What our response to the Bosnian crisis can tell us about multiculturalism in the United States and beyond.

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 representations of the conflict in Bosnia. National Deconstruction is a rethinking 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.