ABSTRACT
Anyone addressing issues of representation in the ethnic and political conflicts of the Balkans cannot but be aware of the precarious position from which he or she is speaking and writing. The very title of this symposium – No Man’s Land, Everybody’s Image – aptly reminds us of what is at stake. Images, especially media images of conflict, have a way of being appropriated. Possessing the image is to possess what it refers to. The primitive magic still seems to work in our high-tech world. Often enough, as competing claims for property, possession, and thus interpretation are being fought over, it is the human lives that have registered in these images that risk becoming no-man’s land, terra incognita.
