The Yugoslav Wars of the 1990s


Book Description

Catherine Baker offers an up-to-date, balanced and concise introductory account of the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s and their aftermath. The volume incorporates the latest research, showing how the state of the field has evolved and guides students through the existing literature, topics and debates.




The Yugoslav Wars (1)


Book Description

Osprey's examination of Slovenia and Croatia's armies' involvement in the Yugoslav Wars (1991-1995). Following the death of the Yugoslavian strongman President Tito in 1980, the several semi-autonomous republics and provinces that he had welded into a nation in 1945 moved inexorably towards separation. After a deceptively clean break for independence by Slovenia in 1991, the world watched a series of other wars rip through this modern European state. In this first of two volumes, experts on the Balkan region give an unprecedentedly clear, concise explanation of the Slovene, Croatian and Krajina-Serb armies of these campaigns, illustrated with rare photos and an extraordinary range of colour uniform plates.




Balkan Battlegrounds


Book Description




Writing the Yugoslav Wars


Book Description

In Writing the Yugoslav Wars, Dragana Obradovi? analyses how the Yugoslav wars of secession helped shape the region's literary culture. Obradovi? argues that the crisis of the country's disintegration posed an ethical challenge to self-identified postmodernists. This book takes a transnational approach to literatures of the former Yugoslavia that have been, since the 1990s, studied separately, in line with geopolitical divisions. This post-socialist conflict was one of the moments that reshaped postmodernism for both local and international thinkers, much in the same way modernism was shaped by World War I and the advent of mechanized warfare.




Tito's Lost Children. A Tale of the Yugoslav Wars. War One


Book Description

Yugoslav People's Army brats Jovana and Hristijan grew up in a secluded border-watch compound, dreaming of grander horizons. They get their wish in the worst way possible when Predrag, a rogue Army captain, kidnaps Jovana for no apparent reason. Hristijan manages to rescue her, but their ordeals are far from over. On the run, they uncover the shocking secret behind Jovana's upbringing: she is the chosen successor to Marsal Josip Broz Tito. With Yugoslavia on the brink of collapse, it is her duty to keep order among the country's quarrelsome nationalities - and stop the Serbs from grabbing power. There's only one tiny problem: Jovana was never trained to take on her new role as the only hope for a unified Yugoslavia. Joining forces with a hard-fighting mute girl, Jovana and Hristijan must make their way to Slovenia to prevent its secession from the Yugoslav Federation. To get there, they will have to outwit Predrag, who is determined to capture Jovana and win the approval of his Serb nationalist father. The fate of Yugoslavia now rests with a band of snarky teenagers. Armed with nothing but a few guns and an old Army truck, they are about to make their mark on history.




To End a War


Book Description

When President Clinton sent Richard Holbrooke to Bosnia as America's chief negotiator in late 1995, he took a gamble that would eventually redefine his presidency. But there was no saying then, at the height of the war, that Holbrooke's mission would succeed. The odds were strongly against it. As passionate as he was controversial, Holbrooke believed that the only way to bring peace to the Balkans was through a complex blend of American leadership, aggressive and creative diplomacy, and a willingness to use force, if necessary, in the cause for peace. This was not a universally popular view. Resistance was fierce within the United Nations and the chronically divided Contact Group, and in Washington, where many argued that the United States should not get more deeply involved. This book is Holbrooke's gripping inside account of his mission, of the decisive months when, belatedly and reluctantly but ultimately decisively, the United States reasserted its moral authority and leadership and ended Europe's worst war in over half a century. To End a War reveals many important new details of how America made this historic decision. What George F. Kennan has called Holbrooke's "heroic efforts" were shaped by the enormous tragedy with which the mission began, when three of his four team members were killed during their first attempt to reach Sarajevo. In Belgrade, Sarajevo, Zagreb, Paris, Athens, and Ankara, and throughout the dramatic roller-coaster ride at Dayton, he tirelessly imposed, cajoled, and threatened in the quest to stop the killing and forge a peace agreement. Holbrooke's portraits of the key actors, from officials in the White House and the Élysée Palace to the leaders in the Balkans, are sharp and unforgiving. His explanation of how the United States was finally forced to intervene breaks important new ground, as does his discussion of the near disaster in the early period of the implementation of the Dayton agreement. To End a War is a brilliant portrayal of high-wire, high-stakes diplomacy in one of the toughest negotiations of modern times. A classic account of the uses and misuses of American power, its lessons go far beyond the boundaries of the Balkans and provide a powerful argument for continued American leadership in the modern world.




