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The Fall of Yugoslavia: The Third Balkan War cover
FEEL THE FISSURE SEE THROUGH IT

The Fall of Yugoslavia: The Third Balkan War

by Misha Glenny

It happened in Europe. In your lifetime.

For you if

you need to understand how genocide happens in living memory

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In 1991, Misha Glenny drove into a war that most of the world hadn't yet decided was happening. The Fall of Yugoslavia is his dispatch from the front lines of the Balkan Wars — Croatia, Slovenia, Bosnia, Macedonia — reported in real time as a BBC correspondent on the ground while politicians in Brussels and Washington debated whether what they were watching counted as ethnic cleansing. What Glenny shows, scene by devastating scene, is how ordinary people become perpetrators and victims of atrocity when nationalist leaders decide that yesterday's neighbor is today's enemy. This isn't comprehensive history — it was written as events unfolded, revised once after Dayton, still carrying the texture of immediate witness. But that's also why it's necessary: it shows how fast it can go, what international inaction costs, and how quickly "it can't happen here" becomes the most dangerous sentence in a language.

Where This Book Lives

Setting
Eastern Europe
Voice
An outside perspective on Eastern Europe
Themes
atrocity unmaskedbearing witnessethnic and religious conflictgenocidewar and civiliansxenophobia and nationalism
Topics
cold warrise of fascism in europeyugoslav wars

Glenny was a BBC correspondent in the region when Yugoslavia began to come apart, and this book is dispatches from that — not a historian's account but a journalist's, written in real time and revised once after Dayton. That matters: the book carries the limitations of its moment alongside its extraordinary immediacy. Some scholars have argued Glenny's framing had blind spots, particularly around Serbian perspectives, and the book is contested territory among Balkan historians — worth knowing going in. What it has that no retrospective account can replicate is the witness itself: what it felt like to watch Europe's first genocide since the Holocaust unfold while international institutions negotiated the grammar of their response. The Yugoslav Wars are a test case for how fast ordinary life becomes atrocity when nationalist leaders decide to make it so. That lesson doesn't have an expiration date.

Stories About This Book

Related Viewing

Shares a topic, theme, or setting with this book in the catalog.

Hearts and Minds poster

Hearts and Minds(1974)

dir. Peter Davis

Same event: Cold War · Same theme: War and Civilians

Vietnam, in the words of those who waged it.

A documentary about the American war in Vietnam, made while the war was still being fought. Davis intercuts interviews with generals, officials, pilots, veterans, grieving Vietnamese families and ordinary Americans, setting the language of policy against what that policy did on the ground and at home.

Why it’s here: The punk move is the editing: Davis lets the war's architects talk at length, then cuts their words against a funeral, a bombed village or a cheering football crowd, and trusts the audience to feel the gap. The pedagogy is in how the film teaches viewers to hear the language of power, euphemism and abstraction included, while looking at what it covers up. Worth knowing that the juxtaposition is the argument, and General Westmoreland and others objected that their words were framed unfairly, so watch it as a persuasive documentary, not a neutral record.

Where to watch: Criterion Channel, HBO MaxLetterboxd ↗

Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb poster

Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb(1964)

dir. Stanley Kubrick

Same event: Cold War

Laughing so you don't scream, since 1964.

A rogue Air Force general triggers an unrecallable nuclear strike on the USSR, and the War Room scrambles — bureaucratically, absurdly — to stop the end of the world.

Why it’s here: The original 'laugh so you don't scream' text — mutually assured destruction played entirely for farce, and the farce is the argument: absurdity is what nuclear brinkmanship actually looks like from the inside.

Where to watch: Rent on Apple TV, AmazonLetterboxd ↗