This atlas may be useful for highways. Other readily available atlases and maps duplicate the other cartographic information. The text has to be updated, and the maps are useless for changes after the wars started.

The articles are useful for a view of the early part of the Bosnia war, but the maps are simply taken from pre-war highway touring guide maps of Yugoslavia. They are very general and do not offer a very clear view of the actual Bosnian conflict. This volume is hastily constructed and extremely commercial. A truly careful Atlas, using the widely available census date from the former Yugoslavia, showing the population of each town and section by group, and showing the exact position of the moving inter-ethnic boundaries during the conflict would be invaluable and is still desperately needed. Why the editors did not take advantage of thw extraordinary census information on the public record escapes this reviewer, but it is deeply disappointing. Volumes that do present this vital information are available, but not on the standard U.S. markets.

Having been to Bosnia 5 times on humanitarian missions, I found that this book was accurate in explaining the central issues. I have always been interested in the "whys" of genocide, which this article covered in a very mind-provoking way. I am suggesting that all my future trip participants get a copy of this to give them an overview of this extremely complicated part of the world.

I think that the book glorifies Alija Izetbegovic way too much....

Written by Izetbegovic while he was imprisoned for campaigning against the Communist dictatorship in Yugoslavia. Includes an analysis of the most powerful ideologies in 20th century Europe, Communism, Fascism, Capitalism, and their relationship to Islam.

Highly recommended. Worth every penny.

This was a decent grouping of articles relating to the mass rapes occuring in Bosnia. Including interviews with the women themselves, as well as some of the rapists, it paints a vivid picture of these troubling events. I would have liked more analysis of the situation, specifically within the context of other wars in which rape has been a primary tool of warfare. Also, more information on where officials in Bosnia stand on this issue. This book could have been more well-rounded analytically.

Stiglmayer's useful book binds together a dozen essays on the mass rapes in Bosnian war. When it was written in 1993 the conflict still raged and disclosures of systematic government-ordered rapes primarily against Muslim women by Serbs were new and shocking to most readers. Now five years later the crimes still shock, but by their magnitude and not their novelty. This book is still a powerful witness to the rapes, but more importantly it provides a legal, psychological, and historic framework for coming to an understanding which is necessary if we are to try to prevent more such horrors in the future, or at least to provide a timely intervention and vigorous prosecution of the perpetrators.

Stiglmayer's own pair of essays are the most useful and interesting. Her first piece is an absorbing history of the Balkans that concisely untangles the web of hatreds and violence which have plagued the area for millennia and which are still powerfully germane. Her second piece constitutes the heart of the book. In it she dramatically and persuasively demonstrates that the rapes in Bosnia are not "typical" rapes, even by wartime standards, but are a tool systematically employed by the Serb leadership to pursue its genocidal campaign of "ethnic cleansing". Her interviews illustrate that the rapes are about the humiliation of women, but they are also directed at the Bosnian Muslim population as a whole as a tactical means to accomplish the evacuation by the Muslims of large swaths of Bosnian territory.

In other essays, Paul Parin offers some ideas on the psychology of the rapes. He doesn't claim to have all the answers, but his essay is thought-provoking. Rhonda Copelon provides a considered analysis of the state of international law and its applicability to the Bosnian horrors. Her otherwise sound piece is marred by her lawyerly/academic tendency to misuse words ("surface" as a transitive verb meaning "bring to light"; "intersectional" where she means "intersecting") and her occasional unlawyerly hyperbole (she notes on p.198 that a midday women's talk show opened with the script, "In Bosnia, they are raping the enemy's women". Two pages later this has turned into the assertion that the media "often refer to the mass rape in Bosnia as the rape of the 'enemy's women'").

Surprisingly, the most disappointing essays are those by the best-known authors. The first of Catharine MacKinnon's two pieces is a reprint of a 1993 Ms. Magazine article. She gets in some obligatory feminist chops, pokes at Gloria Steinem, equates the Third Reich with Penthouse, and moans about American women in porn films, in brothels, and in slavery. She slips in a couple of gratuitous anecdotes, and that's it. No analysis, no nothing. It reads as though she wrote it on a train with a short deadline and did her research by cell-phone. Her second piece is marginally better, but her point is a weak one. She is horrified by the crimes against women, yet she wants to pile every insult and irritation ever suffered by woman under the umbrella of human rights violation. In one breathless sentence (p.185) she says "...UN troops were targeting women: 'In the streets of Zagreb, UN troops often ask local women how much they cost'". Her whining about merely boorish behavior undermines her credibility and belittles the plight of women who suffered grievously in the wars. MacKinnon is exasperating, yet passionate, but ultimately her pieces fail because of her unsupported allegations and the scattered and distracting nature of her attacks on anything that pops into her head.

