. However, most of the participants said that they have never officially or publicly complained about it because of their financial interests. One participant said: ‘Nationalists have created some kind of panopticon effect. You talk one thing in private, another thing in public. You don’t want to be different. You don’t want to be the focus of the gaze’.

This ‘panopticon effect’ has been created by national parties through media but also through informal town groups. In this part of Bosnia, the lens of the ‘panopticon effect’ has been produced by the main Bosniak national party SDA. A slogan, scripted by this party for the 2005 election in BH, has become the collective statement of Bosniak nationalists. The slogan ‘On our own land, in our own faith’ asked the voters to give priority to their ‘one and only one country – Bosnia’, and to their own religion – Islam. Latour (2005) claims that collective statements are used to both format the social and provide a theory as to how the social should be formatted. This statement, scripted in the offices of the major Bosniak party, aimed to provide social norms and a social perspective to all Bosniaks including the academic community. Kukić (2004, p. 103) shows how Bosnian politicians tried to blur the ethical considerations by purifying the terms ‘propaganda’ and ‘marketing’. For them the term propaganda belongs to a totalitarian society and as such it is a negative term, while they use the term marketing, which is a positive form of public communication in a formal democracy. By simplifying the terms democracy, propaganda and marketing, they create a social perspective – a panorama, which displays the images of the homogenous public. These images show the homogenous public as the creator of the collective statement and social norms, and in this way they create the effects of a panopticon: the public is everywhere and it sees everything.

So, the scholars’ public representation was not just media presentation and the university lectures, but it was omnipresent through scholars’ everyday and private activities. Many participants argued that most scholars who attended Friday prayers in the city mosque were not actually religious, but they wanted to be seen as practicing Islam. Practicing Islam was a social norm prescribed by the collective statements. One day in the late August, during the month of Ramadan, when Muslims fast from the sunrise to the sunset, I was sitting in a street coffee shop with two scholars, after having an interview with one of them. They were both Bosniaks, but they did not practice Islam. The street with hundreds of tables in the centre of the city was half empty. Usually, at this time of the day, you could not find an available table in coffee shops in this street. I thought this could be because of Ramadan, but I was surprised that so many people were practicing Islam, as I clearly remembered that this was not the case 20 years ago – before the war.

My companions claimed that there were not so many believers, but most people did not want break social norms. One of them explained it: ‘You know, drinking alcohol publicly during the month of Ramadan has become a sort of rebellion. You see, people have a feeling that these nationalists can see everything. They think: I will need some favour one day and they hold all powerful positions. So, I don’t want be seen as a rebellion or some kind of their enemy’. Practicing Islam publicly was an important norm in the public representation for many powerful positions in the city. Many participants argued that although there was no any formal requirement for national and religious identity, there is an unspoken rule that the rector of the university should be Bosniak and Muslim. Islam has gained the significant place in public representation in Bosniak community, including Bosniak academic community.

Unclear and contradictory messages of leaders of Bosnian Muslims have just boosted ‘the effect of panopticon’. The head of Muslims in BH, reis-ulema Besim Cerić was continuously practicing two contradictory public representations – one for the international media, one for the public in BH. International media, in particular western media, frequently presented him as a moderate teacher of Islam and the future leader of European Muslims. He gave a number of speeches throughout the word calling for peace, tolerance, and dialogue between different religions. For example, he visited Australia in 2007, where he was accepted as an honourable guest and the media built a very positive image of him, calling him ‘the most liberal Grand Mufti in the world’ (“Dr Mustafa Ceric, Grand Mufti of Bosnia,” 2007). He frequently hosted different foreign official delegations in his residency in Sarajevo. In a word, he has built a very good reputation in the international public. However, he was regularly the subject of controversies in the public domain in BH. His aggressive public representation for the Balkan audience put him in a position of a Bosniak national leader rather than a religious one. He often intervened in political disputes, influencing voters on elections, ministers in making policies, and even public officers in their daily jobs. His associations with the people who were convicted of crime and his arrogant behaviour made him hateful in the eyes of one part of the public and a hero in the eyes of others. His statement that Bosniaks had two mothers – one is Bosnia, another is Turkey – made even a large part of Bosniak nationalists angry. But he has made the greatest controversy with his defence of convicted pedophile Rešad Omerhodžić, an Islamic teacher in a Bosnian town (HRHBH, 2009). A participant said that his strategy of the public representation for the Bosnian audience was generally defensive: ‘Any disagreement with him or Islamic institutions in Bosnia was identified as Islam-phobia’.

