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Balkan subjects in intervention literature: the politics of overrepresentation and reconstruction

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Abstract

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.

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Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Maria Mälksoo, Milja Kurki, Berit Bliesemann de Guevara, the audience at the International Politics Research Seminar at Aberystwyth University, and three anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments on earlier versions of the paper. Xymena Kurowska first introduced me to the Special Issue project, and Christine Andrä has engaged different versions of these arguments over several years ‒ I cannot thank them enough. The support of the Economic and Social Research Council (UK) (ES/T009004/1) for a part of this research is gratefully acknowledged.

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  1. Department of International Politics, Aberystwyth University, Aberystwyth, Ceredigion, SY23 3FL, Wales

    Katarina Kušić

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Kušić, K. Balkan subjects in intervention literature: the politics of overrepresentation and reconstruction. J Int Relat Dev 24, 910–931 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41268-021-00235-x

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