Balkanization, division of a multinational state into smaller ethnically homogeneous entities. The term also is used to refer to ethnic conflict within multiethnic states. It was coined at the end of World War I to describe the ethnic and political fragmentation that followed the breakup of the Ottoman Empire, particularly in the Balkans. (The term Balkanization is today invoked to explain the disintegration of some multiethnic states and their devolution into dictatorship, ethnic cleansing, and civil war.)
Balkanization has occurred in places other than the Balkans, including Africa in the 1950s and ’60s, following the dissolution of the British and French colonial empires there. In the early 1990s the disintegration of Yugoslavia and the collapse of the Soviet Union led to the emergence of several new states—many of which were unstable and ethnically mixed—and then to violence between them.
Many of the successor states contained seemingly intractable ethnic and religious divisions, and some made irredentist territorial claims against their neighbours. Armenia and Azerbaijan, for example, suffered from intermittent violence over ethnic enclaves and borders. In the 1990s in Bosnia and Herzegovina, ethnic divisions and intervention by Yugoslavia and Croatia led to widespread fighting between Serbs, Croatians, and Bosniaks (Muslims) for control of key villages and roads. Between 1992 and 1995, Bosnian Serbs and Serbian paramilitary groups conducted a nearly 1,400-day siege of Bosnia’s capital, Sarajevo, in an effort to break Muslim resistance. During the fighting, more than 10,000 people died, including some 1,500 children.
Efforts by some countries to prevent Balkanization have themselves generated violence. During the 1990s, for example, Russia and Yugoslavia used force in attempts to quash independence movements in Chechnya and the ethnically Albanian province of Kosovo, respectively; in each case further violence ensued, resulting in the death and displacement of thousands of people.
Efforts by the international community to cope with the ethnic warfare that has followed Balkanization have been mixed. European efforts to halt violence in Bosnia and Kosovo failed until air strikes by the U.S.-led North Atlantic Treaty Organization compelled Serbian forces to cease their operations. Efforts to stem violence elsewhere (e.g., in Armenia and Azerbaijan) have been less successful.