Foreign authority and the politics of impartiality in postwar Bosnia-Herzegovina.

摘要

The war in Bosnia and its post-war peace heralded the coming-into-being of the "international community" as the dominant protagonist of post-cold war order, structured around the values of peace, democracy, the rule of law, humanitarian solidarity, and the inviolability of human rights. This dissertation is an ethnographic exploration of how the authority and legitimacy of the international community came to be conceptualized, exercised, and transformed through every-day practices of "intervention" in Bosnia's postwar refugee return process. More than merely the movement of refugee populations to their prewar homes, this process was taken as a transformative one, the vehicle to create a state built upon multi-ethnic forms of democracy and transparent institutions and processes.;This dissertation begins with an analysis of how foreign state-building goals were promoted through the recontextualization of a socialist-era concept of sovereign peoplehood, resulting in unanticipated social effects. I then proceed with three case studies of what I call "the politics of impartiality," first through an analysis of foreigners' inability to transcend the ideology of ethnic difference, second by tracking their attempts to delineate and police a space for "humanitarian" action, and third by exploring practices designed to render Bosnian social life "transparent" and available for transformation.;Throughout I argue that the exercise of authority and the claiming of legitimacy were fraught because that legitimacy relied upon the ability of foreigners to embody and demonstrate the neutrality, impartiality, morality, and modernity that supposedly set them apart from the Bosnians they were to mediate between and transform. These sources of authority were often nothing more than ideologized distinctions between "international" and local, the universal and particular, Europe and the Balkans, the moral and political, and the traditional and the modern, and frequently proved easy to undo. Moreover, these distinctions produced their own contradictions when confronted with the actual history, politics, and people that made up the intervention encounter. What was at stake, then, was the attempt to fix the international community's authority in a context where this fixity was constantly being questioned by Bosnians who sought to remake the intervention encounter in their own terms.