A Concise History Of Serbia

This accessible and engaging book covers the full span of Serbia's history, from the sixth-century Slav migrations up to the present day. It traces key developments surrounding the medieval and modern polities associated with Serbs, revealing a fascinating history of entanglements and communication between southeastern and wider Europe, sometimes with global implications. This is a history of Serb states, institutions, and societies, which also gives voice to individual experiences in an attempt to understand how the events described impacted the people who lived through them. Although no real continuity between the pre-modern and modern periods exists, Dejan Djokić draws out several common themes, including: migrations; the Serbs' relations with neighbouring empires and peoples; Serbia as a society formed in the imperial borderlands; and the polycentricity of Serbia. The volume also highlights the surprising vitality of Serb identity, and how it has survived in different incarnations over the centuries through reinvention.

Yugoslavia: A Concise History surveys the whole turbulent course of the country's history, in the context of the struggles between great powers for control of the Balkans. Torn apart by nationalist rivalries, the first Yugoslavia lapsed into paralysis and dictatorship. Axis occupation in 1941 unleashed a murderous civil war, in which the Communist Party emerged victorious. Tito's Yugoslavia appeared to the world as a peaceful, multi-national federation, but in the end disintegrated amid barbarism unknown in Europe for half a century. This revised and fully updated edition explains why, and takes the events up to the arrest of Milosevic in 2001and beyond.

History, myth, and the destruction of Yugoslavia.

Focuses on the dynamic and creative aspects of Bosnia's past as well as the contested, tragic and controversial.

At the time of Serbia's emergence from the ruins of Tito's Yugoslavia and of Milosevic's regime, Stevan Pavlowitch shuns the "doomed to violence" and the "doomed to martyrdom" paradigms favored respectively by some Western and Serbian analysts in order to pose difficult questions about Serbian history.

The dissolution of communism and the rise of ethnic and religious conflict throughout the former Yugoslavia, which sparked the war among Bosnians, Serbs, and Croats, has captivated the attention of the Western media throughout the 1990s. But little notice has been paid to the growing ethnic and religious tensions within the Serbian province of Kosovo -- tensions that now pose a serious threat to the security of the Balkans. Nearly 90 percent of the population of Kosovo is composed of Albanian Muslims, many of whom support a growing movement -- at first peaceful, but now turning violent -- for independence from Christian Serbia. In Between Serb and Albanian, Miranda Vickers explores the roots of this conflict and tracks the recent trajectory of Serbian and Albanian relations in Kosovo. The first third of the book outlines the history of Kosovo during the medieval and Ottoman periods, when relations between the two communities were generally good. The second part examines Kosovo since 1945, when the area fell under Serbian administration in the socialist Yugoslav system. Vickers concludes by surveying the steady deterioration in Serb-Albanian relations since the disintegration of Yugoslavia in 1981. With careful detail, she reveals how a largely peaceful. politically driven campaign for the independence of Kosovo has recently turned to violence with terrorist attacks on Serb political and military institutions, on Albanians thought to be collaborating with the Serbs, and on Serbs themselves. In the process, the author provides a balanced account of the Serb and Albanian positions, while placing much of the blame for the current situation on the repressive policies of Serb dictatorSlobodan Milosevic. Vickers sees ominous portents that the conflict may soon spread to neighboring Balkan countries. This book is essential reading for all those wishing to understand the historical, social, and cultural aspects of ethnic and religious strife in Serbia, and the implications of this conflict for the current political situation in all of southeast Europe.

Vance-Owen peace plan, the tenuous resolution of the Dayton Accords, and the efforts of the United Nations to keep the uneasy peace.