Abstract
In the light of the mounting systemic crises of the post-postmodern world, hetero-patriarchal traditional masculinities have been trying for decades to re-invent themselves through the accelerating processes of the militarization of our societies. Concomitantly, we have observed the increasing rivalry between two adversarial political theologies and imperialisms, i.e., the US- and Europe-led, occidental capital-driven and the Russian-led, continental ethnicity-driven imperialisms, to reassert their domination in the world. The clash between the two imperialisms has crystallized in Ukraine, a historical borderland located at the crossroads between the East and the West. The present paper pursues two main objectives: first, to deconstruct how the adversarial imperialisms are being engendered without succumbing to the Westsplaining, and second, by analyzing the case of the war and mass atrocities in Bosnia and Herzegovina in the 1990s, to demonstrate how the liminal border spaces in the specific sites of geo-historical “thresholds” turn into battlefields between the competing militarized masculinities and imperialisms. In the context of Bosnian-Herzegovinian case study, I use it as a paradigmatic example of a borderspace that has been practicing resilience to essentialist binaries. For this purpose, I have borrowed Ettinger’s concept of “matrixial borderspace,” which could be used to develop liminal theoretical tools for the deconstruction of binary logics of gender, race/ethnicity, class, and imperiality.