Introduction

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.

Interlude

This interlude outlines the contours of international authority created in the response to the Bosnian war of the 1990s. The remaking of international institutions in response to Bosnia's war and its postwar peace heralded the coming-into-being of the “international community” as the dominant protagonist of a post-Cold War order structured around the values of peace, democracy, the rule of law, humanitarian solidarity, and the inviolability of human rights. This order was presented as more or less universally valid. The universal validity of this post-Cold War model bestowed two main roles and sets of hierarchical relations on the agents of intervention: that of mediator above and between conflicting parties, and that of civilizing missionary or educator of not fully modern people(s). Successfully occupying either role required a constant demonstration of neutrality. However, working out what it meant to be “neutral” in the everyday encounters of international intervention across relations of difference was often a vexing and unpredictable endeavor. The interlude then looks at postwar Bosnia's political settlement and explains why refugee return became such an important site of intervention encounters. It also considers the Dayton Peace Agreement.

From Humanitarianism to Humanitarianization

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.

Conclusion

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.