This strategy has encouraged many Bosniak politicians and public officers to behave in the same manner. Instead of identifying the violent attack on participants of a gay festival in Sarajevo as an act of homo-phobia, many Bosniak politicians and media used the incident to accuse the organisation of the festival as an act of Islam-phobia. They claimed that the gay festival was deliberately timed to be on the same day as a Muslim holiday in order to offend the members of Islamic community (Kajinic, 2010). Arzija Mahmutović, the head of the public institution ‘The Children of Sarajevo’, which managed all public kindergartens in Sarajevo, has prohibited any party with Santa Claus during December 2008 because ‘Santa Claus has no role in Bosniak tradition’ (Beaumont, 2008). After many complaints about this, she has prohibited these parties during December 2009 for a different reason – the swine flu – although no epidemic has been declared, and no recommendation came from any institution to avoid public gatherings (Tulić, 2009).

Many participants of this study argued that such behaviour of Bosniak public people, including scholars, was the result of constant post-war use of the war victims in Bosnian politics. There was a strong social perspective, or panorama, displaying images of genocide against Bosniak people. On the other side, there was an active campaign of genocide denial by many Serbian, but also some international intellectuals. One participant said: ‘Bosniak nationalists use those images to shut you up. Whenever they mention victims of the war… you know… civilians and children killed, you just can’t raise political issues. You feel solidarity with victims, they make you soft, you know… And also you don’t want to give the arguments to those genocide deniers’. Part of the ‘victimisation politics’ was a thesis by Bosniak nationalists that Bosniaks were victims of genocide because they were the only people in former Yugoslavia not ready for the war. Many Bosniak nationalists argued that only Bosniaks were prescribed to the collective statement ‘brotherhood and unity’, scripted by the socialist regime of the former Yugoslavia.

A participant said: ‘Brotherhood and unity was an honest political aim to create a normal country on the Balkans. At the end of the day, we are brothers, we speak the same language, almost the same culture, and only religions are different. And it worked. So many mixed marriages, so many people were moving from one place to another. Of course, it worked more in Bosnia because we are mixed here for centuries, long before any Yugoslavia could be imagined. But this is not the legacy of Bosniaks only. This is a legacy of every citizens in Bosnia and Yugoslavia. Bosniak nationalists keep saying that Bosniaks supported brotherhood and unity more than others, just to prevent that such an idea should ever come back. They are feeding off the feelings of guilt to Bosniak people, so they can easier manipulate us’. Encouraging feelings of guilt and politics of victimisation was supported by collective statements of polarisation: ‘Either you are with us or against us’. Such polarisations created panopticon effects, which made people afraid to be placed on the other side - on ‘the side of enemy’. A participant said: ‘In a situation when you have our fascists and their fascists, any critic of our fascist is interpreted as working for their fascists… So, it’s a very hard job to criticise your own nationalists, because they always mobilise the whole population, the whole history, the whole civilisation against you. Most scholars try not to make them angry and they avoid many topics with that risk’. Thus, panopticon effects created situations in which many scholars avoided collaboration with scholars from other national units in BH in order to avoid risks of mobilising the public against themselves.

A Bosniak participant said that she was attacked by the local newspaper for being a co-author with two Serbian authors of the technical paper that was published in the language that was spoken in Bosnia before the war. She said: ‘The language we all spoke in Bosnia and Herzegovina before the war was called Serbo-Croatian. They criticised me for speaking Serbo-Croatian. I agree that the name of that language is not appropriate, but I haven’t given the name to that language. They said because I am a Bosniak, I should speak Bosnian. The language they call Bosnian is for me just Serbo-Croatian language with archaisms and turcisms. Can you imagine, if someone forced you from today to write only Shakespearian English in Australia. I am not a linguist. I am a professor of mechanical engineering. Why are they so worried about purity of the national language of an engineer? It’s like Orwell’s Big Brother. I am a cosmopolitan and I understand their concern about national language and culture, but what they do is a torture’.

