Description
This paper grapples with the complexities of being rendered a target of international peace and security. If focuses on the context of Bosnia and Herzegovina, a key site where European anxieties about security, stability and re-unification meet the elusive promises of liberal peacebuilding. Combining decolonial scholarship and queer IR I show how seemingly progressive practices of international peace and security, necessarily rely on the production of places, such as Bosnia, that cannot but fail to function according to taken for granted norms and imaginaries of conflict resolution. Drawing upon queer insights on failure and impasse (Halberstam, 2011; Berlant 2011) opens a provocative entryway to reveal the violence at stake in ready-made promises of redemption and harness glimpses of a life otherwise in compromised conditions of existence.Mobilising an aesthetic approach, I develop a conceptual reading of local films that unsettle dominant mappings of the region. I illustrate slowness, incoherence and silliness as orientations that undo grandiose narratives of peace and security and show alternative ways of inhabiting world politics.
