Nation Against State: A New Approach to Ethnic Conflicts and the Decline of Sovereignty

A work entitled Nation Against State could be expected to address religion, culture, language, and the roots of nationalism. I wish to advise the reader that this book turns in a different direction; it develops instead innovative approaches for contending with brutal conflicts waged in the name of nationhood. The prevailing doctrines of statecraft currently invoked in efforts to check these conflicts evolved in an age when the scourge of war arose between states rather than within them. The basic conflicts that now threaten international peace have little in common with those that arose during the heyday of fascism and communism, when the nation-state reigned supreme. The dominant norms of international law and diplomacy are ill adapted to coping with the kind of strife that has erupted in Yugoslavia and in the Caucasus and that could become common elsewhere in Eurasia.