The Myth of Ethnic War


Book Description

"The wars in Bosnia-Herzegovina and in neighboring Croatia and Kosovo grabbed the attention of the western world not only because of their ferocity and their geographic location, but also because of their timing. This violence erupted at the exact moment when the cold war confrontation was drawing to a close, when westerners were claiming their liberal values as triumphant, in a country that had only a few years earlier been seen as very well placed to join the west. In trying to account for this outburst, most western journalists, academics, and policymakers have resorted to the language of the premodern: tribalism, ethnic hatreds, cultural inadequacy, irrationality; in short, the Balkans as the antithesis of the modern west. Yet one of the most striking aspects of the wars in Yugoslavia is the extent to which the images purveyed in the western press and in much of the academic literature are so at odds with evidence from on the ground."—from The Myth of Ethnic War V. P. Gagnon Jr. believes that the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s were reactionary moves designed to thwart populations that were threatening the existing structures of political and economic power. He begins with facts at odds with the essentialist view of ethnic identity, such as high intermarriage rates and the very high percentage of draft-resisters. These statistics do not comport comfortably with the notion that these wars were the result of ancient blood hatreds or of nationalist leaders using ethnicity to mobilize people into conflict. Yugoslavia in the late 1980s was, in Gagnon's view, on the verge of large-scale sociopolitical and economic change. He shows that political and economic elites in Belgrade and Zagreb first created and then manipulated violent conflict along ethnic lines as a way to short-circuit the dynamics of political change. This strategy of violence was thus a means for these threatened elites to demobilize the population. Gagnon's noteworthy and rather controversial argument provides us with a substantially new way of understanding the politics of ethnicity.




A History of Yugoslavia


Book Description

Why did Yugoslavia fall apart? Was its violent demise inevitable? Did its population simply fall victim to the lure of nationalism? How did this multinational state survive for so long, and where do we situate the short life of Yugoslavia in the long history of Europe in the twentieth century? A History of Yugoslavia provides a concise, accessible, comprehensive synthesis of the political, cultural, social, and economic life of Yugoslavia—from its nineteenth-century South Slavic origins to the bloody demise of the multinational state of Yugoslavia in the 1990s. Calic takes a fresh and innovative look at the colorful, multifaceted, and complex history of Yugoslavia, emphasizing major social, economic, and intellectual changes from the turn of the twentieth century and the transition to modern industrialized mass society. She traces the origins of ethnic, religious, and cultural divisions, applying the latest social science approaches, and drawing on the breadth of recent state-of-the-art literature, to present a balanced interpretation of events that takes into account the differing perceptions and interests of the actors involved. Uniquely, Calic frames the history of Yugoslavia for readers as an essentially open-ended process, undertaken from a variety of different regional perspectives with varied composite agenda. She shuns traditional, deterministic explanations that notorious Balkan hatreds or any other kind of exceptionalism are to blame for Yugoslavia’s demise, and along the way she highlights the agency of twentieth-century modern mass society in the politicization of differences. While analyzing nuanced political and social-economic processes, Calic describes the experiences and emotions of ordinary people in a vivid way. As a result, her groundbreaking work provides scholars and learned readers alike with an accessible, trenchant, and authoritative introduction to Yugoslavia's complex history.




Yugoslavia


Book Description

In this outstanding appraisal of the modern history of Yugoslavia and the factors surrounding its break-up, Nora Beloff takes sacred tenets of received wisdom and subjects them to close analysis. Interventions by foreign governments, the role of the United Nations, the recognition of the secessionists' political platforms, together with the diplomatic infighting and confusion are all chronicled in this concise account.




The Fall of Yugoslavia


Book Description

"Vigorous, passionate, humane, and extremely readable. . . For an account of what has actually happened. . . Glenny's book so far stands unparalleled."--The New Republic The fall of Yugoslavia tells the whole, true story of the Balkan Crisis--and the ensuing war--for those around the world who have watched the battle unfold with a mixture of horror, dread, and confusion. When Croatia and Slovenia declared their independence in June 1991, peaceful neighbors of four decades took up arms against each other once again and a savage war flared in the Balkans. The underlying causes go back to business left unfinished by both the Second and First World Wars. In this acclaimed book, now revised and updated with a new chapter on the Dayton Accords and the subsequent U.S. involvement, Misha Glenny offers a sobering eyewitness chronicle of the events that rekindled the violent conflict, a lucid and impartial analysis of the politics behind them, and incisive portraits of the main personalities involved. Above all, he shows us the human realities behind the headlines, and puts in its true, historical context one of the most ferocious civil wars of our time.