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The Bosnian Diaspora: Integration in Transnational Communities, edited by Marko Valenta and Sabrina P. Ramet. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2011. 335pp. $124.95 cloth. ISBN: 9781409412526.
This larger than usual edited collection con- sists of 16 chapters written by sociologists, anthropologists, political scientists, and demographers, most with a respectable record of publication on Bosnian refugee diaspora. The volume is focused on several aspects of Bosnian transnational communi- ties settling in a dozen of ex-Yugoslav and Western countries during the 1990s and 2000s: socio-economic and cultural integra- tion and the relationship with the host com- munity, transnational connections, and iden- tity processes. Editors Marko Valenta and Sabrina Ramet offer an interesting cross- national comparative perspective, using transnationalism as their main theoretical framework. It is a welcome follow-up vol- ume to a large research output on the Bosnian war and refugee outflows that was published from the mid-1990s to the early 2000s- although I would not call the current situa- tion a "dearth of [recent] literature" on Bos- nian emigration, as the editors state in the introduction (p. 1).
The focus on diaspora makes sense given the recentness and volume of the Bosnian scattering around the globe and enduring close attachments to the home country (as well as more local ties), culture, and lan- guage by most Bosnians living abroad. What one learns from reading this volume is that, in spite of the significance of the indi- vidual socio-economic profile and "human capital," it is not at all irrelevant what coun- try refugees (or expellees, as Barbara Franz calls them) choose, or end up in, in terms of their prosperity in resettlement. In this respect it seems far preferable to resettle in Norway or Austria rather than trying to build a new life in crisis-stricken Serbia, or...