'Sniper Alley': The Politics of Urban Violence in the Besieged Sarajevo

At the beginning of 1990, after a long history of multiculturalism, Bosnia and Herzegovina suffered a resurgence of ethnic nationalism and a civil war fought over purification of ethnic identity. Urban built environments of Bosnian cities became implicated in this conflict, as they operated not only as the sites and targets of the war, but were used as the very means by which the war was fought. This paper discusses the ways in which a constellation of civil architecture and urban space in the central part of the Bosnian capital, Sarajevo, was adopted for the purposes of military violence during the siege of 1992–1995. The focus is on a particular mode of spatial violence against non-military targets: sniping at civilians who were moving, gathering and mixing in public spaces. 'Sniper Alley' was the name that emerged in the world's media to describe a strip of urban space that was the most intensively attacked by snipers. This paper discusses the way in which an assemblage of Sarajevo's micro-geography and urban morphology was appropriated to enable sniping violence and invest the city with terror. It also elaborates the way in which Sarajevo's population adapted the city's urban morphology for practices of resistance. The paper analyses the spatial effects of the wartime violence, terror, and resistance on the transformation of Sarajevo's network, urban flows, and practices of everyday life that sustained the city's ethnic mix. The aim is to understand the role that such transformations played in the politics of ethnic identities in Bosnia and Herzegovina during the war of 1992–1995. The argument is that the sniping violence and terror operated as a means of socio-spatial reconfiguration of Sarajevo from a multi-ethnic city to an ethnically segregated city. Conversely, civilian resistance partially re-established its ethnic mix. Sarajevo's spatial transformations were both a result of and a tool for Bosnian-Herzegovinian socio-political transformation.