Theatre of Wars: Political Passions and Violence

The Kosovo war of 1999 presented a theatre of political passions that collided with one another on multiple levels. These passions arose out of collective experiences framed by such slippery yet impassioned concepts such as ethnicity & the nation, but these passions were also anchored within individual experience, often at the limits of that which can be spoken, remembered or transmitted. Finally, these experiences are penetrated, within a context of crisis management, by the technical apparatuses & procedures of humanitarian interventions which vacillate between the poles of compassion & dispassionate bureaucratization, thus raising the question of violence in a whole new manner. Ethnographic work, which involves not only presence on the scenes of war & intervention but also the production of voice & narratives, also infiltrates these experiences & must assume responsibility for its role. Under such circumstances, how might it be possible to develop a mode of interpretation that is functional in such extreme scenarios without succumbing to institutionalization or instrumentalization? Adapted from the source document.