Most scholars, who considered themselves as cosmopolitans, were feeling similar about ethno-religious elites in BH. They thought that those elites were creating effects of panopticon to create fear in the public, including academic one, in order to preserve their power. Cosmopolitans frequently tried to show to the public that those panopticons are merely offices of national parties and residency of the Islamic society. In Latour’s (2005) terms, they tried to flatten Bosnia and show that there was no panopticon but only oligopticons, placed in specific offices of ethno-religious elites. Sometimes they were successful, but mostly they were disappointed with the public. One of them was talking about the public domain in Bosnia with a visible resignation: ‘There is no public domain in Bosnia. There are so many newspapers, TV stations, radio stations… you have so much possibility to send a message. There is no any censure. You can say whatever you want to say. But, it’s like talking to the wall. It’s like talking to the deaf people. You talk, but they can’t hear you’. Other cosmopolitans were less depressive, but they were not very optimistic about change in Bosnia. Instead of changing the system, they were rather trying to adapt to it. They used their reputation in international academic community (autonomisation loop) and some alliance with agencies of EU (alliance loop) to raise their public profile in the city (public representation loop) in order to do their research work: to get access to data and instruments (mobilization of the world loop) and deal with their theoretical concepts and knowledge claims (loop of links and knots).

So, the public domain, in which the university has been placed, was dominated by the Bosniak national parties and the leaders of the Islamic community. They have created a sort of ‘panopticon effect’ in the public by polarising ‘us’ and ‘them’. This forced the public, including scholars, to conform to the social norms of this polarisation. Many scholars did not collaborate with researchers from other national units in order to avoid public scrutiny. On the other hand, cosmopolitan scholars tried to show that there was no any ‘panopticon’ but only ‘oligopticons’ which circulate collective statements, such as ‘On our own land, in our own faith’, from the marketing offices in Sarajevo. However, they had little success in this. They were more successful in using their international reputation and alliances to gain some public support for getting access to data and instruments necessary for feeding their theoretical concepts and knowledge claims.

Links and knots

A short questionnaire has been conducted as a part of the investigation of the circulation in the loop of links and knots, which deals with scholars’ conceptual content, research topics, and theoretical claims. The questionnaire was based on Fry and Talja’s (2004) propositions that academic specialty fields with a high degree of mutual dependence and low degree of task uncertainty have a stable research object and field boundaries; while within fields with low degree of mutual dependence and high degree of task uncertainty, research objects, research techniques, and significance criteria are minimally coordinated. This suggests that information practices within the first group are highly coordinated and conformity to communicative norms is high, while within the second group, research problems can be approached from diverse perspectives, and the results of diverse studies are not necessary comparable.

The questionnaire has involved scholars from the two groups of academic specialty fields. The group A consisted of 21 scholars from the specialty fields with high degree of mutual dependence and low degree of task uncertainty such as fields in medical science, mechanical engineering, chemistry, and computer science. The group B consisted of 17 scholars from the specialty fields with low degree of mutual dependence and high level of task uncertainty such as national literature, history, and communication. The questionnaire was designed to obtain answers on how nationalism influenced scholars’ access to data and instruments (mobilisation of the world), academic community (autonomisation), research funding (alliances), and public life (public representation), and how the circulation of all these loops has influenced the loop of links and knots.

The results of the questionnaire indicate that nationalism had a great impact on research collaboration within both groups, while there was significant difference between two groups in the impact of nationalism on scholars’ conceptual content and theoretical claims. The impact of nationalism on scholars’ access to data, research instruments and equipment was very high for both groups. This issue has influenced significantly their collaboration with researchers from other national units in BH. The group B has reported a strong impact of mobilisation of the world on their conceptual content and theoretical claims, while the researchers from group A were mostly neutral regarding this question.

On the question of the impact of nationalism on the credibility of their research in the academic community, the researchers from the group B experienced maximum impact, while the researchers from the group A reported very slight impact. The similar result was on the impact of the credibility of their research on their collaboration with researchers from other national units in BH. The researchers from group A did not report any impact, while the researchers from group B experienced the maximum impact. More differences have been indicated in the answers on the impact of this issue on researcher’s conceptual content. While the group B reported some impact, the researchers from the group A answered that there was not any impact at all.

