Srebrenica and Two Readings of the War's Religious Character

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

In July 1995 more than eight thousand Bosniak men and boys were killed at Srebrenica, a mass killing the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia later ruled to be genocide, one of the war's defining and most extensively documented episodes.

Historians divide over how far to read the wider war in religious terms. One reading, argued at length by the scholar Michael Sells, holds that Serbian Orthodox and Croatian Catholic religious nationalism supplied the operative ideology, drawing on mythologies such as the Kosovo cult to help legitimize the mass killing of Bosniak Muslims, so that religion functioned as a real and specific engine of the violence rather than incidental coloring. A second reading, argued by the historian Noel Malcolm and shared by other historians of the war, holds that the conflict was fundamentally a war of political and territorial aggression manufactured by nationalist political leaderships pursuing ethnonational state building, with religious affiliation functioning chiefly as an ethnic marker used to sort populations for expulsion rather than as the war's own motivating belief, a camp that explicitly warns against reading the conflict as ancient religious hatred the combatants themselves did not act from. Both readings are recorded here without adopting either.