Stuart J. Kaufman

Good to excellent coverage of ethnic conflicts in Georgia, Azerbaijan, Armenia, Moldova, and the former Republic of Yugoslavia. Most of these are little known in the West, and accounts of ethnic conflict are always distorted by fragmentation of the histories involved as well as ideology and the myth-making exercise that is nationalism. The author carefully details the similarities in the symbolic politics of each of these conflicts while trying to point out the differences that resulted in war, or not, or the nature of the warfare that resulted from the conflict. One of Kaufman's chief concerns is distinguishing between ethnic conflicts he considers "mass-led" versus "elite-led" but in his discussions of the various leaders and their actions, he seems to assume a level of rationality that is, to me, deceptive. As Professor Mahmoud Mamdani has pointed out, there is at the heart of every genocide a small, cold-hearted, clear-sighted, intelligent cabal of utter psychopaths, and any attempt to head off or cut short an ethnic conflict rolling down that road WILL FAIL if we don't take that simple fact into consideration.… (mer)