ABSTRACT

The Videoletters Project was a high-profile case of international media assistance to the Western Balkans launched in 2005 with British and Dutch support. Its explicit goal was to promote large-scale reconciliation among ordinary citizens of the former Yugoslavia in the aftermath of the region’s breakup. The project was welcomed internationally: reported on by the press, spotlighted and praised in documentary film festivals, and referred to in scholarly work and policy forums. This was despite the fact that its promise that it would mediate reconciliation via the making and broadcasting of a documentary was barely fulfilled. Based on a qualitative study of the project’s uses of communication to do good and to look good, this chapter considers how an international intervention that harnessed media for do-gooding shifted towards communicating the goodness of aid to donors’ own constituencies. It moreover raises questions for the future research of donors’ dual deployment of communication to do good and to look good.