Inevitable War? Examining Yugoslavia as a Fault Line Conflict

This article examines the case for viewing the conflicts that took place in Yugoslavia between 1991 and 1999 through Huntington’s civilisational paradigm, whereby conflict is the inevitable result of the existence of “cleft states” such as Yugoslavia, which lay on the fault line of Western, Orthodox and Islamic civilisations and was therefore predisposed to civilisational conflict. This article argues instead that divisions in Yugoslavia were national, rather than civilisational and fomented by a wider, more nuanced range of factors which are not taken into account by Huntington.