ABSTRACT
This chapter talks about a thorough excavation of the presence of a contemporary episteme in international relations (IR) discourses about war. It considers some of the texts that are often cited within academic discourses about war, followed by an examination of policy discourses regarding the war in the former Yugoslavia, particularly in Bosnia. The chapter explains the images produced and reproduced within IR and foreign policy domains are blatantly contrasted with the self-narratives of agents in war: ordinary and extraordinary people who participated in and experienced the violence in Bosnia between 1990 and 1995. The chapter discusses part of the failure to respond can be traced to the inability of analysts to think productively about the relationship between political violence and the way agents of political violence are constituted. The perception that violence might lead to more advantageous outcomes for the more well-armed Serbs and Croats had vastly complicated the prospect of ethnic partition.
