Bosnian War

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

The Bosnian War began after Bosnia and Herzegovina's 1992 declaration of independence from the disintegrating Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. It was fought chiefly among the Bosnian government's forces, formally multi-ethnic but chiefly Bosniak led, the Bosnian Serb Army of Republika Srpska, backed by Serbia-dominated rump Yugoslavia, and Bosnian Croat forces backed by Croatia; the Bosnian Croat Croatian Defence Council fought a separate war against the Bosnian government from 1993 to 1994, before the United States brokered Washington Agreement realigned it against the Bosnian Serbs. The war included the more than three year siege of Sarajevo.

It ended with the November 1995 Dayton Agreement, initialed at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base and signed in Paris that December, which partitioned Bosnia and Herzegovina into two largely ethnically defined entities, the Bosniak-Croat Federation and Republika Srpska, joined under a weak central government. The agreement ended the fighting, but the wartime front lines it fixed as an internal political boundary still structure the country's politics today.

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.