Abstract
Post-war Bosnia and Herzegovina was significantly shaped by international intervention and politics. Specifically, various international representatives such as the Office of the High Representative (OHR), held by Austrian Diplomat Wolfgang Petritsch between 1999 and 2002, exercised their powers in specific and intentional ways in the post-war context in Bosnia and Herzegovina (Gilbert, 2020: 1). Understanding the ways in which International Intervention functioned and shaped the political dysfunction in post-war Bosnia and Herzegovina is central to the study of international intervention and ultimately the purpose of the book: International Intervention and the Problem of Legitimacy. Gilbert analyses a series of encounters with the purpose of highlighting the importance for current international intervention scholars to center their analyses on the engagements between foreign officials and members of target populations with a particular focus on the power dynamics and instabilities that directly shape individual encounters. Gilbert defines “intervention encounters” as “those engagements across difference and inequality that are set in motion by policies, projects, and programs that aim to accomplish some goal of postwar transformation” (Gilbert, 2020: 6–7). This book engages with international intervention scholars and encourages them to critique and analyze conflict intervention and the nature of the encounters between various actors involved in international interventions while specifically acknowledging the power dynamics within these encounters and the accompanying instability of power relations.
Gilbert split the 5-chapter book into two sections. The first section focuses on the dynamics of international authority and legitimacy in post-war Bosnia and Herzegovina, accompanied by an analysis of the ways in which mass news media functioned as an instrument for international intervention in the post-war context. Gilbert begins by demonstrating how foreign officials used the mass news media as a means of legitimizing and giving authority to their state-building initiatives and actions while also delegitimizing those of their opponents (Gilbert, 2020: 18). He highlights the position of ambivalence taken up by the OHR, through the use of mass news media, as a tool of political intervention in that they simultaneously accommodated opposing demands. He emphasizes the importance of this analysis as it demonstrates the limits to international intervention and political transformation. Gilbert moves on to demonstrate the ways in which foreign officials use cultural and historical materials to pursue their goals. He focuses on the processes of decontextualization and recontextualization defined as the extraction of discourse from a particular setting or context to fit it into another (Gilbert, 2020: 66). Gilbert explains how limiting recontextualization can be through the example of Petritsch employing the principle of konstitutivnost naroda. Gilbert explains that by taking a local political concept out of its historical, interactional, and institutional context and recontextualizing it, Petritsch aimed to legitimize a state-building agenda and was able to alter the political and social landscape, but not in the way that he had planned to (Gilbert, 2020: 18). By using this example, Gilbert demonstrates the limits and risks associated with decontextualization and recontextualization by international actors and therefore brings attention to the problem of legitimacy in international intervention.
The second section of the book is made up of three chapters that analyze intervention encounters with examples from Gilbert’s fieldwork in northwestern Bosnia. Gilbert focuses on the ways in which foreign aid workers navigated the field and the ways in which their efforts were often unstable due to the provisional nature of humanitarian action. The author explores the limits of humanitarian aid in post-war Bosnia, specifically through the housing reconstruction projects run by international aid organizations, due to the unstable nature of humanitarian action (Gilbert, 2020: 19). Gilbert introduces the reader to the concept of entextualization in international intervention which he defines as “putting information into a text artifact form,” more specifically English-language text artifacts (Gilbert, 2020: 165). Gilbert argues that foreigners use entextualization in order to help stabilize knowledge of Bosnian society and increase certainty for the officials (Gilbert, 2020: 165). This is an essential aspect of international intervention for current scholars to consider as Gilbert highlights the dynamics of certainty and uncertainty that entextualization creates between foreign aid officials and returnees.
To summarize, in this book Gilbert effectively demonstrates the limits of international intervention and encounters through the case study of post-war Bosnia and Herzegovina. The book proves to be a useful tool for current international intervention scholars although there could have been more wider conclusions drawn by Gilbert for the field of international intervention studies. Through field examples and mass news media analyses, Gilbert demonstrates how foreign officials employ specific tactics to maintain authority and legitimacy while pursuing their state-building agendas. This book is highly recommended for students within the field of International Intervention studies, Political Science, and any who are interested in the politics of intervention and international encounters in post-war Bosnia and Herzegovina.
