Abstract:
The 1999 war over Kosovo shaped, and was in turn shaped by, US public spheres. Chapter I
offers a theoretical and historical account of the importance of publics to US political
development, especially the founding of an official liberal-republican state-based public
sphere. Four organisational themes are identified - law, technology, dissent, and foreigners -
as key normative and practical benchmarks by which we can observe this development and
extend to the war over Kosovo. Chapter 2 develops ideas about the violence associated with
the diffusion of public and private through a discussion of the ambivalent role of law in
legitimating the war. The chapter traces the complex meanings attributed to law during
processes crucial to defining the official public sphere and the emerging global order as
evidenced by the war. Chapter 3 suggests that the information technology used to conduct and
debate the air campaign embodied the socially constituted values of the official public sphere
and provided a means by which counterpublic spheres could be created. Chapter 4 argues that
despite the role of technology and NATO's humanitarian claims in limiting public dissent
anti-Kosovo war activists participated in and constituted counterpublic spheres. These
alternative, but increasingly marginalised, publics reveal modes and types of publicity not
captured in liberal and deliberative theoretical accounts. Chapter 5 extends the argument
about different ways of 'being public' through an analysis of how Serb- and Albanian-
American immigrants and Kosovo-Albanian refugees were represented in the official public
domain. Several norms associated with gender, race, and economy appeared to be upheld and
invigorated via representations of these 'foreigners'. Chapter 6, which is the most explicit in
drawing Hannah Arendt, addresses endeavours to transpose the public sphere category to an
emerging global public realm, especially Habermasian efforts to legitimate violent
intervention.
