Introduction : gender and geopolitics in the Eurovision Song Contest

From the vantage point of the early 1990s, when the end of the Cold War not only inspired the discourses of many Eurovision performances but created opportunities for the map of Eurovision participation itself to significantly expand in a short space of time, neither the scale of the contemporary Eurovision Song Contest (ESC) nor the extent to which a field of “Eurovision research” has developed in cultural studies and its related disciplines would have been recognisable. In 1993, when former Warsaw Pact states began to participate in Eurovision for the first time and Yugoslav successor states started to compete in their own right, the contest remained a one-night-per-year theatrical presentation staged in venues that accommodated, at most, a couple of thousand spectators and with points awarded by expert juries from each participating country. Between 1998 and 2004, Eurovision’s organisers, the European Broadcasting Union (EBU), and the national broadcasters responsible for hosting each edition of the contest expanded it into an ever grander spectacle: hosted in arenas before live audiences of 10,000 or more, with (from 2004) a semi-final system enabling every eligible country and broadcaster to participate each year, and with (between 1998 and 2008) points awarded almost entirely on the basis of telephone voting by audiences in each participating state. In research on Eurovision as it stands today, it would almost go without saying that Eurovision and the performances it contains have reflected, communicated and been drawn into narratives of national and European identity which were and are – by their very nature as a nexus between imaginaries of culture and territory – geopolitical

Writing about embodiment as an act of translation

Writing about embodiment is an act of compression: reducing the sensory complexity of someone else’s physical experience, or even one’s own, into written language that somebody else will understand through sight or sound. It is an act of abstraction, excerpting part of a narrative or a life and putting it to another purpose, where indeed one may – and possibly one always should – worry that it is overstepping into appropriation. It is also an act of translation, where recognizing the writer as an intermediary in the translator’s sense might help us be explicit about what it is we do when we write about bodies, and why writing about militarized embodiment might be so unnerving

The ‘Gay Olympics’? : the Eurovision Song Contest and the politics of LGBT/European belonging

The politics of gay and transgender visibility and representation at the Eurovision Song Contest, an annual televised popular music festival presented to viewers as a contest between European nations, show that processes of interest to Queer International Relations do not just involve states or even international institutions; national and transnational popular geopolitics over ‘LGBT rights’ and ‘Europeanness’ equally constitute the understandings of ‘the international’ with which Queer IR is concerned. Building on Cynthia Weber’s reading the persona of the 2014 Eurovision winner Conchita Wurst with ‘queer intellectual curiosity’, this paper demonstrates that Eurovision shifted from, in the late 1990s, an emerging site of gay and trans visibility to, by 2008–14, part of a larger discursive circuit taking in international mega-events like the Olympics, international human-rights advocacy, Europe/Russia relations, and the politics of state homophobia and transphobia. Contest organisers thus had to take positions – ranging from detachment to celebration – about ‘LGBT’ politics in host states and the Eurovision region. The construction of spatio-temporal hierarchies around attitudes to LGBT rights, however, revealed exclusions that corroborate other critical arguments on the reconfiguration of national and European identities around ‘LGBT equality’

Eurovision 2017 was remarkable for its lack of politics

The build up to the 2017 Eurovision Song Contest was overshadowed by a dispute between Russia and Ukraine which resulted in Russia withdrawing from the event. Catherine Baker writes that despite this dispute, the show itself was largely free from the kind of political controversy that has emerged in previous years

The Local Workforce of International Intervention in the Yugoslav Successor States: 'Precariat' or 'Projectariat'? Towards an Agenda for Future Research

The international organizations involved in peacebuilding, democratization and peacekeeping in the Yugoslav successor states have employed thousands of locally recruited workers as project officers, language intermediaries and support staff. This makes them a distinct employment sector within these post-socialist and in several cases post-conflict economies, most significantly in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo. This paper evaluates arguments in favour of regarding this workforce firstly as a group of workers suffering precarity and secondly as a privileged social elite. While there are good grounds for recognizing them as a distinctive social group, this distinctiveness has not led to a widely expressed social identity based on the commonalities of their employment

How international organisations disrupted the post-war labour market in former Yugoslavia

‘Peace-building’ international organisations vitiated the economic course of post-Yugoslav countries by acting as periodical employers with no sustainable long-term strategy, argues Catherine Baker. This has occurred most of all in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo, where international intervention has taken place on the greatest scale

Book review: transnationalism, diaspora and migrants from the former Yugoslavia in Britain by Gayle Munro

In Transnationalism, Diaspora and Migrants from the Former Yugoslavia in Britain, Gayle Munro offers an ethnographic account based on 200 narratives of migrants from the former Yugoslavia to Britain, focusing particularly on how their diverse experiences unsettle the categories through which migration is often understood. This short book is an important contribution to the small but growing field of research looking at this complex migration history, writes Catherine Baker

Critical pedagogy within the migration/security nexus: but who gets through the door?

This submission will reflect on how border control and visa regimes structure access to higher education by differentiating between potential students and funding recipients based on citizenship, and will suggest some implications for critical pedagogy in global politics. I write from the perspective of a former part-time instructor in an interdisciplinary East European studies department in the UK (a post I held in 2011–2012). In the UK system, the fee differential for students who are EU or non-EU citizens produces a stark inequality in access that cuts through East European regions depending on which states have become members of the European Economic Area; this anomaly makes the wider inequality particularly visible

Why were Bosniaks treated more favourably than today’s Muslim refugees? On differing narratives of identity, religion and security

Today’s migration crisis has prompted comparisons with the recent past, with analyses highlighting the relatively successful integration of refugees from Bosnia in the 1990s. Catherine Baker reflects on why today’s migrants are not being given as warm a welcome and why even the welcome of Bosnian migrants was less warm than it has been remembered as. Although even before 9/11 racism and Islamophobia were turning Muslim migration into an imagined security threat, Bosnian refugees did not fit the profile of suspected terrorists that in 1990s European cultural politics was already being attached to brown ‘Middle Eastern’ men

Music as a weapon of ethnopolitical violence and conflict: processes of ethnic separation during and after the break-up of Yugoslavia

Using illustrations from the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s and their aftermath, Baker argues that understanding popular music and public discourses about it can help to understand the dynamics of ethnopolitical conflict. Studies of war and conflict have approached music as political communication, as an object of securitization, as a means of violence and as a symbol of ethnic difference, while international law in the context of another case of collective violence, Rwanda, has even begun to question whether performing or broadcasting certain music could constitute incitement to genocide. Drawing on poststructuralist perspectives on the media and ethnicization in conflicts, Baker explores and interrogates the discourse of popular music as a weapon of war that was in use during and after the violent break-up of Yugoslavia. Music during the Yugoslav wars was used as a tool of humiliation and violence in prison camps, and to provoke fear of the ethnic Other in line with a strategy of ethnic cleansing; it was also conceptualized as a morale-booster for the troops of one's own side. A discourse of music as a weapon of war was also in use and persisted after the war, when its referent was shifted to associate music-as-a-weapon not to the brave and defiant ingroup so much as the aggressive Other. This was then turned against a wider range of signifiers than those who had directly supported the Other's troops and had the effect of perpetuating ethnic separation and obstructing the reformation of a (post-)Yugoslav cultural space. Despite evidence that music did serve as an instrument of violence in the Yugoslav wars (and the precedent of the Bikindi indictment in Rwanda), Baker concludes that music should be integrated into understandings of ethnopolitical conflict not through a framework of incitement and complicity but with respect for the significance of music in the everyday. © 2013 Taylor & Francis