Between the Round Table and the Waiting Room: Scholarship on War and Peace in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo after the ‘Post-Cold War’

The Yugoslav wars of the 1990s are a turning point in the history of diplomacy and international relations between the end of the Cold War and the start of the War on Terror. European politicians’ failure to exert enough influence or moral leadership to realise their hopes of a new diplomatic role for European powers made the wars in Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina a sad counterpoint to celebrations of German reunification and the Maastricht Treaty in 1990–2. A generation of junior US diplomats in the State Department were marked by their inability to persuade superiors in 1992–5 that the Army of Republika Srpska (Војска Републике Српске, Vojska Republike Srpske; BPC, VRS) was committing genocide in Bosnia, and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) air strikes against Serbia and Montenegro during the Kosovo War were what compelled the British prime minister Tony Blair to issue the most complete statement

of his doctrine of liberal interventionism. 3 The wars are the subject of a rich specialist literature grounded in the history and anthropology of the region but also stand as a recent example in longer comparative histories of international intervention. 4 Scholarship in many disciplines explores the aftermath of the Yugoslav wars; only by viewing these disciplines together, this review argues, can historians see how they relate to one another.
The wars themselves are passing out of the 'instant history' they represented when the first academic and serious journalistic accounts were being written 5 -'instant' because they sought to explain wars where the outcome was not even yet known and their conclusions had to remain exceptionally contingentinto a mode of contemporary history where archival research has started being possible and the wars, though still recent, represent a palpably different moment in international security from today. The region's politics today display domestic political disengagement, creeping semi-authoritarianism, endemic socio-economic precarity and ongoing international supervisionfar from the optimistic expectations of a 'post-Cold War' period in European history that increasingly seems to have come to an end.
In academic literature the wars have thus had parallel afterlives. The historiography of the collapse of Yugoslavia, shaped by anthropologists and other social scientists as much as historians, turns on the ascription of guilt and responsibility and on how far the wars should be explained with reference to ethno-national antagonisms. In politics and international relations, meanwhile, the comparative study of peace building (plus other forms of post-conflict intervention like transitional justice) places Yugoslav successor states, especially Bosnia and Kosovo, among many other case studies of the dynamics, effectiveness and politics of international interventionoften addressing practitioners as well as researchers. 6 These two scales might seem difficult to reconcileand yet as peace building scholars have turned towards the everyday, localised and micro-historical, their research increasingly aligned with ethnographers' insights into how international governance and domestic politics had produced the uncertain conditions in which the Yugoslav region finds itself today. Meanwhileas this review of recent works by historians, political scientists, linguists and anthropologists showsthe historiography of the Yugoslav wars itself became a social fact in the politics of knowledge behind international intervention.
This is the case because many foreign officials who travelled to the Yugoslav region to implement internationally driven strategies of peace building, transitional justice and democratisation brought assumptions about what had caused the Yugoslav wars and how to prevent them recurring. 7 What they thought they knew about factors like ethnic antagonism, postsocialist socio-economic precarity or organised crime, and how much weight to put on each, stemmed in large part from the accounts of the region's history they had encountered. The comparative political scientist of ethnic conflict, Stephen Saideman, once wrote that 'perhaps [his] greatest contribution' to US military thinking during a 2001-2 fellowship with the US military's Joint Staff was to persuade its Balkans Branch to stop assigning Robert Kaplan's essentialising travelogue Balkan Ghosts, which he believed gave peacekeepers a harmfully oversimplified context for the conflict. 8 What interveners understood about post-Yugoslav ethnopoliticsand about the relative importance of ethnicity and other social divides in post-Yugoslav politicstherefore informed their peace building and state building policies, with consequences for how much political agency post-Yugoslav citizens would have after the wars.
