Western Intervention in the Balkans

Roger D. Petersen holds B.A., M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in Political Science from the University of Chicago. Since 2001, he has taught in the Political Science Department at MIT, where he was recently named Arthur and Ruth Sloan Professor of Political Science. Petersen studies comparative politics with a special focus on conflict and violence, mainly in Eastern Europe, but also in Colombia and other regions. He is the author of Resistance and Rebellion: Lessons from Eastern Europe (Cambridge, 2001) and Understanding Ethnic Violence: Fear, Hatred, and Resentment in Twentieth-Century Eastern Europe (Cambridge, 2002). He also has an interest in comparative methods and has co-edited, with John Bowen, Critical Comparisons in Politics and Culture (Cambridge, 1999). He teaches classes on civil war, ethnic politics and civil-military relations.

• Part I. Background and Theory: 1. Western intervention in the Balkans: the strategic use of emotion in conflict; 2. Emotions as resources; 3. The strategic use of emotions I: theory; 4. Western intervention games; 5. The strategic use of emotions II: developing strategies, examples from non-Balkan cases; 6. The strategic use of emotions III: hypotheses; Part II. Cases and Tests: 7. Background to Western intervention in the Balkans; 8. The case of the Roma; 9. Background on Kosovo; 10. Kosovo: waiting for the West; 11. Kosovo: intervention games I; 12. Kosovo: intervention games II; 13. Kosovo conclusions; 14. South Serbia; 15. Macedonia; 16. Bosnia; 17. Montenegro; 18. Conclusion.

“In this important and provocative book, Roger Petersen demonstrates the enormous power that can be achieved through the strategic use of emotions, by carefully analyzing a series of high-stakes interventions in the Balkans. Instead of ignoring emotions, or writing them off as irrational aberrations, Petersen offers a powerful analytical road map that invites us to view specific emotions as crucial resources utilized by political entrepreneurs to achieve their objectives. Serving as a coherent alternative to bloodless and rationalistic reconstructions of conflict processes, Western Intervention in the Balkans constitutes a major theoretical breakthrough that is of immediate scholarly and practical relevance well beyond the region that it covers.” – Lars-Erik Cederman, Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zürich