Bosnia: A Short History (Malcolm)

Noel Malcolm's history of Bosnia and Herzegovina from the medieval period to the outbreak of the 1992 to 1995 war, published by New York University Press in 1994 and written substantially in response to the war then unfolding. Malcolm, a historian, argues against reading the conflict as the eruption of ancient religious or ethnic hatreds, holding instead that it was a war of political and territorial aggression manufactured by nationalist political leaderships pursuing ethnonational state-building, with religious and ethnic identity functioning chiefly as a marker used to sort and displace populations rather than as the war's own motivating cause. Its strength is a detailed political and social history across the centuries the ancient-hatreds narrative claims to explain. Its limit is that, published amid the war itself, it argues one side of the historiographical debate over the war's causes rather than assessing it with the distance later scholarship has had.