Lived experiences of the wars and the post-war peace process have left lasting imprints on the kinds of scholarship produced about the wars. The first two books reviewed here, From Yugoslavia to the Western Balkans: Studies of a European Disunion, 1991-2011 by the lawyer, legal scholar and anthropologist Robert M. Hayden and Radovan Karadžić: Architect of the Bosnian Genocide by the historian Robert J. Donia, have both been shaped in different ways by the politics of post-conflict intervention and justice. 9 While Hayden seeks to open a polemic about what he sees as the hypocrisy of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY), Donia as a frequent expert witness for the prosecution at the same tribunal was in the almost unique position of being aggressively cross-examined by the subject of his own biographyan experience that gave him a new understanding of the Karadžić behind his documentary evidence. 10 Hayden's From Yugoslavia to the Western Balkans collects articles Hayden has published on memory politics, 'genocide' discourse, the Tribunal and Bosnian constitutional politics over the past two decades; the early chapters function in the volume both as document and prediction. Donia's Karadžić, meanwhile, is a new biographical monograph drawing upon newly released evidence that the Tribunal's prosecutors collected for the trials of Karadžić and other defendants. The two books differ vastly in subject matter and methodology, but both studies reveal ways that politics and polemics from the early 1990s (when the authors took opposed positions on Bosnian independence) have become mapped on to scholarly debates, such as their diametrically opposed conclusions about the Tribunal: Donia is an experienced expert witness for the prosecution, Hayden a long-time critic of the Tribunal and an expert witness in the defence of Dušan Tadić, the Tribunal's first defendant whose case went to trial. 11 Among the many matters on which they disagree are their understanding of how constructions of ethnic identity of territory led to wars of civilian persecution and the question of what can or should be acknowledged as genocide. These matters remain politically and diplomatically sensitive, but also academically contentious.
Hayden has, for instance, long believed 'that by classifying recent Yugoslav events as "genocide", the nature of the events themselves is actually obscured rather than explained', and that politicised accusations of genocide during the Bosnian war impeded a quicker end to the conflict. 12  . 10 Donia, Karadžić, 2-6. The ICTY is hereafter 'the Tribunal', though specialist literature is more likely to use the acronym. 11 Hayden, From Yugoslavia, 223. Hayden's role was to offer testimony on the question of whether the Bosnian war had been a national or international conflict. 12 Ibid., 117, 140-1. 13 Ibid., 241.
political and military proponents of Republika Srpska (RS), the entity that declared itself a Bosnian nation state and sought to expel non-Serbs from its territory, committed genocide. While he does not adopt the maximalism of historians such as Edina Bećirević, who argues that Karadžić's entire campaign against Bosniaks in 1992-5 should count as genocide, Donia contends that 'broad judicial and popular agreement' recognises the massacres of 8,372 Bosniak men and boys at Srebrenica in July 1995 as genocide. 14 Throughout the book Donia unambiguously names this a 'Bosnian Genocide' and Karadžić, equally indubitably, its 'architect'. 15 Srebrenica is where Hayden comes closest to referring to any part of the Bosnian conflict as genocide, though even then his language remains conditional. 16 While it would be reductive, as Christian Axboe Nielsen argues, to reduce the Yugoslav wars' historiography entirely to 'a "genocide or not" dichotomy', 17 the gulf between Hayden's and Donia's approaches to genocide, perhaps even more than their conclusions about Bosnian independence in 1992, reveals two very different conceptions of the scholar's task: the reader must determine how far these stem from the authors' different disciplinary traditions.
Hayden's collection comprises fifteen previously published articles, plus a new coda, 'From EUphoria to EU-goslavia', extending his long-standing contention that 'multinational polities in Europe have a history of not functioning' into an argumentwritten years before Brexit had become a mainstream British political optionthat the inherent instability of a Yugoslav federation built from ethno-national republics under a fictitious pan-Yugoslav identity has ominous lessons for the European Union's stability. 18 The chapters combine pieces as widely debated as 'Schindler's Fate', Hayden's polemical 1996 essay on forced population transfers in twentieth-century history, 19 with newer articles about the impossibility of reaching a Bosnian constitutional settlement acceptable to majorities in all three ethnic groups, older book chapters on the distortion of Second World War body counts in late socialist Yugoslavia and a group of articles on the hypocrisy of international 'humanrightsism' that usefully allows his current perspective on the Tribunal to be read in the context of criticisms Hayden was already making of Helsinki Watch/Human Rights Watch in 1990. Though not written as a single integrated narrative of the conflict, the chapters can be read as a compendium of arguments that have left a mark on theoretical discussions of the wars by claiming to bridge legal scholarship and an anthropologist's 'holistic approach'. 20 One distinctive feature of Hayden's approach, his interest in comparing Yugoslavia and India, deserves revisiting now that new scholarship on the global Cold War is bringing Yugoslav-Indian relations through the Non-Aligned Movement further into light.
