Yearnings in the Meantime: Normal Lives and the State in a Sarajevo Apartment Complex

Soon after they moved into their apartment complex in Sarajevo, this book's protagonists 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.