Conclusion

2020 ◽  
pp. 205-220
Author(s):  
Andrew C. Gilbert
Keyword(s):  
Bosnia And Herzegovina ◽  
International Intervention

This concluding chapter highlights some of the major arguments and observations of the book and demonstrates the comparative opportunities and broader relevance of a focus on encounters for the study of international intervention. Addressing the question of legitimacy in intervention encounters was a useful method for identifying and accounting for the stakes, instabilities, and effects of international intervention. This is, in part, because questions about legitimacy were an everyday part of intervention encounters. Analysis of intervention encounters revealed not only these contestations of legitimacy, but also how these encounters were where the grounds and criteria for evaluating that legitimacy were created, improvised, tested, and rejected. Intervention encounters are not only where one learns about the power or instabilities of international intervention; they are also generative sites of invention and creativity. The chapter then looks at the three processes that should be useful in exploring and analyzing intervention encounters beyond Bosnia and Herzegovina: humanitarianization, entextualization, and recontextualization.

Introduction

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-19
Author(s):  
Andrew C. Gilbert
Keyword(s):  
Ethnic Groups ◽  
Bosnia And Herzegovina ◽  
Cultural Production ◽  
Social Transformation ◽  
The Political ◽  
Creative Processes ◽  
International Intervention ◽  
Direct Participation ◽  
The One

This introductory chapter provides an overview of international intervention in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Years of international intervention had significantly shaped postwar politics in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Comprising an uneasy encounter between and among the political classes claiming to represent one of Bosnia's three main ethnic groups (Croats, Serbs, and Bosniaks) and a wide array of foreign agencies like the one headed by Austrian diplomat Wolfgang Petritsch, these interventions ranged from indirect relations of supervision to the direct participation of foreign agents in Bosnian government. This book studies international intervention and the problems of legitimacy that emerge in and through what can be called “intervention encounters.” It analyzes international intervention as a series of encounters to reveal the creative processes of cultural production and social transformation that happen in everyday interactions by members of unequally positioned groups.

Mediating among Mediators: Building a Consensus in Multilateral Interventions

2018 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 125-154 ◽  
Author(s):  
Timea Spitka
Keyword(s):  
Northern Ireland ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Bosnia And Herzegovina ◽  
Violent Conflict ◽  
Consensus Building ◽  
Critical Question ◽  
International Intervention ◽  
Intervention Process

AbstractThe conditions under which multilateral international intervention are effective in ending a violent conflict is a critical question for scholars and practitioners. Scholarly studies have demonstrated the importance of a united intervention but have been in disagreement over the effectiveness of neutral versus partisan intervention. This article examines the conditions under which mediators construct a consensus on the type of intervention process. What are the factors that enable a consensus on a neutral versus a partisan intervention? Distinguishing between four types of international intervention processes – united-neutral, united-partisan, divided-partisan, and divided neutral and partisan intervention – this article argues that it is a united intervention, whether united partisan or united-neutral, that contributes to creating leverage on conflicting parties to end a conflict. The article examines consensus building among mediators within two divergent case studies: Northern Ireland and Bosnia and Herzegovina.

The Right to Return Home: International Intervention and Ethnic Cleansing in Bosnia and Herzegovina

1998 ◽  
Vol 47 (3) ◽  
pp. 599-631 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marcus Cox
Keyword(s):  
Bosnia And Herzegovina ◽  
Group Living ◽  
Ethnic Cleansing ◽  
International Intervention ◽  
Internally Displaced ◽  
Durable Solutions ◽  
The Right ◽  
Dayton Agreement ◽  
The Cost ◽  
Near Future

The use of terror to separate the ethnic groups in Bosnia and Herzegovina was a deeply tragic episode, with devastating effects on the lives of millions of people. Although the Dayton Agreement of December 1995 has brought a fragile peace to Bosnia and Herzegovina, it has done so at the cost of the division of its territory, its population and almost every aspect of civil life along ethnic lines. Two years into the peace process, the progress of return of refugees and displaced persons has been extremely disappointing. More than two million people—almost half the population—are still dispossessed of their homes. Some 600,000 of these are refugees abroad who have not yet found durable solutions, many of whom face the prospect of compulsory return into displacement within Bosnia and Herzegovina in the near future. Another 800,000 have been internally displaced to areas in the control of their own ethnic group, living in multiple occupancy situations, in collective centres or in property vacated by the displacement of others, often in situations of acute humanitarian concern. The fundamental issue for the future of the postwar society of Bosnia and Herzegovina is whether these people can or will return to their homes.

From Humanitarianism to Humanitarianization

2020 ◽  
pp. 138-162
Author(s):  
Andrew C. Gilbert
Keyword(s):  
Bosnia And Herzegovina ◽  
International Aid ◽  
Aid Workers ◽  
Considerable Time ◽  
International Intervention ◽  
Humanitarian Action ◽  
Cultural Conditions ◽  
The Social ◽  
Housing Reconstruction

This chapter explains that much of contemporary international intervention takes places under the sign of humanitarianism. One of the most significant undertakings in postwar Bosnia and Herzegovina was the massive housing reconstruction projects run by international aid organizations as part of a highly politicized effort to move refugees back to their prewar homes. Alongside the usual technical tasks of such projects, aid workers spent considerable time and effort in their encounters with refugees creating the social and cultural conditions conducive to humanitarian action—a process which can be called humanitarianization. The chapter analyzes these efforts and demonstrates that the humanitarian status of such aid projects was never more than provisionally settled. It argues that this unstable, provisional nature of humanitarian action forms an underexplored dynamic shaping and limiting aid interventions in Bosnia and beyond.