The questionnaire indicates less difference between the two groups in the loop of alliances. Researchers from both groups have experienced a high degree of impact of nationalism on the circulation of this loop. The researchers from both groups thought that there was a significant impact on this circulation on their collaboration with researchers from other national units in BH, but also on their research topics and conceptual content. It was interesting that some researchers found it useful to write a comment, which was an optional field for each loop, only on this issue. The typical comment was: ‘Nationalism had an impact on research funding when a sponsor of research was from Bosnia, Serbia or Croatia’. This might be result of a not well-formatted question that grouped together industry, government institutions, and international organisations.

On the question of the impact of nationalism on public representation, the researchers from group B thought that there was a great impact, while researchers from group A said that there was some impact. While researchers from group B have experienced a significant impact of this issue on both their conceptual content and their collaboration with researchers from others national units in BH, the researchers from group A have reported high degree of impact on their collaboration with researchers from other national units, and no impact at all on their conceptual content.

In short, the questionnaire indicates that nationalism has an impact on researchers’ mobilisation of the world, autonomisation, alliances, and public representation in all academic fields. The circulation of nationalism through these loops resulted in less collaboration between researchers from different national units in BH in all academic fields. The researchers from the academic fields with low degree of mutual dependence and high degree of task uncertainty have reported that the circulation of nationalism through all loops had an impact on their research topics, conceptual content and theoretical claims (loop of links and knots). For the researchers in academic fields with high degree of mutual dependence and low degree of task uncertainty, the loop of links and knots has been influenced only by circulation of nationalism through the loop of alliances. Comments, related to this loop, indicate that this impact was significant only in situations when the research funding was coming from the government institutions in Bosnia, Serbia, and Croatia.

Similar answers were provided by researchers in this fieldwork through personal communication and interviews. Typical conversation with researchers from the group A on the topic of this study would start with the researcher’s claim that there was no nationalism in their academic field. Nationalism was a concept that simply did not belong to their field. In a personal communication with a researcher, who claimed that his academic field of psychometrics was a field with high degree of mutual dependence and low degree of task uncertainty, his first statement was that there was no nationalism in his field because it dealt with numbers and explicit data. Rather, nationalism can be found in the fields of history, literature and similar. However, when the conversation came, by accident, to the concept of social constructivism, he said: ‘I have constant arguments with one of my colleagues, who is social constructivist. He always argues that our data is subject to interpretation, and he often interprets the data in a softly nationalist way’.

While it was difficult to clearly identify the field of psychometrics with either group, researchers from the fields of mechanical engineering, physics, medicine, metallurgy, and chemistry have easily placed themselves in the group A. They also argued that there was no impact of nationalism on their conceptual content, but there were less collaborations between researchers in their fields, who are coming from different national units in BH, due to nationalism. They blamed mostly the circulation of nationalism through the loops other than the loop of links and knots. A participant said jokingly: ‘I am doing all my life investigations of different sort of alloys, but I have never seen Serbian, Croatian, or Bosniak alloys. When we put two types of metal together… see, metal, not mental… we get the same alloy in Serbia, Croatia, and Bosnia. The result is interpreted by metal’s mentality, not by national mentality’.

On the other hand, in the fields of high degree of task uncertainty and low degree of mutual dependence, research results were ambiguous and subject to conflicting interpretations. We saw in the mobilisation of the world loop how ambiguity of the picture of the ancient world has allowed initial circulation of the theoretical claims about Bosnian pyramids. Even the strongest opponent of these claims couldn’t be 100% certain of their claims, but rather gave a little space for uncertainty in their statements. So Harding (2007) stated that the chances of the possibility of existence of ancient pyramids in Bosnia are the same as if the humans land on Saturn in the next two decades. This little space of uncertainty was enough for the leader of the project to create successful public representation during the first year of the project. However, as the field of archaeology is not a field with so high degree of task uncertainty and so low degree of mutual dependence, the project could not survive scrutiny of highly coordinated norms of this field supported by the field of geology.

The strongest circulation of nationalism through the loop of links and knots was in the fields of the national literature and Bosnian medieval history. These fields had the lowest degree of mutual dependence and the task uncertainty was extremely high. The circulation of nationalism through conceptual content in the field of national literature has been described in the section on autonomisation loop. The controversies between national and cosmopolitan interpretation of the work of Bosnian Nobel Prize winner, Ivo Andrić have split Bosnian academic community in the field of literature into two conflicting groups. We saw in the autonomisation loop that Bosnian academic community has been divided into three ethnic groups with very little communication between them. Scholars from an ethnic group hesitated to debate ‘sensitive topics’ with scholars from other national units in BH. One such ‘sensitive topic’ was ethnic origin of Bosniaks and the related topic of the Bosnian medieval church. The debate, recounted below, illustrates the impact of nationalism on the conceptual content of Bosnian medieval history, a field with a high level of task uncertainty.

