Multiple Identities, Interfacing Games: The social construction of Western action in Bosnia

This article explores an alternative approach to the analysis of patterns in International Relations. These patterns are not to be found in recurring cause-effect sequences, but in shared rules, drawn from the past, by which actions are constituted. The metatheoretical approach builds on the later work of Wittgenstein, and particularly his use of `language games’. The approach is applied to a cursory analysis of the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina. The exercise is less explanatory in any complete sense than illustrative of the approach. The choice of context did, however, result from a number of questions that arose during the dramatic events of the summer of 1995. The first was how to understand the apparent inability of `the West’ to act. The second was how to understand the change by the end of August 1995 towards more interventionary strategies thought originally to be unrealistic in this context.