ABSTRACT
In my Introduction, I noted that the deliberate destruction of the built environment – embodied in the destruction of Mostar’s Stari Most – was both integral to the 1992-95 Bosnian War and widespread beyond the historico-geographical confi nes of that confl ict. The destruction of the Stari Most itself became an iconic event that raised the destruction of the built environment onto the political agenda. And yet, perhaps paradoxically, the elevation of this event to iconic status served to defl ect interest in the meaning of the widespread, deliberate destruction of the built environment towards the role that such destruction might play in the wider human tragedy of ethnic cleansing/genocide that was being played out across the Balkan Peninsula. That is, the destruction of the Stari Most was, by and large, interpreted as a symbol of the nature of the destruction of human lives and communities underway in Bosnia. In the Introduction I argued that such a reduction of the deliberate destruction of the built environment to a status ancillary to the killing of individuals was responsible for an avoidance of the question of understanding the destruction of the built environment as a form of violence in its own right. Such a failure to examine the widespread deliberate destruction of buildings as a distinct category of political violence might, I argued, be attributed to the anthropocentric lens through which confl ict is customarily viewed.
