Jens Bartelson’s ‘As If’ World and the (Im)Possibility of Critique in International Relations Theory
| Author | Aida Hozić |
| Published date | 01 September 2019 |
| Date | 01 September 2019 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/0305829819873955 |
| Subject Matter | Book Forum |
https://doi.org/10.1177/0305829819873955
Millennium: Journal of
International Studies
2019, Vol. 48(1) 90 –98
© The Author(s) 2019
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DOI: 10.1177/0305829819873955
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1. Max Bergholz, Violence as a Generative Force: Identity, Nationalism and Memory in a
Balkan Community (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2016).
2. Ibid., 267–296, ‘Sudden Nationhood’.
Jens Bartelson’s ‘As If’ World
and the (Im)Possibility of
Critique in International
Relations Theory
Aida Hozić
University of Florida, USA
Keywords
ontogenetic war, critique, Bartelson, ISA Theory Section
In September 1941, as World War II rolled over the Balkans, some 2,500 people – men,
women and children – were killed near the town of Kulen-Vakuf, in the North-western
part of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Following the trail of a buried report about this massa-
cre, discovered in 2006 in the Archives of Bosnia-Herzegovina in Sarajevo, historian
Max Bergholz carefully reconstructed the events that led to the killings and examines its
afterlife (or lack thereof) in communist Yugoslavia, in the recent wars and genocides, and
in the memory of Kulen-Vakuf inhabitants.1 In the intricate micro-history of violence,
Bergholz shows how religion, ethnicity and nationalism played off each other and against
other social, political and economic divides; how persecutors and their victims on occa-
sion traded places; how ‘dynamics of restraint’ prevented similar violence from taking
place in other Bosnian communities; and how waves of public memory and forgetting of
the massacre intersected with multiple contingent factors to create new cycles of vio-
lence – but also new solidarities, new group boundaries, and new ‘sudden nationalisms’.2
Exploring nationalism as an event, as an outburst of emotions, rather than as a
pre-existing and durable socio-political condition, enables Bergholz to deliver a nuanced
Corresponding author:
Aida Hozić, University of Florida, 234 Anderson Hall, Gainesville, FL 32611-7011, USA.
Email: hozic@ufl.edu
873955MIL0010.1177/0305829819873955Millennium: Journal of International StudiesHozic
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