The first important source on the topic of Bosnian medieval church was Franjo Rački, one of the greatest Croatian historians in the nineteenth century. His theory that the Bosnian church was an offshoot of the Bogomils had a significant impact on Bosnian history since it provided an explanation for its greatest issue – the conversion to Islam of the large parts of Bosnians under the Turks (Malcolm, 2002). The Bogomils ‘was a Bulgarian heretical movement, founded in the tenth century by a priest called “Bogumil” (beloved by God), which spread in subsequent centuries into Constantinople and other areas of the Balkans, including Macedonia and parts of Serbia’ (p. 27). The Bogomils preached a dualist theology, according to which Satan and God had an equal power. The visible world was Satan’s creation, while the spiritual world was God’s creation. This had important theological implications for understanding Christ’s incarnation. According to the Bogomils, this incarnation could not happen as it was a part of the visible world. They also rejected all ceremonies involving material objects; such as baptism with water and most importantly they rejected the cross itself and the use of church buildings. While there were some rival theories, such as that the Bosnian Church was just a Serbian Eastern Orthodox Church, or just a Croatian Catholic Church with some heretical tendencies, Rački’s theory has been widely accepted for over a century because ‘his painstaking work in the archives of Dubrovnik and Venice, and his method of using known facts about non-Bosnian Bogomil beliefs and practices to fill gaps in the Bosnian evidence’ (Malcolm, 2002, p. 28).

In Latour’s terms, Rački’s painstaking mobilisation of the world from international archives made his Bogomil theory more credible to the academic community. His theory was supported by nineteenth century Croatian pan-Yugoslav romanticism, and twentieth century search for national identity of Bosnian Muslims. An implication of his theory was a concept of mass-conversion of Bogomils to Islam. The concept indicates that Bogomils preferred to convert to Islam than to the Catholic or Orthodox Church, after being persecuted by these churches for centuries. Malcolm (2002) points out that such a concept became very attractive to twentieth century Bosnian Muslims since it offered them a theory, different than theories of their origin in Serbian or Croatian nations to which they should return. In this way, they could define their conversion to Islam ‘not as an act of weakness, but as a final gesture of defiance against their Christian persecutors’ (p. 29).

This theory was to be used by Bosnian Muslims only when the Turkish Ottoman Empire was replaced by Austro-Hungarian Empire as a ruler of Bosnia in 1878. The first influential work of a Bosnian Muslim to use this theory was A short instruction about the past of Bosnia and Herzegovina, published in 1900 by Safvet beg Bešagić-Redžepašić, sometimes regarded as ‘the founder of Bosniak historiography’ (Redžič, 2000). This work is also often referred as the beginning of the building of a Bosniak national identity. Its intention was to establish an ideal political, ethnic, religious and cultural continuity between medieval and ottoman Bosnia, which would be a foundation for building a post-ottoman national identity of Bosnian Muslims (Lovrenović, 2005). The building of the Bosniak nation will last a whole century, and the Bogomil theory will have a very significant place in this process.

The culmination of using this theory was reached during the Bosnian war from 1992 to 1995 and particularly during the post-war period. Many Bosniak historians had adopted this theory as a matter of fact and as a foundation for Bosniak nation, while at the same time the theory has lost much of its credibility in the academic community, and finally ‘turns out to consist mainly of wishful thinking’ (Malcolm, 2002, p. 29). Malcolm (2002) shows that the attitude of Bosnian church was not an important factor (if any) in conversion of the large part of Bosnians to Islam. He claims that the process of conversion of the majority population of Bosnian Muslims lasted at least 150 years, and that ‘the Bosnian church was largely defunct even before the Turkish conquest’ (p. 56); so, the ‘Bogomil theory’ is just one of the many myths ‘about how and why it happened’ (p. 51).

