Commissioned Book Review: Andrew Gilbert, International Intervention and the Problem of Legitimacy: Encounters in Postwar Bosnia-Herzegovina
| Published date | 01 May 2022 |
| DOI | 10.1177/14789299211021519 |
| Date | 01 May 2022 |
| Subject Matter | Commissioned Book Review |
Political Studies Review
2022, Vol. 20(2) NP21 –NP22
journals.sagepub.com/home/psrev
Commissioned Book Review
1021519PSW0010.1177/14789299211021519Political Studies ReviewCommissioned Book Review
book-review2021
Commissioned Book Review
International Intervention and the Problem
of Legitimacy: Encounters in Postwar Bosnia-
Herzegovina by Andrew Gilbert. Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press, 2020. 264pp., $49.95 USD,
ISBN13: 9781501750267,ISBN10: 1501750267.
Post-war Bosnia and Herzegovina was signifi-
cantly shaped by international intervention and
politics. Specifically, various international rep-
resentatives 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 politi-
cal dysfunction in post-war Bosnia and
Herzegovina is central to the study of interna-
tional 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 high-
lighting the importance for current interna-
tional 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 dif-
ference and inequality that are set in motion by
policies, projects, and programs that aim to
accomplish some goal of postwar transforma-
tion” (Gilbert, 2020: 6–7). This book engages
with international intervention scholars and
encourages them to critique and analyze con-
flict intervention and the nature of the encoun-
ters between various actors involved in
international interventions while specifically
acknowledging the power dynamics within
these encounters and the accompanying insta-
bility of power relations.
Gilbert split the 5-chapter book into two sec-
tions. 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 interna-
tional 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 dele-
gitimizing those of their opponents (Gilbert,
2020: 18). He highlights the position of ambiva-
lence taken up by the OHR, through the use of
mass news media, as a tool of political interven-
tion in that they simultaneously accommodated
opposing demands. He emphasizes the impor-
tance of this analysis as it demonstrates the limits
to international intervention and political trans-
formation. 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 institu-
tional context and recontextualizing it, Petritsch
aimed to legitimize a state-building agenda and
was able to alter the political and social land-
scape, but not in the way that he had planned to
(Gilbert, 2020: 18). By using this example,
Gilbert demonstrates the limits and risks associ-
ated with decontextualization and recontextual-
ization 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 encoun-
ters 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
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