If the main points of Hayden's scholarship are collected here, so too are what his critics claim to be his most serious contextual omissions. 21 The first is Hayden's take on the break up of the federal League of Communists in January 1990. He largely blames the Slovenian and Croatian parties without describing how Slobodan Milošević (who held significant power over the votes of Serbia, Kosovo, Vojvodina and Montenegro) had shaken the balance of power by revoking the provincial autonomy of Vojvodina and Kosovo and repressing Kosovo Albanians' civil rights. Many Slovenes and Croats started fearing that they might share this fate.
Hayden's implication that Bosnians of different ethnicities had never demanded to live together in a sovereign Bosnian state has also drawn criticism, for not accommodating the forms of Bosnian belonging, across and beyond ethnic boundaries, that existed as social alternatives until nationalist political coalitions and outright violence suppressed them. For example, Hayden's chapter on 'The Partition of Bosnia', originally written in May 1993, speaks throughout of Muslims, Croats and Serbs, never of multi-ethnic or non-ethnic forms of political communityyet, as more recent social and intellectual histories of late socialist Bosnia show, 22 such demands for political community were being made in Bosnia on the eve of war. But these alternative voices were suppressed politically by nationalists and physically by the snipers who fired on a multiethnic peace demonstration in Sarajevo on 5 April 1992a demonstration called to celebrate international recognition of the very independence for which Hayden has contended there was no mass Bosnian demand. 23 While 'the terminologies of description used since 1991 by the peoples of Bosnia and Herzegovina to describe themselves' might indeed have made 'Bosnians' by that name a 'vanishing category', 24 those terminologies were the product of political processes which had deliberately undermined the space where such a category could exist. Those who eschewed ethnic political identities had the least access to political and diplomatic, let alone military, power.
Donia's study of Karadžić, meanwhile, is less a traditional biography, more the most exhaustive account in English of how Karadžić and the Serb Democratic Party (Српска демократска странка/Srpska demokratska stranka; SDS) planned and orchestrated their campaign. Donia shows how the SDS first monopolised power in Serb-majority municipalities during autumn 1991, then how they founded an 'Autonomous Region of Krajina' using a plebiscite boycotted by most non-Serbs and, finally, how they unleashed a campaign of paramilitary and military violence against non-Serbs and politically unwelcome Serbs. In developing his biography, Donia makes use of a complete set of transcripts from the Bosnian Serb Assembly, hundreds of telephone intercepts that security services in the Republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina began collecting in May 1991, SDS internal documents, diaries written by Ratko Mladić (which Serbian investigators found in his Belgrade apartment in 2010), Karadžić's own speeches and other major ideological documents in the history of the Yugoslav wars, such as the Serbian Academy of Arts and Sciences memorandum of 1986 or the Slovenian Nova revija manifesto of 1987. Indeed, Donia places Karadžić's 'six strategic goals' speech of 12 May 1992 (prima facie evidence that the SDS's takeovers of towns and villages were part of a planned programme of territorial expansion and control, not just spontaneous 'hatred') among these as a key document for understanding the wars. In pursuit of this programme, Donia unwaveringly shows, 'Radovan Karadžić planned, ordered, monitored, and sought to justify the Srebrenica genocide' of July 1995 'with forethought, decisiveness, and calm detachment'. 25 While letting judges determine criminal responsibility, 26 Donia attributes moral responsibility as firmly as a historian can: a necessary statement about crimes which two decades later are still beset by obfuscation. 22  In using so much Tribunal documentation, Donia's study also joins an expanding literature on the Tribunal and its prosecutorial strategy. 28 The politics of how and why the Tribunal was formed, how it operated, what parties it chose to investigate (Hayden rightly asks why NATO commanders were not investigated for using cluster munitions over Serbia and Montenegro in 1999 29 ) and how prosecutors and defence lawyers actively deployed historical evidence in constructing cases are all part of the context of how such evidence became available to historians. This archival methodology is very different from Hayden's interpretive use of legal and anthropological theory. Both authors also differ in how and when their narratives begin and in their perspectives on the viability of a multi-ethnic Bosnian state. However, they have one thing at least in common: both explain how the Bosnian war was driven by conflicts over how the ethnic identity of a piece of territory should be determined and which nation's right to sovereignty should then hold sway. While historians have investigated these linkages between ethnicity, territory and sovereignty in order to reach a deeper understanding of nationalism and genocide in contemporary European history, research in the field of peace building explores a similar configuration of factors in order to solve practical problems on the ground. But, as the following section will suggest, historians interested in both the regional history of the Yugoslav wars and global histories of international intervention might benefit from the insights offered by research into peace building. Peace building in Kosovo was shaped both by the liberal interventionism of Blair and the 'Bosnia generation' of US diplomats, as well as by Western disillusionment after the failure of utopian state building in 2000s Afghanistan and Iraq. Skendaj's Creating Kosovo uses questionnaires and interviews with reformers of Kosovo's police, customs service, central state bureaucracy and courts in order to test the hypothesis that placing state institutions under 'local' control too early is not effective in achieving interveners' goals. 36 Skendaj concludes that the state bodies that enjoyed most public confidence, operated most effectively and were least vulnerable to corruption were those which international institutions had most successfully insulated from the local political system (the customs service and police); those with the most local ownership, the judiciary and central administration, were most vulnerable to political patronage and least trusted by citizens.
