Why did the United States government eventually intervene decisively in the Bosnian war in the summer of 1995, first with sustained NATO bombing, subsequently by forging the Dayton Peace Accords, and finally by deploying 20 000 troops to a region its military leaders had long claimed was not strategic? In this paper I seek to provide an answer to this question by arguing that Bosnia became strategic because of its geopolitical location in a Europe supposedly secured by NATO and because of the negative sign value it accumulated over the course of its bloody war. The Bosnian war exposed the limits of the Bush administration's New World Order, the inability of the European Union to impose peace, the weaknesses of the United Nations, the impotency of NATO, and the leadership failures of the United States. It thus became strategically important as a threatening sign of disorder in Europe that the United States needed to confront in order to relegitimate NATO and its plans for expansionism, and to regenerate its national exceptionalist identity as a global power. In this paper I consider the role of the media in helping generate Bosnia as a ‘strategic sign’ by arguing that the videocameralistics of the media play an important role in conditioning the practices of foreign policy.
FalkR, 1995On Humane Governance: Towards a New Global Politics (Pennsylvania State University Press, University Park, PA)
17.
FriedlandL, 1992Covering the World: International Television News Services (Brookings Institution, Washington, DC)
18.
GlennyM, 1992The Fall of Yugoslavia. The Third Balkan War (Penguin Books, Harmondsworth, Middx)
19.
GompertD, 1996, “The United States and Yugoslavia's wars”, in The World and Yugoslavia's Wars Ed. UllmanR, (Council on Foreign Relations Press, New York) pp 122–144
20.
GowJ, 1997Triumph of a Lack of Will: International Diplomacy and the Yugoslav War (Columbia University Press, New York)
21.
GowingN, 1994, “Real-time television coverage of armed conflicts and diplomatic crises: Does it pressure or distort foreign policy decisions”, working paper, The John Shorenstein Barone Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA
22.
GutmanR, 1993A Witness to Genocide (Macmillan, New York)
23.
HolbrookeR, 1998To End a War (Random House, New York)
24.
HonigJ WBothN, 1996Srebrenica: Record of a War Crime (Penguin Books, Harmondsworth, Middx)
25.
LewisMWigenK, 1997The Myth of Continents (University of California Press, Berkeley, CA)
26.
LukeTÓ TuathailG, 1997, “On videocameralistics: The geopolitics of failed states, the CNN international and UN governmentality”Review of International Political Economy4709–733
27.
MaassP, 1996Love Thy Neighbor: A Story of War (Vintage Books, New York)
28.
MandelbaumM, 1996The Dawn of Peace in Europe (Twentieth Century Fund Press, New York)
29.
NeumanJ, 1996Lights, Camera, War: Is Media Technology Driving International Politics? (St Martin's Press, New York)
30.
Ó TuathailG, 1996a, “An anti-geopolitical eye: Maggie O'Kane in Bosnia, 1992–94”Gender, Place and Culture3171–185
31.
Ó TuathailG, 1996bCritical Geopolitics (Routledge, London)
32.
Ó TuathailG, 1998, “Postmodern geopolitics? The modern geopolitical imagination and beyond”, in Rethinking Geopolitics Eds Ó TuathailGDalbyS, (Routledge, London)
33.
Ó TuathailG, 1999, “The ethnic cleansing of a safe area: The fall of Srebrenica and the ethics of UN-governmentality”, in Geography and Ethics Eds SmithDProctorJ, (Routledge, London)
34.
Ó TuathailGDalbyS, 1998Rethinking Geopolitics (Routledge, London)
35.
RieffD, 1995Slaughterhouse: Bosnia and the West (Simon and Schuster, New York)
36.
RohdeD, 1997End game: The Betrayal and Fall of Srebrenica. Europe's Worst Massacre Since World War II (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York)
37.
RoseG, 1998, “The exit strategy delusion”Foreign Affairs7756–67
38.
RotbergRWeissT, (Eds), 1996From Massacres to Genocide: The Media, Public Policy and Humanitarian Crises (Brookings Institution, Washington, DC)
39.
ShawM, 1996Civil Society and Media in Global Crises (Pinter, London)
40.
SobelR, 1996, “US and European attitudes towards intervention on the former Yugoslavia”, in The World and Yugoslavia's Wars Ed. UllmanR, (Council on Foreign Relations Press, New York) pp 145–181
41.
StrobelW, 1997Late-breaking Foreign Policy: The News Media's Influence on Peace Operations (United States Institute of Peace Press, Washington, DC)
42.
TodorovaM, 1997Imagining the Balkans (Oxford University Press, New York)
43.
TribeK, 1984, “Cameralism and the science of government”Journal of Modern History56263–284
44.
UllmanR, 1996, “Introduction: The world and Yugoslavia's wars”, in The World and Yugoslavia's Wars Ed. UllmanR, (Council on Foreign Relations Press, New York) pp 1–8
45.
VulliamyE, 1994Seasons in Hell: Understanding Bosnia's War (Simon and Schuster, London)
46.
WarkMcK, 1994Virtual Geography: Living with Global Media Events (Indiana University Press, Bloomington, IN)
47.
WeissT, 1996, “Collective spinelessness: U. N. actions in the former Yugoslavia”, in The World and Yugoslavia's Wars Ed. UllmanR, (Council on Foreign Relations Press, New York) pp 59–96
48.
WoodwardB, 1996The Choice (Simon and Schuster, New York)
49.
ZimmermannW, 1996Origins of a Catastrophe: Yugoslavia and Its Destroyers—America's Last Ambassador Tells What Happened and Why (Times Books, New York)