Lovrenović (2005) discusses the post-war Bosniak scholarship on Bosnian medieval history. He claims that a large part of Bosniak academic community, involved in research of medieval history of BH, uses the ‘Bogomils myth’ to establish radical claims and propositions, denying the basic human and political rights to non-Bosniak people in BH. The myth about continuity between Bogomils and Bosniaks tries to justify the thesis about Bosniaks as a fundamental nation of Bosnia, which leads to a proposition that BH should be a Bosniak country in the same way as Serbia is a Serbian country, and Croatia is a Croatian country. Lovrenović (2005) claims that this myth, used as a logistic base for political marketing of the theoretical claims that Bosniaks are the fundamental ethnic group in BH, has clear intentions to marginalise the other two ethnic groups: Bosnian Serbs and Croats.

In his monograph Stećci, Lovrenović (2009) has presented the multicultural character of stećci, peculiar medieval gravestones that can be found in many parts of Bosnia. Their decorations were frequently interpreted by the ‘Bogomil theory’. Malcolm (2002) points out that modern history has rejected this idea because most of these gravestones were made during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries when most of the population of Bosnia were Catholics and Orthodox, but also because there was no evidence of Bogomils making them in their ‘native’ Bulgaria. Moreover, ‘the presence of crosses (a symbol hated by Bogomils) on many of the stećci has always been an obstacle to the theory’ (p. 31). Kazaz (2009a) notes that the main Lovrenović’s thesis is that through these gravestones, three churches in medieval BH – Bosnian, Catholic and Orthodox Church – had a rich dialogue within a culture of death in which later Islam was included with its culture of death. This thesis has enabled Lovrenović to show the hybrid form of Bosnian cultural identity. According to Kazaz (2009a), Lovrenović illuminates the formula for what he call ‘soft multiculturalism’, which allows and even encourages some kind of hybrid identity.

However, many Bosniak historians, who were pre-scribed to the ‘Bogomil’ theory, reacted to this book as an attempt at ‘croatisation’ of Bosnian medieval history. The debate, which took place during this fieldwork in Bosnian paper ‘Oslobodjenje’ from June to August 2009, involved not only historians but also artists, economists, etc. While most of the Bosniak scholars who were involved in the debate argued that Lovrenović worked for the Croatian cultural association ‘Matica Hrvatska’ and he was paid to provide the stećci with Croatian cultural character, Lovrenović accused his opponents of ignorance and Bosniak nationalism. As debates went on, it became more personal and more political than academic, dividing participants into two groups. Researchers from both groups were accusing each other that they use wrong or non-existing data (mobilisation of the world loop). They did not attend even the same conferences (autonomisation loop). They were allied to different political organisation (alliances loop) and their ideas were promoted by different media to different audience (public representation loop). Finally, they have created different conceptual content and theoretical claims that oppose each other (links and knots loop). One group claimed that the Bogomils were a fundamental element of Bosnian history. Another group claimed that the Bogomils have never existed in Bosnia.

A research student of Bosnian history said that the main reason for this was a political animosity between two groups. One group was directly nominated to their academic positions by Bosniak national party, while Lovrenović was a deputy minister for education when social democrats were holding power. Although he was not a member of the party, the participant thought that he shared their political view about multicultural Bosnia. So, according to this participant, the main reason for the animosities was in building the alliances and then the circulation spread through other loops. He said: ‘When you are supported by a national party, your place in academic community and media is defined by default’. The alliances were directly moving circulation in the loops of autonomisation and public representation. And finally, this accelerated the loops of mobilisation of the world and links and knots. The participant said: ‘You ask how they can come to such conflicting conclusions. To be honest, I think that Bosniak nationalists started with the conclusion. But the medieval Bosnian history is such a risky business. There is so little data about it, particularly Bosnian data. The most data about the medieval Bosnian church came from the Italian, Austrian and Turkish archives. These data is not sufficient to give us a clear picture of the medieval Bosnia. So, you depend on more logical interpretation. For me, Lovrenović’s interpretation is far more logical, but I wouldn’t be surprised if one day someone came with some new data that will make the interpretation of Bosniak nationalists more credible. However, I think that even they don’t believe in much of what they are saying. They just offer an interpretation that will justify the nationalism of their sponsors’. So, very high degree of task uncertainty and low degree of mutual dependency in the field of medieval Bosnian history has enabled two conflicting theoretical claims to exist next to each other without any dependence on each other’s work. Research results were entirely subject to interpretation, and this provided nationalism with the opportunity to freely circulate through the loop of links and knots.