Skendaj's account of politics in Kosovo might interest historians firstly because it traces the legacies of socialist, pre-war state structures into wartime and post-war Kosovo, which some presentist peace building research might not take into account. Secondly, it shows that political clientelism, more than ethnicity, determined Albanians' political position: in particular, exmembers of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), led by Hashim Thaçi, and their regional clients from the Drenica Valley, came to be at odds with networks from the Democratic League of   38 Creating Kosovo exemplifies a problem solving approach to peace building and democratisation, oriented towards improving future interventions as much as, or more than, explaining how Kosovo's current condition came to be. Despite the tendency towards theoretical abstraction in some peace building research, some studies succeed in conveying the spatial and historical nuances of a post-conflict society. Adam Moore's Peacebuilding in Practice: Local Experience in Two Bosnian Towns, based on ethnographic observation, archival research and 120 interviews collected during visits to Brčko and Mostar in 2004-12, compares two Bosnian cities in ostensibly similar circumstances (both were and are the subjects of ethno-territorial disputes that stemmed from the war and have persisted since Dayton), where peace building has nevertheless had different outcomes and where international-local relationships, Moore finds, have also had a different character. 39 While Mostar remains contested between the Croatian Democratic Union (Hrvatska demokratska zajednica; HDZ), which has monopolised the urban space and economy of western Mostar, and the Bosniak nationalist Party of Democratic Action (Stranka demokratske akcije; SDA), with its power base in the east of the city, negotiators at Dayton could not agree whether to award Brčko (a pinchpoint between the northern and eastern halves of the RS) to the RS or the Federation. The Brčko Final Award of March 1999, announced by a US administrator, made the Brčko District a distinct multiethnic government (on Federation and RS territory but under the authority of neither). Its political system was deliberately designed to promote political and social integration, eschewing the institutionalised ethnic power-sharing approach that Dayton had applied to the rest of Bosnia, including Mostar. Brčko would go on to have Bosnia's only integrated school system, whereas the obstacles to integrating even one school in Mostarlet alone to using its integration as a platform for reintegrating social interaction in the rest of the cityare richly described by Azra Hromadžić's ethnography of the Mostar Gymnasium. 40 Mostar is, after Sarajevo and Srebrenica, probably the most commonly researched city in post-war Bosnia; 41 there are fewer studies of Brčko, yet those that exist all suggest the ethnicity-territory nexus operated somewhat differently in social and political practice there. 42 Moore's study is thus another example of how recent research into Bosnian towns' and cities' specific historical and socio-economic contexts has helped historians to understand the multiple and localised conflicts that combined to constitute the war in Bosnia. 43 The power and authority of international agencies was also, Moore shows, constituted through localised interactions and thus operated in different ways across the country. Moore is interested in emergent 'configurations' of power, 44 and his greater level of localised texture further illustrates them. The strategy that the Office of the High Representative (OHR) in Brčko found for achieving its integrative peace building aims depended on acting as a patron for local political and economic interests vis-à-vis OHR Sarajevo, which in 2002-6 under Paddy Ashdown sought to bring the Brčko office under its direct control. 45 By shifting supervision of Brčko to Sarajevo in 2007, the OHR lost the 'intimate knowledge of current developments in the District . . . the product of intensive daily interactions with local officials' which until then appeared to have set peace building in Brčko apart, at least on an institutional level. It was little wonder, Moore suggests, that local support for the OHR's presence in Bosnia had declined to 15 per cent by 2010. 46 What distinguishes Peacebuilding in Practice from peace building studies with a wider and more abstract lens is not only its richer post-war context but also its attention to how wartime legacies in both cities structured political and social conditions, which is also an important foundation for historians considering the legacies of war. If knowledge of the conflict in Mostar between the Croat Defence Council (Hrvatsko vijeće obrane; HVO) and the Army of the Republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina (Armija Republike Bosne i Hercegovine; ARBiH), representing the government in Sarajevo, and of how HDZ elites monopolised the privatisation of Party-owned factories, is essential for understanding the division of post-war Mostar, so too is the less wellknown history behind the unpopularity of SDA among its ostensible Bosniak constituency in Brčkodating back to the day in May 1992 when the SDA's president in Brčko, Mustafa Ramić, was forced to appear on television with a commander from the Yugoslav People's Army (Југословенска народна армија, Jugoslovenska narodna armija; JNA) to reassure non-Serbs there was no need to leave Brčko just as Serb paramilitaries were entering the town to round them up. 47 These were self-evidently part of the everyday contexts that peacebuilders in each city would find.
