The Limits of Foreign Authority: Publicity and the Political Logic of Ambivalence in Postwar Bosnia and Herzegovina
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract This article explores the ambivalent forms of authority and legitimacy articulated by the Office of the High Representative of the international community in postwar Bosnia and Herzegovina. The High Representative exercised quasi-sovereign powers that placed his position at the center of two contradictions: a democratization paradox of “imposing democracy,” that is, promoting democracy through undemocratic means, and a state-building paradox of building an independent state by violating the principle of popular sovereignty. I analyze the Office's use of mass-mediated publicity to show how the High Representative sought to legitimize his actions in ways that both sustained the norms of democracy and statehood he advocated and suspended the contradictions behind how he promoted them. In doing so, he claimed that Bosnia was caught in a temporary state of exception to the normal nation-state order of things. This claim obliged him to show that he was working to end the state of exception. By focusing on one failed attempt by the OHR to orchestrate an enactment of “local ownership” that was aimed at demonstrating that Bosnia no longer required foreign supervision, this article identifies important limits to internationally instigated political transformation. It offers a view of international intervention that is more volatile, open-ended, and unpredictable than either the ordered representations of the technocratic vision or the confident assertions that critique international intervention as a form of (neo)imperial domination. It also demonstrates the analytic importance of publicity for the comparative study of international nation-building and democratization in the post-Cold War era.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.010 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.012 | 0.055 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.015 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".