Auditing War

Abstract

I made a mistake a few months ago. It was the sort of mistake I have made repeatedly and yet one I always reflect upon with the same measure of surprise. It started when colleagues in Bosnia alerted me to the fact that Bosnia and Kosovo, unlike other neighbouring countries in the former Yugoslavia, were to be excluded from a new relaxing of EU visa requirements. Indignant and overflowing with hypothetical rationales as to why Bosnia and Kosovo might be excluded, rationales that I presumed might have been contrived to obscure ‘real reasons’, a colleague and I went onto the internet to find an explanation (which I tacitly understood would only be a justification, the ‘real’ reasons left un-enunciated). We eventually read that the countries in question had failed to meet a variety of requirements—we can already call them indicators—that would signal their readiness to enjoy the new visa regime. My error resided precisely in the presumption that these alleged ‘failures’ on the parts of the states involved, concealed some more pertinent truth.  In fact, these ‘failures’ had everything to do with visibility and transparency and nothing to do with rationales hidden beneath an exercise in accountability that might measure ‘readiness’. That is, the entire dilemma had everything to do with what Marilyn Strathern poignantly referred to as ‘what visibility conceals’ (2000: 310).