This book examines the historical, cultural and political dimensions of the crisis in Bosnia and the international efforts to resolve it. It provides a detailed analysis of international proposals to end the fighting, from the Vance-Owen plan to the Dayton Accord, with special attention to the national and international politics that shaped them. It analyzes the motivations and actions of the warring parties, neighbouring states and international actors including the United States, the United Nations, the European powers, and others involved in the war and the diplomacy surrounding it. With guides to sources and documentation, abundant tabular data and over 30 maps, this should be a definitive volume on the most vexing conflict of the post-Soviet period.

Rwanda and Bosnia both experienced mass violence in the early 1990s. Less than ten years later, Rwandans surprisingly elected the world's highest level of women to parliament. In Bosnia, women launched thousands of community organizations that became spaces for informal political participation. The political mobilization of women in both countries complicates the popular image of women as merely the victims and spoils of war. Through a close examination of these cases, Marie E. Berry unpacks the puzzling relationship between war and women's political mobilization. Drawing from over 260 interviews with women in both countries, she argues that war can reconfigure gendered power relations by precipitating demographic, economic, and cultural shifts. In the aftermath, however, many of the gains women made were set back. This book offers an entirely new view of women and war and includes concrete suggestions for policy makers, development organizations, and activists supporting women's rights.

Mahmutcehaji'c (former vice president of the Bosnia-Herzegovina government) first prepared this text as a lecture to be given at Stanford University in 1997, but he was unexpectedly denied a visa to enter the United States. The book is an indictment of the partition of Bosnia and a plea for Bosnia's communities to reject ethnic segregation and restore mutual trust. He argues that different religious and ethnic cultures have co-existed in Bosnia for centuries, and that the partitioning was made possible by Western complicity with Serbian and Croatian nationalists. Annotation copyrighted by Book News Inc., Portland, OR

Abstract: Now that integration into Europe is on the public agenda, the discourse in Bosnia-Herzegovina is tending to build up a narrative about Bosnia-Herzegovina that is not actually integrating but returning to Europe from which it was "torn away" when it joined the Yugoslav state in 1918. Similar narratives, characteristic of Croatia and Slovenia, may have found their way into Bosnia-Herzegovina too. Indeed, what happened to Bosnia-Herzegovina from 1918 up to 1992, and was it really "abducted" from Europe where, as part of the Habsburg Monarchy, it had spent the last decades of the 19th and first decades of the 20th century? Has Bosnia-Herzegovina returned to the Balkans since 1918, where it had been up to 1878 and wherefrom, now in the early 21st century, it is trying to join Europe or - in line with this new narrative - is it once again ""making a break" for it? What, in this sense, are Bosniak, Croat and Serb experiences of Yugoslavia and what memories of Yugoslavia are they building

Who are the Serbs? Branded by some as Europe's new Nazis, they are seen by others—and by themselves—as the innocent victims of nationalist aggression and of an implacably hostile world media. In this challenging new book, Timothy Judah, who covered the war years in former Yugoslavia for the London Times and the Economist, argues that neither is true. Exploring the Serbian nation from the great epics of its past to the battlefields of Bosnia and the backstreets of Kosovo, he sets the fate of the Serbs within the story of their past. This wide-ranging, scholarly, and highly readable account opens with the windswept fortresses of medieval kings and a battle lost more than six centuries ago that still profoundly influences the Serbs. Judah describes the idea of "Serbdom" that sustained them during centuries of Ottoman rule, the days of glory during the First World War, and the genocide against them during the Second. He examines the tenuous ethnic balance fashioned by Tito and its unraveling after his death. And he reveals how Slobodan Milosevic, later to become president, used a version of history to drive his people to nationalist euphoria. Judah details the way Milosevic prepared for war and provides gripping eyewitness accounts of wartime horrors: the burning villages and "ethnic cleansing," the ignominy of the siege of Sarajevo, and the columns of bedraggled Serb refugees, cynically manipulated and then abandoned once the dream of a Greater Serbia was lost. This first in-depth account of life behind Serbian lines is not an apologia but a scrupulous explanation of how the people of a modernizing European state could become among the most reviled of the century. Rejecting the stereotypical image of a bloodthirsty nation, Judah makes the Serbs comprehensible by placing them within the context of their history and their hopes.

This book offers an unprecedented account of the Serb Democratic Party’s origins and its political machinations that culminated in Europe’s bloodiest conflict since World War II. Within the first two years of its existence, the nationalist movement led by the infamous genocide convict Radovan Karadzic, radically transformed Bosnian society. It politically homogenized Serbs of Bosnia-Herzegovina, mobilized them for the Bosnian War, and violently carved out a new geopolitical unit, known today as Republika Srpska. Through innovative and in-depth analysis of the Party’s discourse that makes use of the recent literature on affective cognition, the book argues that the movement’s production of existential fears, nationalist pride, and animosities towards non-Serbs were crucial for creating Serbs as a palpable group primed for violence. By exposing this nationalist agency, the book challenges a commonplace image of ethnic conflicts as clashes of long-standing ethnic nations.