"Nationalism and Ethnic Conflict" from Greenhaven Press [1]

In 1994, as part of its ongoing "Current Controversies" series, Greenhaven Press brought out a volume of essays and articles under the title Nationalism and Ethnic Conflict.

The Foreward stated:

"The purpose of the Current Controversies series is to explore many of the social, political, and economic controversies dominating the national and international scenes today. Titles selected for inclusion in the series are highly focused and specific."

This is true; the series included other titles as specific as "Police Brutality" and "The AIDS Crisis." The editors also promised that the contemporary material would be supplemented with historical documents and other data, in an effort to ensure that the volume would not quickly go out of date but would rather provide a useful research tool for years to come.

This was an admirable project (and Greenhaven continues to produce several series along the same lines to this day), and one can only applaud their commitment to help readers to "sort through the plethora of opinions accompanying today's major issues, and to draw one's own conclusions".

But in the case of Bosnia, and the Yugoslav wars in general, this is a problem, because as we know there is a concerted campaign of distortion regarding the historical record, and a great deal of confusion--some of it honest, some of it contrived--surrounding the entire period. Unfortunately, there is not a "Bosnia consensus", not to the degree that there is about many other conflicts and historical events.

Therefore, it will be interesting to see how the editors dealt with this particular issue; given the publication date, there is little surprise that Bosnia took up much of the attention in this volume.