Therefore, nationalism had an impact on collaboration between researchers coming from different national units in BH, both in academic fields with high degree of mutual dependence and low degree of task uncertainty, and those with low degree of mutual dependence and high degree of task uncertainty. Academic fields did not determine the impact of nationalism on research collaboration. However, while there was no evidence that nationalism had a strong impact on researchers’ conceptual content in the first group, there was a great impact of nationalism on the circulation of the loop of links and knots in the group with low level of mutual dependence and high level of task uncertainty. The impact of nationalism on the conceptual content, research topics and theoretical claims was proportional to the degree of task uncertainty, and counter-proportional to the degree of mutual dependence. If the degree of mutual dependence was higher, the impact of nationalism on conceptual content of a field was smaller. If the degree of task uncertainty was higher, the impact of nationalism of a field was also higher. Thus, the greatest impact of nationalism on the circulation of this loop was in academic fields with low degree of mutual dependence and high degree of task uncertainty such as the fields of national literature and history.

Summary

Nationalism had a great impact on information sharing practices in academic communities, but it did not determine these practices. The scholars from all academic fields reported the influence of nationalism on their access to data and instruments, their academic reputations, the public image of their research and building alliances with government agencies. In addition, scholars from the humanities reported the high level of impact of nationalism on their theoretical concepts, particularly scholars from the fields of national literature and history, which are the fields with low degree of mutual dependence and high degree of task uncertainty. Nationalism at this university has created barriers for research collaboration not only between scholars from different national units but also between scholars prescribed to a nationalist perspective and those who were prescribed to a cosmopolitan one. This was particularly visible in the public representation activities. The public domain in BH was dominated by nationalist political parties, which created a sort of ‘panopticon effect’ in the public by polarising ‘us’ and ‘them’, pushing the scholars to conform to the social norms of this polarisation. In such a context, many scholars did not collaborate with researchers from other national units in order to avoid public scrutiny.

However, as the circulatory system suggested, actors were never prisoners of a single context because the circulation in one loop was always dependent on the circulation in other loops. Thus, in spite of the great impact of nationalism on scholars’ information sharing practices, these practices were not determined by nationalism. Bosnian academic community was divided formally into three ethnic academic communities. Each ethnic academic community was informally divided into three groups: nationalists, who hold the official power; cosmopolitans, who were actively opposing the nationalists; and the majority of scholars, who I described as ‘non-aligned’, made up the third group. Such division has created a huge gap between formal and informal research collaboration in BH. Although nationalists hold the official power, which in the most cases created barriers for formal collaboration between researchers from different national units in BH, they frequently tried to link themselves to cosmopolitan networks, in order to increase the credibility of their research and its conceptual content. The scholars often translated nationalism into their own interests to get research instruments and academic positions, or to make alliances with the government and the industry in order to promote and implement their research projects. But the same scholars often used cosmopolitanism to gain similar interests when the situation required a cosmopolitan attachment, such as in some projects funded by the EU. These projects were successful in maintaining the circulation of collaboration between researchers coming from different national units in BH, but also from different countries created on the space of the former Yugoslavia. The rules for building alliances, set up by EU research collaboration frameworks, were flexible enough to allow different identities to compromise their interests into composite goals. While some cosmopolitans were allowed to define the cosmos as Europe and others as former Yugoslavia, nationalists were allowed to temporarily ‘plug’ into a specific cosmos created by a specific project.

Therefore, it was not a strong attachment to the local national context that prevented nationalists from collaborating more often with scholars from other national units in BH. Cosmopolitans were also strongly attached to the same context. It was a tendency of nationalists to put everything into a national context as ‘a single container’ that detached them from other local contexts, to which cosmopolitans were more easily attached. More attachments to more local contexts provided cosmopolitans with more possibilities for information sharing. Nationalism was thus a barrier to information sharing between scholars more often than cosmopolitanism, not because it made actions limited to a local context; but on the contrary, because it tried more often to act as a global overarching context. Similarly, cosmopolitanism was more often an enabler of scholars’ information sharing, not because it was more global and detached from a local context, but because it acted as a local actor more often than nationalism. Whenever nationalism or cosmopolitanism acted as local actors, they were able to be attached to other actors through a number of different contexts. On the other hand, whenever actors were limited to a single context, either nationalism or cosmopolitanism, or any other single context, they had difficulties negotiating circulation.