Questioning the International: (Un)making Bosnian and Korean Conflicts, Cinematically

Undoing EU security through the art of failure: cinematic imaginations in/from the post-Yugoslav space

“…Critical scholars have questioned the aggressive promotion of the EU mission civilisatrice that projects the EU as normative political trajectory and ideal of community for the post-Yugoslav space and Southeast Europe (Horvat and Štiks 2012;Majstorović, Vučkovac, and Pepić 2015;Kušić, Lottholz, and Manolova 2019). Inspired by postcolonial and decolonial theory, a rich literature has worked to deconstruct dominant global imaginings of the SEE region ii framed through Eurocentric gaze and shaped by regimes of modernity and coloniality (Todorova 1997;Wolff 1994;Kovacevic 2009;Bjelic and Savic 2005;Choi and Deiana 2017;Kušić, Lottholz, and Manolova 2019). Building on and developing such insights, I suggest that the EU peace and security narratives of making Bosnia 'work for Europe' (Bialasiewicz 2011, 1) rely on a specific aesthetics that frames the region as a target of EU knowledge and intervention, whether framed as space of intractable conflict, ethnonational division and corruption, as a route for organised crime, illegal migration and external illiberal influences, and/or as candidate for enlargement.…”