Warriors: Cinematic ontologies of the Bosnian war

Abstract

This article analyses the British TV drama Warriors (1999), investigating military masculinities and their cinematic attachments to specific nationhoods (British, Serb, Muslim, Croat). The author’s main argument is that Warriors engages in a negotiation of ontological differences through production of military masculinities, situated within specific time–space coordinates. The story of the war is told using the classical war movie genre, underpinned by a tripartite gendered discourse that links feminization, victimhood and peace, on the one side, with two kinds of military masculinities, on the other side: first, the heroic-moral-military masculinity of the protector and defender (UK peacekeepers) and second, the vicious-ethnic-military masculinity of the ‘local’ men (Serb and Croat paramilitary forces). As the drama’s characters stand for the specific symbolic geographies and histories, we see different ontological worlds appearing. Among them Bosnia – represented through viciousness of local masculinities and victimhood of local femininities – becomes a specific, isolated place, the ‘symbolic continent’ of the Balkans, whose singular, violent geography is separated from Europe and the West, through Orientalist and Balkanist discourses. Furthermore, it is a place with a past but no future, wherein moral geographies of peacekeeping military masculinities translate into ontologies of Self and Other.