Twentieth century Eastern Europe has produced a multitude of cases of ethnic violence. Perhaps no case illustrates and examines the basic points of this project better than the collapse of Yugoslavia in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The bloody conflicts resulting from Yugoslavia's demise direct themselves toward both the micro and macro dimensions of this study.

First, there is the phenomenon of the essentialization of identities. Yugoslavia was a modern, complex society in social and economic realms. Ethnicity was only one of several forms of identification and often not the most important. Yet, as mentioned in the introductory chapter, neighbors often came to reduce each other to “enemy.” Recall the quoted passage of Bringa from the first chapter: “the familiar person next door had been made into a depersonalized alien, a member of the enemy ranks.” In 1989, the leading political science journal, American Political Science Review, published an article by Steven Burg and Michael Berbaum based on survey research. Focusing on the increasing numbers of those declaring themselves as “Yugoslav” on census forms, rather than some specific nationality, the authors, with some important qualifications, came to the following conclusion: “These findings support an interpretation of Yugoslav identity as evidence of diffuse support for the existence of a shared political community.” This shared political community would be violently ripped apart only two years later, replaced by homogenized nations.