Recovery is Possible: Making and Unmaking Futures after Addiction in Sarajevo

Abstract

Recovery occurs in a complex, emergent manner. It is a worldly process, shot through with the nuances and imperatives of an equally complex, emergent and imperfect world. Encountering recovery, therefore, entails thinking through the complex, mutually informed relationship between recovery-oriented organisations and the contexts in which they arise. This thesis presents and compares different attempts to address the social problem of addiction in Sarajevo. At its heart, it is a study of the ways in which members of two primary fieldsites—a therapeutic community and an NGO—try to achieve recovery from addiction, which gives equal weight and attention to the roles and voices of the addicts whose recovery is at stake, and to the roles and voices of the professionals involved in recovery processes. Positioning my study within both the city of Sarajevo, and within historical and contemporary manifestations of addiction problems in the city, I pursue a comparative explication of the ways in which addicts and professionals come together to ‘make’ recovery. I trace and compare the manifestations of a productive tension in these contexts between idealised and programmatic recovery on the one hand, and the imperatives of sociality on the other. If recovery is ‘made’ through such tension, it can also be ‘unmade’ in this way. As such, I ground my observations of the ‘unmaking’ of recovery processes in a discussion of the factors inherent to, and externally acting upon these institutions which undermine both the recovered state and the recovery process. In so doing I seek to generate insight into the complex, emergent nature of change in these contexts, which will be discussed in terms of (ab)normality, capricious simultaneity and possibility.