Shortly after the book's protagonists moved into their apartment complex in Sarajevo, they, like many others, were overcome by the 1992-1995 war and the disintegration of socialist Yugoslavia More than a decade later, in post-war Bosnia and Herzegovina, they felt they were collectively stuck in a time warp where nothing seemed to be as it should be. Starting from everyday concerns, this book paints a compassionate yet critical portrait of people's sense that they were in limbo, trapped in a seemingly endless "Meantime." Ethnographically investigating yearnings for "normal lives" in the European semi-periphery, it proposes fresh analytical tools to explore how the time and place in which we are caught shape our hopes and fears.

" A] theoretical milestone that signposts provocative new directions for scholars and students of displacement. This volume offers an exceptional critical synthesis of emergent strands of thinking about displacement while also posing new questions about how processes of 'home making, un-making, and re-making' unfold for people who must navigate the socially transformative and uncertain conditions generated by conflict and structural violence." . Stephen C. Lubkemann, author of Culture in Chaos: An Anthropology of the Social Condition in War

Based on anthropological studies across the globe, this book explores the social practice of home-making amongst people whose lives are characterized by movement and violence. Social scientific and policy understandings of home and migration tend to focus on territory, culture and nation, often carrying implicit 'sedentarist' assumptions of a naturalised link between people and particular places. This book challenges such views, drawing attention instead to unpredictable forms of dwelling in the often violent processes that connect yet differently affect the movement of people and capital. Taking seriously the political implications of this challenge, the authors do not resort to a free floating, placeless approach. Instead, through the detailed ethnography of lived experiences of displacement and emplacement, *Struggles for Home* investigates the power sedentarism may have to provide or prohibit hope. Research conducted in Sri Lanka, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Zambia, Cyprus, the Palestinian West Bank, Guatemala, and amongst Romanians and Moroccans in Spain articulates a novel theoretical framework for the development of a critical political anthropology of one of the most controversial and fascinating issues of our time - the remaking of home in migration.

Stef Jansen is Senior Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of Manchester. His research centres upon critical ethnographic investigations of home and hope with regard to nation, place and state transformation on the intersection of postwar and postsocialist change in the post-Yugoslav states.

Staffan Lofving is Lecturer in the Department of Social Anthropology, Stockholm University. The editor of books on Cultural Economics (2005) and Identity Politics (2002), his current research revolves around the neoliberal social contract in Colombian and Central American polities.

Exploring recent configurations of social relations in post-socialist, post-war, post-Yugoslav Bosnia and Herzegovina this collection of ethnographic research turns an analytical lens on questions of sociality. Contributions based on long-term, in-depth research projects explore how people in different parts of BiH make and remake social relations and outline how their practices of sociality relate to donor-set priorities and formal human rights provisions. The book explores the socio-political concerns which have emerged within BiH, incites interdisciplinary conversations and sheds critical light on ways of engaging with these concerns and discusses forms of sociality, politics and agency which remain largely absent from the official political discourse and practice of local and foreign actors. Explicitly focusing on social relations in BiH against the historical background of both war and Yugoslav socialism, and directly placing these in relation to authoritative discourses and policies regarding BiH today brings the different strands together while the commentaries of specialists who have studied BiH in different ways explicitly situates the contribution of ethnographic work in the country.

Exploring recent configurations of social relations in post-socialist, post-war, post-Yugoslav Bosnia and Herzegovina this collection of ethnographic research turns an analytical lens on questions of sociality. Contributions based on long-term, in-depth research projects explore how people in different parts of BiH make and remake social relations and outline how their practices of sociality relate to donor-set priorities and formal human rights provisions. The book explores the socio-political concerns which have emerged within BiH, incites interdisciplinary conversations and sheds critical light on ways of engaging with these concerns and discusses forms of sociality, politics and agency which remain largely absent from the official political discourse and practice of local and foreign actors. Explicitly focusing on social relations in BiH against the historical background of both war and Yugoslav socialism, and directly placing these in relation to authoritative discourses and policies regarding BiH today brings the different strands together while the commentaries of specialists who have studied BiH in different ways explicitly situates the contribution of ethnographic work in the country.

Based on anthropological studies across the globe, this book explores the experiences and contested meanings of home for people whose lives are characterized by migration related to varying forms of violence. Taking seriously the political implications and exploitation of discourses of home in the transnational processes that connect yet differently affect the movement of people and capital, it challenges the sedentarist assumption that territoriality and nation are necessarily the primary determinants of identification. However, it does not replace this sedentarism with a free floating, placeless approach. Instead, through the detailed ethnography of actual experiences of displacement and emplacement, it investigates the power sedentarist discourses may have to provide or prohibit hope. In Struggles for Home the focus is turned onto hope, aspiration and a sense of worth as necessary building blocks in the reconstruction of the social, amidst the violence of political and economic transformation. Research conducted in Sri Lanka, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Zambia, Cyprus, the Palestinian West Bank, Guatemala, and amongst Romanians and Moroccans in Spain articulates a novel theoretical framework for the development of a critical political anthropology of one of the most controversial and fascinating issues of our time - the remaking of home in migration. Stef Jansen is Senior Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of Manchester. His research centres upon critical ethnographic investigations of home and hope with regard to nation, place and transformation, with particular reference to the post-Yugoslav states. Staffan Lofving is at the Department of Social Anthropology, Stockholm University. The author of books on cultural economics (2005) and identity politics (2002), his current research deals with violence in post-war processes of political and economic liberalisation."

Shortly after the book's protagonists moved into their apartment complex in Sarajevo, they, like many others, were overcome by the 1992-1995 war and the disintegration of socialist Yugoslavia More than a decade later, in post-war Bosnia and Herzegovina, they felt they were collectively stuck in a time warp where nothing seemed to be as it should be. Starting from everyday concerns, this book paints a compassionate yet critical portrait of people's sense that they were in limbo, trapped in a seemingly endless "Meantime." Ethnographically investigating yearnings for "normal lives" in the European semi-periphery, it proposes fresh analytical tools to explore how the time and place in which we are caught shape our hopes and fears.