Difficult conversations as moral imperative: Negotiating ethnic identities during war

I found the claim of a "moral imperative" as reason to bomb Kosovo and the sovereign nation of Yugoslavia to be untenable because as an American of Serbian descent, I saw the media portrayal of my relatives, culture, and ancestry reduced to descriptions of savagery and barbarism. Thus began my autoethnographic exploration of ethics and communication in the emotional work of identity construction within a context of war. In this essay, I use my personal experiences with conflicted identities as the basis for discovering a discussion strategy for difficult conversations that is capable of helping us understand the connections between personal actions and political solutions, lived experiences and the new terms for global dialogue.