Stef Jansen is a social anthropologist. He is Professor at the Faculty of Philosophy, University of Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina. Since the mid- 1990s he has conducted ethnographic research in Serbia, Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina. His publications have explored questions of home, hope, the state, borders, infrastructure and political subjectivity, always with a focus on inequality and domination, social transformations and everyday geopolitics.

In his book about yearnings for ‘normal lives’, Stef Jansen coined the term The (Dayton) Meantime to refer to the specific temporal configuration in which people in a Sarajevo apartment complex in 2008-2010 shared an affective experience that their lives were ‘on hold’, suspended between a known past and a normative future. In this talk he will ask: Can the notion of the Meantime travel? Is every time a Meantime? And, in Bosnia and Herzegovina, a decade and a half later, is The Dayton Meantime over, for whom, in which ways, and to what degree?