ABSTRACT
One of the best-known statements on the fiction of representation is Rene Magritte's painting of a pipe entitled Ceci n' est pas une Pipe, a title Michel Foucault appropriated for one of his essays (1983). Like Magritte's art, Foucault's thinking interrogated and disturbed the relationship between images and words. In this chapter, I would like to do the same with the image and language of war. Traveling in the former Yugoslavia---the first time just months before the end of the 1990-95 war and then several times in the years to follow--to find out how the people there experienced and understood the violence that destroyed the Yugoslav state, I found myself thinking of "war" more like Magritte's pipe than as I had been trained to think about it within International Relations (IR) academic and policy discourses.
