ABSTRACT
What does identity have to do with conflict and violence, especially brutal violence, particularly directed toward innocents and unarmed civilians? The violence in the former Yugoslavia has been variously characterized as ethnic conflict, wars of secession, a civil war in reference to either the whole of Yugoslavia or Bosnia-Herzegovina, and a war of aggression in Croatia (by Serbia) and Bosnia-Herzegovina (by Serbia and Croatia). While terms like “ethnic conflict” and “war” serve to normalize political violence as a feature of international relations, in this and the next three chapters I will argue that uncritical use of such terminology obscures the social processes in which the phenomena they refer to are constructed.1 Instead, they serve to maintain a political order which, in turn, generates a reflexive and tautological discourse deployed to disarm contestations that might otherwise disrupt or subvert that order. Consequently, those who take seriously the proposition that “war” and “ethnic conflict” are problems, and that a better understanding of them might lead, if not to solutions, at least to the amelioration of their worst effects, are prevented from asking whether “causes” of war and ethnic conflict might also be traced to the social order of the state and the linguistic order of citizenship. Is wide-scale sexual violence, including the rape of women and the forced oral castration of men,2 neighbors burning down their neighbors’ homes, the murder and targeting for murder of civilians-men and women, children, the elderly, and infirm-“normal” simply because it takes place within the context of something we call “war” or “ethnic conflict?” To be sure, academic analysts and foreign policy-makers whose expertise focuses on the problem of war tend to normalize such violence, to some extent because they view war as both a tragedy and a solvable, or at least manageable, if not predictable, problem. But I have been struck, semester after semester in intro ductory classes on IR, by the unabashed
and rather unsympathetic realism reflected in many American university students’ perception of war. It is as if studying history as a series of events often organized around the way war restructures perceptions of power in the macrohistorical sense leaves them with a fatalistic, if not also dispassionate, sense that wars are an inevitable feature of political life and that the “nature” of war is simply tragic. Neither the scope nor innocence of its victims, nor the severity, depths, and scope of the intentional cruelty on the part of perpetrators seem to make much difference to their fatalism. I always wonder what combination of socializing influences produces such an attitude, and whether their families see things very differently. My impression is anecdotal, yes, and perhaps what I’ve seen is only an American attitude, but in itself it is more than disturbing enough.
