Why the Serbs fought: Motives and misperceptions.

Abstract

When the Serbs started the war in Bosnia, their chief motive was not a Hider-like desire for domination or conquest. It was fear. The Serbs of Bosnia mainly feared that if they remained a minority in Bosnia they would be persecuted by a coalition of diabolical enemies. The Serbs of Serbia, shocked by Yugoslavia's disintegration, feared continuing weakness in a dangerous world. Both feared continuing national disunity of both Serbs and Yugoslavs. In addition, there was some desire for power (domination) as an end in itself, and for revenge. Several misperceptions also contributed: a diabolical enemy image (leading to exaggerated fear), an innocent self-image (not seeing that their own actions were aggressive and therefore would be perceived by others as aggression), overconfidence based on lack of empathy with the potential fighting spirit of both victims and onlookers, and failing to see a promising alternative to violence. Their Manichean world-picture was in turn supported by continual selective inatten...

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 23 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.