And yet in the practice of international intervention such nuances are often ignored. Intervention agencies assume that strategies for conflict resolution and stabilisation can be duplicated in any post-conflict situation. A major reason for this absence of institutional contextual knowledge is that international interveners do not speak local languages and thus have no access to everyday cultural knowledge. 48 Autesserre argues precisely this in Peacelandand, indeed, six comparative potential of Brčko and Mostar and reached conclusions that would be borne out, after eight more years of contentious politics, by Moore's research. 42 44 Moore, Peacebuilding in Practice, 6. 45 Ibid., 144-5. 46 Ibid., 156-7. 47 Ibid., 83. 48 Autesserre, Peaceland, 118. years before, the anthropologist Andrew Gilbert had similarly argued after ethnographic research with the Organization for Security and Co-Operation in Europe (OSCE) in Bosnia that the OSCE obtained an inaccurate picture of Bosnian politics and society because it devalued local staff's expertise and privileged knowledge that could be easily expressed in English within the genre of a conventional written report. 49 Mediation between languages is fundamental to the practice of peace building yet almost always taken for granted by peacebuilders themselves. 50 Most international staff of intervention agencies never acquire linguistic fluencymany do not even seek toand many organisations would not even keep them in post long enough to acquire it. The mostly locally recruited language intermediaries on whom they depend for written translation and spoken interpretingmuch more complex tasks than many non-linguists are likely to appreciateare relied upon as unofficial cultural brokers and mediators while in post yet, paradoxically, overlooked as exercisers of agency even in most peace building research. Ian Jones and Louise Askew's Meeting the Language Challenges of NATO Operations, the next work reviewed, provides what very few studies of peace building even attempt to acknowledge, let alone foreground: recognition that the knowledge production and therefore the effectiveness of peace building depends onthat the relationships between 'international' and 'local' at the heart of peace building research are actually constituted byacts of mediation between languages.
In Meeting the Language Challenges of NATO Operations, Jones and Askew, as professional linguists who worked in NATO's field language services in Bosnia, Kosovo and then Afghanistan, combine their first-hand experiences as NATO insiders with scholarly analysis of 'the mechanics of language policy formulation in an international organisation'. 51 They also show that NATO's operational language policy developed in the wider context of NATO's search for a new purpose in international security after the reunification of Germany and the collapse of the USSR in 1991. 52 Russian contributions to peace enforcement in Bosnia, for instance, represented the first 'operational cooperation' between NATO and Russian forces, requiring linguists to create a new Russian military vocabulary for NATO concepts such as command and control. 53 Jones and Askew's detailed accounts of establishing and managing the field language services reveal a history of technological change that improved the workflows of predictable office-based translation between the 1980s and the late 2000s but did not solve the complexities of translation and interpreting in post-conflict peace building, where documents containing significant knowledge rarely materialised in pristine, machine-readable form. HQ SFOR's word processing software in the late 1990s, for instance, could not even accommodate the Cyrillic script in which Serbian was often printed (the very kind of everyday barrier to knowledge circulation that Autesserre and Gilbert so often observed). 54 The failure of NATO or SFOR commanders to appreciate how heavily their operations depended on accurate and effective translation and interpreting is evident from the fact that it took SFOR two years to invite the professional chief of NATO's own language service to even make recommendations about how language support ought to be organised in Bosnia; once Jones had devised a plan for centralising and upgrading SFOR's language service, including relatively much more employment security and professional development than locally recruited linguists at other military and civilian intervention agencies enjoyed, it took three further years for him to be invited to review the language service in Kosovo. 55 Meeting the Language Challenges contributes to scholarship on the micropolitics of international intervention by drawing attention to the agency, and the positionality, of language intermediaries themselves within the dynamics of knowledge production in international intervention and the everyday performances of power and security through which intervention takes place. At the same time, the study is itself a product of knowledge production within an international organisation: Jones and Askew were both part of institutional structures which depended on acquiring and applying 'local' knowledge before they came to write those structures' history. Readers used to the conventions of anthropological or feminist research might expect longer reflections on how some interviewees' working histories as subordinates of Jones or Askew would affect the interview dynamic, or how interview based methodologies themselves might be limited in what knowledge they can collect about patronage and the informal economy, than this book provides. Historians might develop broader structural arguments around the placement of one expert figure at the centre of the narrative. Yet the fact that a history of NATO's field language services can even be contained within one expert's experiences reflects the lack of awareness throughout NATO and its missions about how language and interlinguistic mediation affect knowledge gathering and interoperability: a history of NATO logistics, civil-military cooperation or intelligence could not be told this way. While the book does not systematically connect its findings with the diplomatic history of NATO or the transition from Cold War to post-Cold War, it will be an invaluable resource when an archival history of NATO language policy comes to be written.

