ABSTRACT
To be asked to ‘say something’ ‘about’ the topic of violence in the months immediately following the confl ict in Kosovo was both a responsibility and a temptation.2 Given the urgent demands that the war in the former Yugoslavia made and continues to make on thinking about the contemporary political space it would be irresponsible not to take the time to think through such an important event’s relation to an understanding of violence. However, it is also tempting today to concentrate on the singular example of Kosovo as paradigmatic of all violence to the exclusion of the heterogeneous moments of violence which constitute the contemporary historical, social and political situation. One might refer to ‘cease-fi res’ in Ulster, teen shootings in North America, the crises in Kashmir and Taiwan, the ongoing confl icts in Chechnya, the Congo, Liberia, Sri Lanka, and several other troubled regions of the world, as equally signifi cant examples of violence (at this time) all worthy of study and all with similarly pressing demands on our attention. Making Kosovo a central example of violence today might run the risk of turning the event into a model which would act to reconstitute the we of Western discourse primarily responsible for the violence itself. If we ‘Western Europeans’, and this term includes North Americans, grant Kosovo a privileged status in the global economy of violence then we run the risk of excluding other proper names equally as distressing as that
of Kosovo, names which as yet may not even be recognised as objects of reportage by the Western mediatic gaze.3