Similarly, Susan Brownmiller spends her essay slamming men as warrior animals. So much so that she entirely misses the point that these rapists were not beasts out of control, but were entirely under control and following their leaders' war plans to a tee. Brownmiller is not a scholar of Balkan history with any depth or understanding. She doesn't have Stiglmayer's innovative perceptions of the war. The Brownmiller piece offers no value added, it is mere filler.

Overall the book is excellent. Although, now, five years later, Stiglmayer could well give it another update, in addition to the changes she has made for this English edition. The wars have reached a precarious end, the ICTY war crimes trials are underway. There is another chapter to be added to the book, one can only hope that Stiglmayer will provide it, so that this work can remain fresh for many more years.

This is a collection of articles that cover the entire span of the history of the Bosnian Muslims, although the quality of the individual contributions varies greatly. The first three articles, which go from the Middle Ages to 1878, are unfortunately uninformative and even tedious for anyone who has already done some reading on general Balkan history, and probably confusing and perhaps overwhelming for those who have no previous knowledge in this field. By far the best piece is the article by this volume's editor, Mark Pinson, which covers the period of Austro-Hungarian rule in Bosnia-Herzegovina (1878-1918) and its effects on the Muslim community. This was in fact a very crucial period for the Bosnian Muslims, because as Pinson points out, it was when they first became a politically aware as a community, and began to seek new ways to articulate their needs. The final article by Ivo Banac, which covers the twentieth century, is a good survey of Bosnian Muslim political history, but it lacks depth, which is disappointing given the importance of this period for understanding events in Bosnia today. There is also a useful, if somewhat dated, appendix for finding further resources on Bosnia, both in print and on the Web. This book is, thus, a generally useful reference source, but it could and should have been something much more.

Allen knows zilch about the Balkans, knows nothing about the war, prattles on incessantly about herself. Seems she heard some horrifying stories of mass rapes from acquaintances and decided to write about how bad that made her feel. That's it. If you care about that, then this book is for you.

After reading the book, I read all of the reviews below. This book isn't as bad as the worst critics make it out to be, but it's not as good as the apologists purport. It's just another read. If you get assigned it for a feminist class, relax, read it, and move on. It's a strange book because it's not really about Bosnia - not having much to offer about politics or the war. It's not about sexual politics - being just another feminist screed. But it's mostly about the writer's own personal thoughts on rape as a military tool. If that interests you, you'll enjoy the book. If not, you probably won't be able to finish it.

Rape Warfare was a courageous book to write: Beverly Allen dared to speak out about how rape was being used systematically before 'historical consensus' had validated that claim. Thus it became an influential and historically significant work, credited today with having been instrumental in the U.N. War Crimes Tribunal's decision to change international law so that war rape might now be prosecuted as a "crime against humanity." The very first convictions under this new law were handed down in February 2001.

Incidentally, some reader reviewers, apparently not up-to-date on recent strides in research approaches, failed to grasp the importance of the inclusion in Rape Warfare of Dr. Allen's personal responses, especially considering the situation on the ground in the Balkans at that time. The information coming from interviews is always shaped by the attitudes and expectations of the interviewer. Thus it becomes the interviewer's duty to both REVEAL and SITUATE the details of her/his own subjectivity.

By withholding the gruesome details of the rapes, Allen protected the women she interviewed; she spared them the kind of re-victimization they experience when journalists pander to public prurience, making pornography of these women's horrors. Nonetheless, or perhaps even, therefore, Rape Warfare is also 'about' the power of stories; it makes a significant contribution to demonstrating that narrative, often disqualified as "not objective," is, in fact, a valid tool for discovering the deepest truths.

[Susan Schwartz Senstad is the author of MUSIC FOR THE THIRD EAR (Picador, 2001), which treats the fate of, among others, a Croatian woman who seeks asylum in Norway after being subjected to the mass rapes in Bosnia.]

This book was a disappointment to me. It is done like an auction catalog, has over two hundred listings of items which are in various museums, with a brief description. However I only count twenty illustrations, and as the entire format is in black and white, these are of limited interest. Other than this, there is ONE page of "history". I am not sure for what audience a book like this is intended, I can think of no practical use for it. It was 20.00 wasted.

This book is not a scholarly examination of ethnic cleansing in the Bosnian civil war but a propaganda publication by the Croation Ministry of 'Information'. It holds no academic value and is only interesting as an example of how scholars and intellectuals on all sides of this war have become pawns of nationalistic governments.

This unusually shrill piece of pro-Pale polemics claims that the February 1994 market-place mortar shell, like the one in August 1995, was 'a self-inflicted act of terrorism by the Sarajevo regime'; contains much flesh-creeping rhetoric on the subject of 'Mujahedin'; and solemnly warns that any Western military intervention in Bosnia will lead to 'a new world war'. Curiously, the text was produced in November 1995: anyone can get predictions wrong in advance of the event, but it requires a special talent to make false predictions about events that have already happened.