Doing Fieldwork in Areas of International Intervention

2020 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Bosnia And Herzegovina ◽  
International Intervention ◽  
Personal Experiences ◽  
The World ◽  
Practical Guidance ◽  
Conducting Research

Using insights from those with first-hand experience of conducting research in areas of international intervention and conflict across the world, this book provides essential practical guidance, discussion of mistakes, key reflections and raises important questions for researchers and students embarking on fieldwork in violent and closed contexts. Chapters detail personal experiences from areas including the Congo, Sudan, Yemen, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Myanmar, inviting readers into their reflections on mistakes and hard-learned lessons. Divided into sections on issues of control and confusion, security and risk, distance and closeness and sex and sensitivity, the chapters look at how to negotiate complex grey areas and raise important questions that intervention researchers need to consider before, during and after their time on the ground.

International Intervention and the Problem of Legitimacy

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew C. Gilbert
Keyword(s):  
Bosnia And Herzegovina ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
International Intervention ◽  
Target Populations ◽  
The People ◽  
Ethnographic Analysis ◽  
The Human Condition

This book argues for an ethnographic analysis of international intervention as a series of encounters, focusing on the relations of difference and inequality, and the question of legitimacy that permeate such encounters. The book discusses the transformations that happen in everyday engagements between intervention agents and their target populations, and also identifies key instabilities that emerge out of such engagements. It highlights the struggles, entanglements and inter-dependencies between and among foreign agents, and the people of Bosnia-Herzegovina that channel and shape intervention and how it unfolds. Drawing upon nearly two years of fieldwork studying in postwar Bosnia and Herzegovina, the book's analysis identifies previously overlooked sites, processes, and effects of international intervention, and suggests new comparative opportunities for the study of transnational action that seeks to save and secure human lives and improve the human condition. Above all, the book foregrounds and analyzes the open-ended, innovative, and unpredictable nature of international intervention that is usually omitted from the ordered representations of the technocratic vision and the confident assertions of many critiques.

scholarly journals The Limits of Foreign Authority: Publicity and the Political Logic of Ambivalence in Postwar Bosnia and Herzegovina

2017 ◽  
Vol 59 (2) ◽  
pp. 415-445 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Gilbert
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Bosnia And Herzegovina ◽  
Popular Sovereignty ◽  
State Of Exception ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Transformation ◽  
Independent State ◽  
International Intervention ◽  
Post Cold War ◽  
The Comparative Study

AbstractThis article explores the ambivalent forms of authority and legitimacy articulated by the Office of the High Representative of the international community in postwar Bosnia and Herzegovina. The High Representative exercised quasi-sovereign powers that placed his position at the center of two contradictions: a democratization paradox of “imposing democracy,” that is, promoting democracy through undemocratic means, and a state-building paradox of building an independent state by violating the principle of popular sovereignty. I analyze the Office's use of mass-mediated publicity to show how the High Representative sought to legitimize his actions in ways that both sustained the norms of democracy and statehood he advocated and suspended the contradictions behind how he promoted them. In doing so, he claimed that Bosnia was caught in a temporary state of exception to the normal nation-state order of things. This claim obliged him to show that he was working to end the state of exception. By focusing on one failed attempt by the OHR to orchestrate an enactment of “local ownership” that was aimed at demonstrating that Bosnia no longer required foreign supervision, this article identifies important limits to internationally instigated political transformation. It offers a view of international intervention that is more volatile, open-ended, and unpredictable than either the ordered representations of the technocratic vision or the confident assertions that critique international intervention as a form of (neo)imperial domination. It also demonstrates the analytic importance of publicity for the comparative study of international nation-building and democratization in the post-Cold War era.

(Inter)National Reconstruction: Revising Poststructuralist Encounters with the War in Bosnia and Herzegovina

2015 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
pp. 17-48 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tomáš Dopita
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Diversity ◽  
Bosnia And Herzegovina ◽  
Political Institutions ◽  
The Political ◽  
International Intervention ◽  
National Reconstruction ◽  
Do So ◽  
The Ideal ◽  
Liberal Bias

The most serious problems in Bosnia and Herzegovina today are linked to the political practices of conflicting visions of nationhood and statehood. The international intervention in the country was expected to create self-sustaining political institutions and then withdraw. However, the fact that the intervention is ongoing shows its failure to do so. Many scholars have engaged this issue, but this article shows that some of the analyses that have been most critical of the international intervention also bring problems of their own. The article focuses on the encounters between collective Subjects and the ways they have been constituted in relation to one another. It warns that without carefully identifying these Subjects we risk serious misinterpretations, such as equating Bosnian Muslims, Bosniaks, and Bosnians. This misinterpretation occurs in two major critical works in IR's ‘poststructuralist canon’ that purport to critically engage the situation and, particularly, the international intervention in Bosnia and Herzegovina – David Campbell's National Deconstruction and Lene Hansen's Security as Practice. Campbell and Hansen rightly criticize the International Community's ethno-cultural essentialism, but in their critique they apply Campbell's radical-idealist version of multiculturalism. Based upon the ideal of a community without essence and the principle of affirming cultural diversity without situating it, this approach is not able to identify the Subjects involved or the unwelcome radicalization of the excluded Subjects, which leads to flawed conclusions as to how to sustainably resolve their conflict. In providing an academic corrective to such a hyper-liberal bias, this article seeks to increase the room-for-manoeuvre of those who seek to create self-sustaining political institutions in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

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