The Bridge Betrayed: Religion and Genocide in Bosnia (Sells)

Michael Sells' 1996 study of the religious ideology behind the Bosnian War and the Srebrenica genocide, published by the University of California Press. Sells, a scholar of religion, argues that Serbian Orthodox and Croatian Catholic religious nationalism, drawing on mythologies such as the Kosovo cult and what he terms Christoslavism, supplied a real and specific ideological engine for the ethnic cleansing and genocide carried out against Bosnian Muslims, rather than functioning as incidental background to a purely political or ethnic conflict. Its strength is a close reading of the religious rhetoric and symbolism nationalist leaders and clergy actually used. Its limit is that, as an argument for religion's causal centrality, it is one side of an active historiographical debate rather than a neutral survey of the war.