Postcolonial and decolonial critiques have highlighted the absence of non-Western people as active agents of politics from IR scholarship. These subjects, however, are present as constitutive others in narratives of liberalism, peace, and modernity. This article engages the traces of this presence by focusing on Balkan subjects in intervention literature that studies the far-reaching international involvement in Southeast Europe (SEE) since the 1990s. The article centres on two dimensions of Balkan subjecthood, antipolitics and positioning vis-à-vis Europe, found in two innovative texts that deal with international presence in the Balkans: Lene Hansen’s Security as Practice: Discourse analysis and the Bosnian war (2006) and Elizabeth Dauphinée’s The Politics of Exile (2013). In reconstructing the two dimensions of Balkan subjecthood, the article argues that provincialising IR from SEE requires breaking with the use of postcolonial thought as analogy in the region; it involves encounters with complex difference; and it commands rethinking what kind of knowledge is valorised in IR.

后殖民主义和去殖民主义的批评强调了非西方人作为国际关系奖学金的积极政治代理人的缺席。然而，这些主题在自由主义、和平和现代性的叙事中作为构成性的其他主题出现。本文通过关注干预文献中的巴尔干主题来探究这种存在的痕迹，这些文献研究了自 1990 年代以来对东南欧 (SEE) 影响深远的国际参与。文章集中在巴尔干主体性、反政治和相对于欧洲的定位的两个维度上，在处理巴尔干地区国际存在的两本创新文本中找到：Lene Hansen 的安全即实践：话语分析和波斯尼亚战争（2006 年）和伊丽莎白·多芬妮 (Elizabeth Dauphinée) 的流放政治(2013). 在重建巴尔干主体性的两个维度时，文章认为，从 SEE 区域化 IR 需要打破使用后殖民思想作为该地区的类比；它涉及复杂差异的相遇；它要求重新思考在 IR 中重视什么样的知识。