Moral Vision and Impaired Insight: The Imagining of Other Peoples' Communities in Bosnia
Author(s)
Hayden, Robert M.
Abstract
Depictions of the Balkans conflicts in most Western academic and journalistic writings are based on an unreal reading of life as those in the West do not want it, while those of prewar Bosnia manifest an imagination of a Bosnian community not shared by many Bosnians themselves. International political actors insist on efforts to create a Bosnia in accordance with their own images rather than accept that many of the people there view their world and their fate far differently. The result has been to hinder the reconstruction of the region and perhaps also to foreclose the possibility that the peoples of Bosnia will draw on their own cultural knowledge to reforge their own interconnections. The well-intentioned and morally grounded antinationalist positions of most observers skew their observations in such a way as to hinder the understanding of nationalist conflict as a social phenomenon.
