Campbell: National Deconstruction: Violence, Identity, and Justice in Bosnia

Campbell, David. (1998). National deconstruction : violence, identity, and justice in Bosnia. Minneapolis, Minn: University of Minnesota Press.

Though this book is not without its problems, it is an interesting and helpful application of deconstructivist reasoning and methodology in the field of international relations. The thesis is basically this: a positivist project of maps, census and history created a situation whereby the possibilities of responding to the tensions in the former Yugoslavia were constructed in such a way that they caused great harm and death. Campbell posits the ways in which the story could have been told differently, and how this may have gone a great distance to solving the problem with relatively less loss of life.

He begins by telling a couple of different stories from people after the break-up of the former Yugoslavia. The most striking is that of a Bosnian Muslim who says, “I am a Muslim…but I didn’t know that before the war. Before the war, of course, we were all atheists!” (1). This initially highlights the possible accounts that one could give regarding this conflict that were not part of the hegemonic discourse.

Campbell then goes on to discuss an Ethos of Political Criticism, the heart of the methodology. This ethos involves, “an effort to disturb those practices that are settled, untie what appears to be sewn up, and render as produced that which claims to be naturally emergent” (4). This is explicitly an effort to deconstruct.

We are then taken through some of the criticism that has been piled onto the “post-structural” school of though by other IR theorists. This criticism tends to be silly at best, and clearly indicates the critic’s lack of familiarity with the text(s). Deconstructivism is seen as leading directly to nihilism, in that it makes the ability to take action impossible.

In contrast to instrumental rationality, which is seen as not being a sufficient barrier to guarantee against totalitarianism, Campbell’s method, “aims to demonstrate that the settled norms of international society—in particular, the idea that the national community requires the nexus of demarcated territory and fixed identity—were not only insufficient to enable a response to the Bosnian war, they ere complicit in and necessary for the conduct of the war itself” (13).

One important move that Campbell makes is to identify identities with performance, and thus to take the ideational realm and make it apply to the material. “First and foremost among the onto-political assumptions of deconstructive thought is the concept of the performative constitution of identity” (24). “The performative constitution of identity is central to rethinking the relationship between violence and the political, especially in the context of the state” (25).

Then, the concept of ontopology is deployed. This is used as a method for mapping out the narratives, the “enplotment”, according to Hayden White, vis-à-vis the history of the Balkans. He then outlines the history of the conflict in terms of conflicting narratives that all still highlight the entrenched nature of historical assumptions of sovereignty, ethnicity and conflict. This is where the “bad” occurred that leads to more death in the Bosnian war.

There is a discussion of ethics and Lévinas. “’responsibility [is] the essential, primary and fundamental structure of subjectivity. For I describe subjectivity in ethical terms. Ethics…does not supplement a preceding existential base; the very note of the subjective is knotted in ethics understood as responsibility.’ Of these concepts, responsibility is perhaps the most important because, for Lévinas, being is a radically interdependent condition, a condition made possible only because of my responsibility to the other” (173).

He then goes over Derrida and moves towards a pursuit of democracy. This is where the methodology and the text run into themselves. If we are fighting against power structures, and critique the modern project of rationality because it can not guarantee against fascism, why would we want to throw up such an empty topic as democracy? How do we make this practical? If anything, democracy has lead to horrible crimes being committed as well as other systems of government.

The final chapter outlines ways in which the conflict in Bosnia could have occurred differently, assuming that the deconstructive methodology were followed from the beginning. All in all, a compelling read that does a nice job of melding method and practice, though there are some gaps.