Building A Multiethnic Military In Post Yugoslav Bosnia And Herzegovina

"On 1 January 2006, soldiers from across Bosnia and Herzegovina gathered to mark the official formation of a unified army; and yet, little over a decade before, these men had been each other's adversaries during the vicious conflict which left the Balkan state divided and impoverished. Building a Multi-Ethnic Military in Post-Yugoslav Bosnia and Herzegovina offers the first analysis of the armed forces during times of peace-building in Bosnia and Herzegovina. This sophisticated study assesses Yugoslav efforts to build a multi-ethnic military during the socialist period, charts the developments of the armies that fought in the war, and offers a detailed account of the post-war international initiatives that led to the creation of the Armed Forces of Bosnia and Herzegovina. At this point, the military became the largest multi-ethnic institution in the country and was regarded as a model for the rest of Bosnian society to follow. As such, as Elliot Short adroitly contends, this multi-ethnic army became the most significant act in stabilising the country since the end of the Bosnian War. Drawing upon a wealth of primary sources - including interviews with leading diplomats and archival documents made available in English for the first time - this book explores the social and political role of the Bosnian military and in doing so provides fresh insight into the Yugoslav Wars, statehood and national identity, and peace-building in modern European history."--

On 1 January 2006, soldiers from across Bosnia and Herzegovina gathered to mark the official formation of a unified army; and yet, little over a decade before, these men had been each other's adversaries during the vicious conflict which left the Balkan state divided and impoverished. Building a Multi-Ethnic Military in Post-Yugoslav Bosnia and Herzegovina offers the first analysis of the armed forces during times of peace-building in Bosnia and Herzegovina. This sophisticated study assesses Yugoslav efforts to build a multi-ethnic military during the socialist period, charts the developments of the armies that fought in the war, and offers a detailed account of the post-war international initiatives that led to the creation of the Armed Forces of Bosnia and Herzegovina. At this point, the military became the largest multi-ethnic institution in the country and was regarded as a model for the rest of Bosnian society to follow. As such, as Elliot Short adroitly contends, this multi-ethnic army became the most significant act in stabilising the country since the end of the Bosnian War. Drawing upon a wealth of primary sources – including interviews with leading diplomats and archival documents made available in English for the first time – this book explores the social and political role of the Bosnian military and in doing so provides fresh insight into the Yugoslav Wars, statehood and national identity, and peace-building in modern European history.

The history of the Balkans has been a distillation of the great and terrible themes of 20th century history-the rise of nationalism, communism, fascism, genocide, identity and war. Written by one of the leading historians of the region, this is a new interpretation of that history, focusing on the uses and legacies of nationalism in the Balkan region. In particular, Professor Veremis analyses the influence of the West-from the fall of the Ottoman Empire and the rise and collapse of Yugoslavia. Throughout the state-building process of Greece, Serbia, Rumania, Bulgaria and later, Albania, the West provided legal, administrative and political prototypes to areas bedevilled by competing irredentist claims. At a time when Slovenia, Rumania, Bulgaria and Croatia have become full members of the EU, yet some orphans of the Communist past are facing domestic difficulties, A Modern History of the Balkans seeks to provide an important historical context to the current problems of nationalism and identity in the Balkans.

Given the recent revival of nationalism in many parts of the world in tandem with new conflicts and forms of interventionism, this book uses the case of Kosovo to discuss some of key problems around contemporary practices of state-building. Based on exhaustive research and fieldwork, Marius Calu investigates how the management of plurality is a fundamental element of contemporary state-building seeking to build social cohesion, while for the new-born Kosovo it stands as vital symbol for its domestic sovereignty and legitimisation. With the aim of understanding why and in what ways the management of diversity has become a central element of state-building in post-conflict Kosovo, this study juxtaposes the de jure multi-ethnic liberal democratic form of governance with the de facto results and consequences of Kosovo's task to protect, accommodate and integrate its ethnic minorities.

A numerically small Jewish community helped their ethnically embattled neighbors in a neutral, humanitarian way to survive the longest modern siege, Sarajevo, in the early 1990s.

Winner of the Lord Aberdare Literary Prize for 2018 Even before Tito's Communist Party established control over the war-ravaged territories which became socialist Yugoslavia, his partisan forces were using football as a revolutionary tool. In 1944 a team representing the incipient state was dispatched to play matches around the liberated Mediterranean. This consummated a deep relationship between football and communism that endured until this complex multi-ethnic polity tore itself apart in the 1990s. Starting with an exploration of the game in the short-lived interwar Kingdom, this book traces that liaison for the first time. Based on extensive archival research and interviews, it ventures across the former Yugoslavia to illustrate the myriad ways football was harnessed by an array of political forces. Communists purposefully re-engineered Yugoslavia's most popular sport in the tumult of the 1940s, using it to integrate diverse territories and populations. Subsequently, the game advanced Tito's distinct brand of communism, with its Cold War-era policy of non-alignment and experimentation with self-management. Yet, even under tight control, football was racked by corruption, match-fixing and violence. Alternative political and national visions were expressed in the stadiums of both Yugoslavias, and clubs, players and supporters ultimately became perpetrators and victims in the countries' violent demise. In Richard Mills' hands, the former Yugoslavia's stadiums become vehicles to explore the relationship between sport and the state, society, nationalism, state-building, inter-ethnic tensions and war. The book is the first in-depth study of the Yugoslav game and offers a revealing new way to approach the complex history of Yugoslavia.

The early 1990s saw Europes first conflict for almost 40 years when bitter fighting broke out in the former Yugoslav republic. Colonel Colm Doyle of the Irish Army found himself in the midst of this appalling civil war when in October 1991 he became first a European Community Monitor and almost immediately Head of the Monitor Mission in besieged Sarajevo. After six months he was appointed Personal Representative to Lord Carrington, Chairman of the Peace Conference on Yugoslavia.In this overdue memoir, he describes his role mediating, negotiating and persuading political and military leaders of all sides to halt the seemingly inexorable path to all-out war. He arranged ceasefires, visited prisoner-of-war camps, extricated election monitors and organised hostage releases. His experiences made him a key witness at the International Criminal Tribunal in The Hague at the trials of Milosevic, Mladic and Karadzic.With his unprecedented access, Doyles personal account can claim to be one of the most significant works on the brutal Bosnian War.