“While it lasts”

Abstract This article traces transformations of labor through an exploration a relatively new employment sector in supervised postsocialist, postwar Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH), where internationally funded, temporary, project-based contracts are the rule. Focusing on atypical white-collar precarious workers who have strung together 10 to 25 years successive short projects IGOs NGOs Sarajevo (under umbrella democratization, peacebuilding EU integration agendas), I investigate their ways strategizing accumulate such continuity cultivation three kinds assets: sector-specific competences, favorable positionality, disposition optimism. argue that “successful” strategizing, generally line with neoliberal rationality mainly developed within this sector, is facilitated by similar structural conditions overall precarity, temporariness provisionality wider BiH society.