This article uses examples from the 1992–1995 Bosnian war and its aftermath to illustrate how a gender lens helps to understand the category of genocide, both in legal and in popular terms. The one event in the Bosnian war that was ruled to be genocide was the sex-selective killings of over 8000 Bosnian Muslim men during the Bosnian Serb Army’s takeover of the Srebrenica “Safe Area” from July 11, 1995. Assumptions about gender and culture—that this population was a traditional patriarchal society—formed the basis for the judgment that the Bosnian Serbs had acted with the intent to “destroy in whole or in part” the Bosnian Muslims of the enclave. Sexual violence against both men and women has also figured in war crimes trials for Bosnia, prosecuted as crimes against humanity but not directly as genocide. This connection has also stirred activist and academic debate, owing to the contradictions that arise between the pursuit of justice on behalf of ethno-national groups and justice that counteracts gender-based violence and gender inequalities. Through the Srebrenica judgment and debates over wartime rape, this article examines the gendered logics of the Bosnian war and how the label of genocide or that of “lesser” crimes affects survivors and members of victim and perpetrator groups. It shows how postwar initiatives for gender justice in Bosnia, especially those for war violence survivors, have not significantly challenged the fundamental gender logics of national victim narratives which continue to dominate much of public discourse and politics. As in other contexts, the goal of preventing and condemning mass atrocities, whether ruled genocide or not—to ensure “Never Again”—does little to advocate for comprehensive justice without also challenging the gendered logic that has historically upheld them.
Drawing on recent critiques of liberal conceptions of legal-juridical citizenship, this article develops a model of disenchanted citizenship that moves away from treating legal-juridical citizenship as an unqualified good, normative value, or universal concept. Building on the concept of the regionally specific citizenship regime, constructions of citizenship that can be bound within one nation-state or extend across several, the article examines the inequalities, instabilities, and exclusions that remain central to contemporary regional constructions of citizenship. By offering new language to describe old and new processes of de-documentation, the review and revocation of core identity documents, and de-citizenship, the revocation of birthright or naturalized citizenship, the essay explores how citizenship remains a site of bio-documentary power, the power to make and unmake populations through the production, interrogation, destabilization, and even destruction of digital and physical files and documents.
This essay introduces Inaugurated Ideology (Ix), a theoretical framework for understanding how political succession reconfigures governing rationalities through the symbolic articulation, institutional mediation, and uneven translation of state power. Drawing on political anthropology, critical theory, and the study of bureaucracy, Ix conceptualizes executive transition not as a simple change in leadership, but as a performative process through which overlapping temporal and moral orientations are publicly established and differentially enacted across institutions and policy domains. Unlike paradigms or worldviews, Ix is temporally bounded, strategically articulated, and institutionally consequential, often reshaping legal processes, bureaucratic practice, and lived experience without altering formal statutes. Rather than assigning administrations to fixed ideological types, the framework identifies configurations of temporal orientations—reactive, restorative, revolutionary, and pragmatic—together with moral orientations, inclusionary and exclusionary, that combine differently across political contexts. Through an analysis of US administrations from Ronald Reagan to Donald J. Trump's second non-consecutive administration, the essay traces how ideological succession reshapes public discourse, institutional behavior, and state practice across time. It does so through a two-level examination of US immigration governance, first as a broader field in which shifting governing rationalities become visible through executive framing, administrative priority, and uneven institutional translation, and second through the I-485 adjustment-of-status process, where these configurations become materially consequential through mechanisms such as classification, evidentiary thresholds, administrative time, and bureaucratic discretion. In doing so, the essay offers a framework for understanding political transition as a recurring site for the rearticulation of authority, belonging, and state practice.
