An Anti-geopolitical Eye: Maggie O'Kane in Bosnia, 1992-93

This paper, written in April 1995 before the significant events of the summer of 1995, and torn between anger and academia, explores the general question of the relationship between geopolitics, gender and 'the gaze' using the case of the Bosnian dispatches of the award-winning British Guardian journalist Maggie O'Kane. In it I elaborate an argument that O'Kane's powerful dispatches can be considered examples of an anti-geopolitical eye, a way of seeing that disturbs the enframing of Bosnia in Western geopolitical discourse as a place beyond our universe of moral responsibility. The paper uses O'Kane's anti-geopolitical eye to place the horror of Bosnia before geographers, a horror that should provoke reflection upon geographies of moral responsibility (proximity and distance) in foreign policy discourse. It concludes by noting that although the anti-geopolitical eye disturbs a generalized distancing of Bosnia from the West in Western geopolitical discourse, it has its own limits and is never simply a negation of geopolitics.