Western Intervention in the Balkans

"In this important and provocative book, Roger Petersen demonstrates the enormous power that can be achieved through the strategic use of emotions, by carefully analyzing a series of high-stakes interventions in the Balkans. Instead of ignoring emotions, or writing them off as irrational aberrations, Petersen offers a powerful analytical road map that invites us to view specific emotions as crucial resources utilized by political entrepreneurs to achieve their objectives. Serving as a coherent alternative to bloodless and rationalistic reconstructions of conflict processes, Western Intervention in the Balkans constitutes a major theoretical breakthrough that is of immediate scholarly and practical relevance well beyond the region that it covers."
- Lars-Erik Cederman, Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zürich