David Campbell has been at the forefront of showing how deconstruction, and the philosophy of Jacques Derrida, can help us to think international relations differently. Like Derrida himself, Campbell has eschewed the goal of an ethical theory in favour of an ‘ethos of political criticism’ concerned to question and go beyond our assumptions and limits. In order to continue such an ethos of criticism, to push our understanding of ethics in international relations further still, it is surely important to question the assumptions and limits Campbell himself imposes. It is with this in mind that I wish to take a particular political intervention by Derrida in 1993 and read it against Campbell’s Derridean analysis of the Bosnian conflict which began in 1992.