Robert M. Hayden

Orientalist Variations on the Theme "Balkans": Symbolic Geography in Recent Yugoslav Cultural Politics

At first we were confused. The East thought that we were West, while the West considered us to be East. Some of us misunderstood our place in this clash of currents, so they cried that we belong to neither side, and others that we belong exclusively to one side or the other. But I tell you, Irinej, we are doomed by fate to be the East on the West, and the West on the East, to acknowledge only heavenlyJerusalem beyond us, and here on earth-no one.

Antagonistic Tolerance: Competitive Sharing of Religious Sites in South Asia and the Balkans

This paper develops a concept of competitive sharing to explain how sacred sites that have long been shared by members of differing religious communities and may even exhibit syncretic mixtures of the practices of both may come to be seized or destroyed by members of one of them in order to manifest dominance over the other. This competitive sharing is compatible with the passive meaning of tolerance as noninterference but incompatible with the active meaning of tolerance as embrace of the Other. Confusion of this passive noninterference with the active embrace of the Other is shown to lie at the heart of a critical weakness of most current explanations of nationalist conflict in the Balkans and communal conflict in India. Several discomfiting conclusions follow. One is that positive tolerance requires social stasis and thus is akin to a LviStraussian myth, a machine for the suppression of time. Second, democracy based on the consent of the governed may often be incompatible with programs that mandate positive tolerance. Third, syncretism may be fostered by inequality and is actually endangered by equality between the groups. Rather than try to avoid these uncomfortable conclusions, the paper adopts the argument of Max Weber and Tzvetan Todorov for the superiority of an ethics of responsibility over an ethics of conviction, concluding that scholarly ethics requires reporting research findings that are contrary to that which many would prefer to be true.

“Democracy” without a Demos? The Bosnian Constitutional Experiment and the Intentional Construction of Nonfunctioning States

The social science literature on ethnically divided states is huge and varied, but suggestions for constitutional solutions are strangely uniform: “loose federations” of ethnically defined ministates, with minimal central authority that must act by consensus and thus cannot act at all on issues that are contested rather than consented. In Bosnia, the political system mandated by the international High Representative suffer the same structural flaws that were used to make the former Yugoslav federation and the Socialist Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina unworkable. Similarly nonviable systems were proposed in 1994 to 1995 for Croatia and in 1998 to 1999 for Kosovo and recently for Cyprus and for Iraq. This article analyzes the paradox of mandating consensus-based politics in ethnically divided states, inclusion in which does not have the consent of most members of at least one group.

Moral Vision and Impaired Insight The Imagining of Other Peoples' Communities in Bosnia

Depictions of the Balkans conflicts in most Western academic and journalistic writings are based on an unreal reading of life as those in the West do not want it, while those of prewar Bosnia manifest an imagination of a Bosnian community not shared by many Bosnians themselves. International political actors insist on efforts to create a Bosnia in accordance with their own images rather than accept that many of the people there view their world and their fate far differently. The result has been to hinder the reconstruction of the region and perhaps also to foreclose the possibility that the peoples of Bosnia will draw on their own cultural knowledge to reforge their own interconnections. The well‐intentioned and morally grounded antinationalist positions of most observers skew their observations in such a way as to hinder the understanding of nationalist conflict as a social phenomenon.

Epidemiology of ski injuries: effect of method of skill acquisition and release binding accident rates

An epidemiological study of a closed population of 2071 skiers investigated the effects of method of skill acquisition and type of release binding on accident rates. The population was observed for an entire skiing season. Accidents numbering 221 were generated by the population. Distributions within the population of age, sex, skill level, years of experience, marital status, and type of binding used were obtained prior to the start of the season. Exposure to risk was obtained at the end of the season. Injury data included measures of severity, location of injury (upper vs. lower extremity), ski patrol involvement, binding release or not, and overall and lower-extremity injury rates. Conclusions drawn are: (1) lessons as presently structured are not contributing to ski safety and, in fact, are associated with high accident rates; (2) bindings that have more than two release modes (up at the heel laterally at the toe, roll about longitudinal axis, etc.) have lower accident rates than those with only two release modes; (3) cable bindings are categorically dangerous by every accident variable available; and (4) a significant sex by binding-type interaction exists that has important implications for both female skiers and binding designers.

Moral Vision and Impaired Insight

Depictions of the Balkans conflicts in most Western academic and journalistic writings are based on an unreal reading of life as those in the West do not want it, while those of prewar Bosnia manifest an imagination of a Bosnian community not shared by many Bosnians themselves. International political actors insist on efforts to create a Bosnia in accordance with their own images rather than accept that many of the people there view their world and their fate far differently. The result has been to hinder the reconstruction of the region and perhaps also to foreclose the possibility that the peoples of Bosnia will draw on their own cultural knowledge to reforge their own interconnections. The well‐intentioned and morally grounded antinationalist positions of most observers skew their observations in such a way as to hinder the understanding of nationalist conflict as a social phenomenon.

What's Reconciliation Got to do With It? The International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) as Antiwar Profiteer

Abstract This article argues that the actions and activities of the ICTY have not been beneficial to achieving reconciliation or stability in the Balkans, but to the contrary are part of the reason that parts of the region have remained unstable. This result should not be unexpected as there is very little evidence, if indeed any, that indicates that protracted tribunals like the ICTY (and unlike, therefore, Nuremberg), have ever had, or even could have, beneficial effects on reconciliation. It argues, further, that the primary beneficiaries of the ICTY have been international human rights lawyers and human rights agencies, and in the region itself, the political parties of indictees. Considering the amounts of money spent on the Tribunal compared to those spent on rebuilding the region it seems that the ICTY has functioned better as an antiwar profiteer than it has as a promoter of peace and reconstruction

The Byzantine Mosque at Trilye: A Processual Analysis of Dominance, Sharing, Transformation and Tolerance

This paper analyses the history and current utilization of an edifice in Northwestern Anatolia that was constructed in the eighth century as a Byzantine church, converted into a mosque in the sixteenth century, back into a Greek Orthodox church from 1920 to 1922, and has been a mosque again since 1923—this is the “Byzantine mosque” of our title. By looking at the building not simply as a Byzantine church that has undergone changes but as a long‐term locus of interaction between Christians and Muslims, we address criticisms in History and Anthropology of a model of “antagonistic tolerance”, or competitive sharing or religious sites, that we are developing in a multidisciplinary comparative project. More importantly, we also show why the customary scholarly practices of studying time‐delineated horizons, ethnographic presents, or other “units of contemporaneity” (Rowe 1962) are inadequate, as they not only block understanding of the trajectories of specific historical processes, but also hinder comparative study. In so doing, we hope to achieve the goals of historical particularism while still facilitating comparative study.

The Continuing Reinvention of the Square Wheel: The Proposed 2009 Amendments to the Bosnian Constitution

Neither the Dayton constitution nor the two Butmir draft constitutions will work in Bosnia or any other multiethnic country. None of them is a serious effort to address the problem of creating a state when two of the three nations comprising the country reject the imposition of its authority upon them. Until this problem is faced directly, international interveners face a nearly impossible task.

Constitutional Nationalism and the Logic of the Wars in Yugoslavia

Constitutions and laws are generally presumed to be good things. Unfortunately, laws may be unjust and contrary to freedom, as evidenced by Nazism, apartheid, and Jim Crowism. When constitutions and laws are used to institutionalize discrimination, civic unrest logically follows.