The War of Yugoslav Succession

Abstract

The War of Yugoslav Succession (1991–5) was Europe's bloodiest war since the Second World War. It represented the violent culmination of the political conflict within Yugoslavia of the late 1980s and early 1990s occasioned by the rise of nationalism, particularly within Yugoslavia's Socialist Republic of Serbia; the weakening of the Yugoslav communist regime; the seizure of power by Slobodan Milošević in the Socialist Republic of Serbia in 1987; and his subsequent attempt to overturn the Yugoslav constitutional order. This political conflict pitted Milošević's Serbia against other members of the Socialist Federated Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRJ), in particular the Socialist Republics of Slovenia and Croatia and the Socialist Autonomous Province of Kosovo. Although blood was spilled in the spring of 1989, when the Yugoslav People's Army (JNA) occupied Kosovo, the “War of Yugoslav Succession” properly refers to the armed conflict of 1991–5 in Croatia, Slovenia, and Bosnia-Herzegovina, involving all the Yugoslav republics except Macedonia. By far the bloodiest and most protracted phase of the conflict occurred in nationally heterogeneous Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1992–5. Although the war was primarily fought between JNA and Serb forces on the one hand and Croatian and Bosnian forces on the other, a bitter conflict was also fought between Croat and Bosnian (predominantly Muslim) forces in Herzegovina and Central Bosnia in 1992–4. The War of Yugoslav Succession is the most significant armed conflict to have taken place in Europe since 1945, one that influenced not only the entire course of regional politics and economic development, but also the relations of the major powers (the United States, Russia, and the EU states); global perceptions of the meaning of national conflict, war-crimes and genocide; and the evolution of international justice.

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