How did Bosnia, once a polity of intersecting and overlapping identities, come to be understood as an intractable ethnic problem? David Campbell pursues this question - and its implications for the politics of community, democracy, justice, and multiculturalism - through readings of media and academic reprsentations of the conflict in Bosnia. This text offers a re-thinking of the meaning of ethnic/nationalist violence and a critique of the impoverished discourse of identity politics that crippled the international response to the Bosnian crisis.