Sociology after Bosnia and Kosovo: Recovering Justice (review)

Sociology after Bosnia and Kosovo: Recovering Justice. By Keith Doubt. Rowman and Littlefield, 2000. 183 pp. Cloth, $60.00; paper, $24.95.

Bosnia humbles sociology. That is the premise of Doubt's meditations on the 1992-95 war in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Starting with Zygmunt Bauman's contention that the Holocaust had more to say about sociology than sociology had to say about the Holocaust, Doubt's book offers fourteen short chapters, each of which takes an aspect of the conflict, and connects it to an important concept in sociological theory. Thus, the failures of international diplomacy are read in terms of Goffman's face-work, ethnic cleansing is considered via Merton's notion of the latent function of social conduct trumping its manifest function, and the impoverishment of the UN's reasoning is analyzed with regard to Weber's iron cage of rationality.

In these terms, Doubt's book makes for interesting reading. It is driven by a commitment to overcome sociology's lacunae with respect to the Bosnian war (assuming the statistics of paper topics at conferences is a reliable measure of concern), and infused with a moral commitment. The events and issues chosen for reflection show a keen eye for details that can carry a substantive argument, and the conceptual armory that is connected to these details is suggestive. Kosovo is something of an afterthought in all this, being the topic of only two of the chapters -- though the dismembering of Chomsky's logic in opposing NATO action is worth reading.

There is, however, something odd about this book. The first chapter makes clear that the argument is set against, and designed to resist, the "pariah's position" of something labeled "postmodernism." This observation is made in the context of memoirs of the war and the way an author's authority is judged, but the concern has a wider ambit. However, as is all too often the case when "postmodernism" becomes a reviled thing from which accounts feel the need to be inoculated, no citation, reference, or specific argumentation is offered in support of the claim. All the intellectual care and attention evident in the rest of the book is seemingly considered superfluous when one comes to the theoretical tradition that is "other." For a book that deals with violence predicated upon othering, this logic is disturbing.

In setting down his marker against "postmodernism," Doubt follows comments in a foreword from the book's series editor, Stejpan G. Mestrovic, in which Doubt's position is contrasted to the "jargon" and "disdain for reality" of this marginal mode of inquiry. The stance of Doubt and Mestrovic is puzzling when one considers the opening premise of the argument: the torpidity of sociology with respect to Bosnia. If there has been so little work on Bosnian per se, there has been even less from the "pomos" we are told are marginal. What, then, is the latent function of this hostility against "postmodernism" in Doubt's book?

An answer appears in chapter 12, where Peter Handke's apologia for the Serbs is said to be exemplar of postmodernism within the context of Bosnia. But Doubt's rendition of "postmodernism" sees him constructing not so much a straw man as a grotesque effigy. Much of Handke's argument warrants Doubt's criticism, but the idea that Handke is a postmodernist indebted to deconstruction is nothing short of ludicrous. There is nothing in Handke's argument that makes the link Doubt claims. To find my book on Bosnia -- which deploys Derrida, Foucault, and Levinas to develop an ethics politically consistent with some of Doubt's positions -- being used to support Handke's revisionism, is nothing short of scandalous. How much and how well has Keith Doubt actually read?

David Campbell, University of Newcastle

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