Ethnic Mobilization, Violence, and the Politics of Affect

Adis Maksic is Head of the Department of International Relations and European Studies at International Burch University in Sarajevo, Bosnia. He has also served in several peacekeeping missions in the Balkans.

This book offers an unprecedented account of the Serb Democratic Party's origins and its political machinations that culminated in Europe's bloodiest conflict since World War II. Within the first two years of its existence, the nationalist movement led by the infamous genocide convict Radovan Karadzic, radically transformed Bosnian society. It politically homogenized Serbs of Bosnia-Herzegovina, mobilized them for the Bosnian War, and violently carved out a new geopolitical unit, known today as Republika Srpska. Through innovative and in-depth analysis of the Party's discourse that makes use of the recent literature on affective cognition, the book argues that the movement's production of existential fears, nationalist pride, and animosities towards non-Serbs were crucial for creating Serbs as a palpable group primed for violence. By exposing this nationalist agency, the book challenges a commonplace image of ethnic conflicts as clashes of long-standing ethnic nations. 

Advances scholarly understandings of the conditions that lead to ethnicized violent events and war in Bosnia-Herzegovina

1. Understanding the Dynamics of Ethno-Politicization .- 2. Ethnic Nationalism as Bodily Pedagogy: Affect, A Regime of Feeling and Discourse Coalitions .- 3. Riding the Tide of Nationalism: The Collapse of Yugoslav Party-State and the Emergence of SDS .- 4. Contextualizing Agency: The Discourse of SDS within a Spiral of Polarization .- 5. Networks of Circulation: The Origins and Modalities of SDS BIH .- 6. Circulation Technologies: Money, Media and Guns of SDS BIH .- 7. Feeling the Nation: The Master Frame of SDS .- 8. Uniting the Nation: SDS's Mobilization Frames in the 1990 Election Campaign .- 9. Nation on Alert: SDS's Radical 'Othering' and the Priming for Violent Ethno Separatism .- 10. Conclusion: The Making of an Affective Community.