The West and its Radical Others

This contribution explores François Debrix’s Re-Envisioning Peacekeeping on the question of radical alterity. I argue that Debrix presents a unique and prescient analysis of alterity in the context of the war in Bosnia that highlights an ideological aspect of late twentieth century ‘disciplinary neoliberalism’. For Debrix, the visualization and representation of genocidal racial violence in Bosnia becomes a form of seductive voyeurism. As I argue, this also opens up the possibility of imagining forms of microfascism circulating within the West itself as a way of reigniting the political in the face of a depoliticized world. Debrix’s Re-Envisioning Peacekeeping helps us situate the proliferation of contemporary forms of neo-fascism in this ideological legacy of the late 1990s ‘End of History’.