'Not Welcome at the Holiday Inn': How a Sarajevan Hotel Influenced Geo-politics. Issue 1 (2nd January 2016)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Smirl, Lisa
• Is Part Of: Journal of intervention and statebuilding. Volume 10:Issue 1(2016)
• Page Start: 32
• Page End: 55
• Publication Date: 2016-01-02
• Subjects: Hotels -- materiality -- conflict -- urbicide -- architecture -- built environment -- liminality; Intervention (International law) -- Periodicals; Nation-building -- Periodicals; Economic assistance -- Periodicals; Postwar reconstruction -- Periodicals; International cooperation -- Periodicals; 320
• DOI: 10.1080/17502977.2015.1137398
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 1750-2977

Abstract

ABSTRACT: During the reporting of the 1992–95 Bosnian War, the bright yellow Holiday Inn played host to many of the most renowned characters involved in documenting, resolving and perpetuating the conflict. It provided the visual background for numerous television broadcasts, provided the infrastructure to send the reports around the world via satellite and created the environment to negotiate agreements and hold conferences and briefings. But the building has never been regarded as anything more than a neutral or slightly bizarre backdrop to the events that took place there before, during and after the conflict. Closer examination reveals three ways in which the hotel needs to be considered as co-constitutive of the conflict: (1) in the conflict geography and conflict epistemology; (2) in the forging of a common international subjectivity; and (3) as a material, symbolic and informational resource. Taken together, this also contributes to considerations of how the built environment is an integral part of understandings of contemporary conflict.