Polluted air, polluted politics: Disfiguring atmospheres in Sarajevo

What forms of political imagination emerge in disturbed ecologies? This paper explores this question through an ethnographic study of Sarajevo, where winter temperature inversions trap toxic emissions from diffuse and decentralized sources, turning the air into a suffocating smog. Pollution leaves enduring traces on residents’ bodies – causing at least one in five premature deaths and significantly increasing rates of cancer and asthma. Despite being firmly ‘in sight’ and widely recognized as a serious problem by citizens, politicians, and foreign intervention agencies alike, it fails to galvanize any political mobilization. Approaching air pollution as a socio-material force that links embodied experience with city-wide governance, I trace how political inferences accrue through the smog and argue that in Sarajevo, air pollution operates disfiguratively: it materializes relations that actively foreclose the imagination of alternative political orders beyond the status quo. This analysis critically engages with literature on ‘slow violence’, which often frames visibility as the primary key to environmental justice; instead, I demonstrate that visibility can inhibit political action as readily as inspire it. Ultimately, I call for attending to the ‘political dispositions’ of environmental entities – their proclivity for channeling certain forms of imagination over others – opening a path for developing political strategies in times of widespread activist exhaustion.