Troubled locations

This article confronts the nationalist and foreign interventionist discourses on 'home' in post-war Bosnia-Herzegovina with the everyday experiences of a category of persons who are perceived as the ultimate embodiment of the promised homecoming encapsulated in sedentarism: minority returnees. It ethnographically traces the initially mirroring movements of two households and their differential ways to overcome the effects of displacement as well as their insertion in broader transformations. Infusing the notion of 'home' with an eye for security in its widest sense, and, in particular, highlighting the importance of the life course, it investigates the significance of place through a contextualized household political economy of 'home'. In that way it explores the conditions in which certain remakings of 'home' come to be seen as more feasible than others.