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The final volume reviewed here, Stef Jansen, Čarna Brković and Vanja Čelebičić's Negotiating Social Relations in Bosnia and Herzegovina, demonstrates how anthropological perspectives can shed light on questions of interest to both historians and peace building practitioners or researchers. 56 Cécile Jouhanneau's chapter on how and when former camp detainees from Brčko choose to testify publicly about their wartime experience, or Karla Koutková's chapter arguing that the social categories of 'locals' and 'internationals' in international agencies are produced through practice rather than depending inherently on workers' nationality, for instance, align well with debates over testimony and silence in transitional justice, or the emerging literature on the locally recruited staff of international agencies, respectively. 57 Other chapters tackle topics such as families' anxieties for the care of their elderly relatives in a healthcare system which owes its catastrophic conditions to the wartime expropriation of state property, the clientelistic postwar development of a market economy and the stagnation of the cantonal government structure built into the Dayton Peace Agreement itself. These approaches were inspired by historicallyminded anthropologists who have called attention to the effects of the collapse of Yugoslav state socialism as much as the effects of inter-ethnic conflict, thus inspiring historical reassessments of late state socialism as well as new anthropological and sociological research on the present. enclosed waiting room where the politics of Serbian negotiations with the EU, as well as Russian instrumentalisation of Kosovo in its own foreign policy, leave no alternative future in immediate view. Scholars whose careers and disciplines are grounded in the specifics of the Yugoslav region, and scholars who study the Yugoslav region primarily as part of comparative analyses with a global reach, have wrestled withand contributed tothe meta-history of knowledge production about the 1990s wars, their aftermath and the meanings of inter-ethnic relations in contemporary post-Yugoslav societies. These are not separate camps from each other, and indeed are finding increasing amounts of common ground as international peace building researchers discover 'ways of knowing' that anthropologists have long held as common sense. If peace building studies can learn from the interdisciplinary history-anthropology-sociology of the Yugoslav region about how important an understanding of localised contexts and legacies is for appreciating the everyday micropolitics of peace, the juxtapositions which international peace building studies routinely create between the Yugoslav region and other sites of intervention point to a transnational lens on the region's contemporaryand olderhistory that connects it not just with the rest of Europe but with the whole globe. The international military and civilian missions in Bosnia, Kosovo and Afghanistan, to name only those that appear in the works reviewed here, belong to an optimistic and confident period in the history of international intervention that has already subsided, though semi-transformed structures of international supervision over all three countries still persist. The histories of this moment of intervention that are yet to be written will surely take up among their major themes the production and circulation of knowledge about peace and conflict: this was a milieu where interpretations and conclusions from one conflict zone were routinely translated less appropriately or more appropriately into policy and practice in another, where both 'internationals' and inhabitants of sites of intervention could find themselves travelling through a global political economy of peace building, governance and military power. What perhaps distinguishes the past they describe from the present in which they appear is that the timescale for the Yugoslav region's exit from the 'waiting room' of international oversight, and the form of society or political system it might exit with, has become less clear rather than clearer with the passage of time. The conversion of hope into uncertainty is, in many ways, what marks the waning of the