Comment

Extract

The contributors to this section have produced three authoritative vignettes or ‘side-bars’ that enhance and add important corrective nuances to our understanding of Yugoslavia's disintegration and civil wars and especially the positions and roles of varieties of Serbian nationalism and nationalist intellectuals in the background to and the course of those events. Drawing on their previous work, which has established each of them as respected specialists on their respective and overlapping subjects, the authors also make use of more recently published and unpublished sources to offer fresh or revised perspectives and evaluations of the personalities, ideas and consequences of their subjects. The result is a coherent, conjoined triune analysis, with emphasis on individual and collective internal incoherencies and contradictions that constructively confound efforts to ascribe some kind of evolving consistency, continuity and coherence to the ideas, role and consequences of these intellectuals and the Serbian national ideas and programmes they shaped and often initiated.