Ethnic Mobilization, Violence, and the Politics of Affect

This book advances scholarly understandings of the conditions that lead to ethnicized violent events and war by analyzing the role of ethno-nationalist agency in the constitution of politicized ethnic communities. It analyzes the role of Serb Democratic Party of Bosnia-Herzegovina (SDS), the party led by the globally infamous war crimes suspect Radovan Karadzic, in the political homogenization and armed mobilization of ethnic Serbs in the two years preceding the Bosnian War. The study traces and analyzes SDS's organizational origins, internal relations and political machinations that defined its growth and political success. It considers how the party approached the task of affectively engineering the dispersed individuals of Serb ethnic background into a coherent community. It synthesizes the tools of discourse analysis, new literature on affective thinking and data gathered through 15 interviews with relevant political elites, including members of SDS Main Board and Bosnian presidency, to argue that SDS was able to gain a following of a majority of ethnic Serbs of Bosnia-Herzegovina with the power of its visceral understandings and affective experiences of the nation. At a faithful moment of political change and nationalist rivalry, and with access to considerable material resources, SDS was a crucial contributor to the production of a new "regime of feelings" that promoted ethnic sentiments as a defining feature of social and political life in Bosnia-Herzegovina.