About

Professor of Cultural Studies and European Ethnology, University of Mainz, Germany

Email: carna.brkovic[at]uni-mainz.de

Profile

My name is Čarna Brković (pronounced as Charna Brkovitj). I am a cultural anthropologist and Professor of Cultural Studies and European Ethnology at the University of Mainz.

My book “Realigning Humanitarianism in the Balkans: From Cold War Politics to Neoliberal Ethics” is coming out with Indiana University Press. It tells the story of how humanitarians in Montenegro pursued worldmaking within the Non-Aligned Movement and, forty years later, during the Europeanization process. Realigning humanitarianism in Southeast Europe meant changing the vision of the world away from the imaginary produced during the Non-Aligned Movement and toward the one epitomized in the liberal humanitarian tradition. Looking at local humanitarian staff outside the West/Global North, I explore links between morality and imagination.

In the winter semester of 2024, I was a Visiting Fellow at Harvard University’s Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies. Between 2023 and 2025, I was a PI on a research project Redigim studying new redistributive imaginaries in Europe. Our consortium won CHANSE funding for this research.

My first monograph Managing Ambiguity is an ethnographic study of how neoliberal reforms in healthcare and social welfare in Bosnia and Herzegovina encouraged clientelism. In the book, I show how the neoliberal emphasis on local community and self-responsibility was translated into clientelist modes of relating and back. I also ethnographically trace how some people managed to get into official political positions by managing ambiguity between social welfare as a civic right and a personal gift. It is based on my PhD in Social Anthropology at the University of Manchester.

My research was published in peer-reviewed articles focusing on humanitarianism (Humanity, Ethnos; Focaal, Social Anthropology), freedom and activism (Social Anthropology), favours (Social Anthropology, Focaal), anthropological epistemology (Anthropological Theory), refugee camps (COMPSEES), and gender (COMPSEES). I co-curated a conversation on peer review for the POLAR journal and serve as a co-editor at Comparative Southeast European Studies.

A red thread connecting my work across diverse topics is thinking about Europe from its southeastern peripheries. I examine the cultural, social, political, and economic forces that compel people to help one another in particular ways; what makes certain ways of relating to others meaningful and sensible; and how the fall of socialism redrew the boundaries of aid communities in ways that have since been forgotten.

My decentered perspective on Europe means critically engaging with conventional notions of Europeanization as a one-way flow of knowledge from West to East. At the same time, I resist romanticizing the local and the vernacular in the East as inherently desirable alternatives. Instead, I critically interrogate both ‘Western’ and ‘Eastern’ humanitarian formations, advocating for a nuanced analytical engagement with the political heritage of socialism and a re-examination of how people in Europe care for themselves and others. My work combines a focus on ambiguity and social complexity, while making visible the political-economic inequalities and hierarchies that shape these dynamics.

For me, (South) Eastern Europe figures as a region that poses unexpected theoretical challenges to conventional directions of anthropological analysis. I am deeply critical of hegemonic visions of the region as a poor copyist of theory produced elsewhere – in the former colonial centres, or peripheries. To counteract such visions, I strive to test and develop new concepts that reflect the ethnographic realities of the region but also help understand socio-political entanglements throughout the globe.

As a scholar with a Montenegrin passport and a PhD from the UK, I work towards transforming cultural anthropology into a decentered global discipline. This is reflected in my service roles:

Research Interests and PhD supervision:

  • anthropology of humanitarianism, borders, refugee camps
  • clientelism, favors, the gift
  • nationalism, the state, policy
  • gender and sexuality
  • political imagination, activism, citizenship
  • histories of ethnology and anthropology
  • Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, Germany, Europe

I supervise doctoral students studying political imagination after the fall of socialism in Europe and elsewhere, especially in humanitarianism, activism, gender, and sexuality.