Chapter 62: Sectarian Conflict in the Post-Cold War World
Core idea
The Cold War held a lot of things in place
For four decades, the rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union froze a lot of local conflicts in place. Both superpowers had strong reasons to keep their client states from breaking apart, both could discipline their own allies, and both watched closely for openings the other might exploit. When the USSR dissolved in 1991, that pressure lifted. Yugoslavia, Rwanda, and dozens of other places that had been held together by Cold War-era arrangements suddenly weren’t. The 1990s and 2000s were the decades when those held-back conflicts came due — and when religious and ethnic identity, often suppressed under earlier ideologies, returned to the center of political life.
Fundamentalism is modern, not ancient
A common mistake is to treat religious fundamentalism as a primitive holdover from before modernity. The historian Karen Armstrong’s correction is essential: fundamentalist movements are intrinsically modern. They emerged in response to modern conditions — secularization, urbanization, mass media, the loss of inherited certainty — and they use modern tools (broadcast media, the internet, encrypted messaging) to advance their agendas. Christian, Jewish, Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist, and Islamic fundamentalisms all date from the same general era and respond to the same general pressures. They are not the past coming back; they are a particular kind of present.
Why it matters
The 1990s genocides showed the UN’s limits
The post-Cold War decade was supposed to be a global democratic spring. Instead it produced two of the most efficient mass killings of the twentieth century. In Rwanda in 1994, an estimated 800,000 Tutsi and moderate Hutu were murdered in 100 days, mostly with machetes, while UN peacekeepers stood by under orders not to intervene. In Bosnia from 1992 to 1995, Serb forces killed an estimated 100,000 people and conducted systematic ethnic cleansing, including the July 1995 massacre of more than 8,000 Bosniak men and boys at Srebrenica — a designated “UN safe area.” The international community responded after the fact: ad-hoc UN tribunals were set up for both, and the failures of those years drove the eventual creation of the International Criminal Court in 1998. But the dead stayed dead.
September 11 and the War on Terror
On September 11, 2001, nineteen al-Qaeda hijackers crashed four planes into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and a Pennsylvania field, killing about 3,000 people. It was the deadliest single terrorist attack in modern history. The US response — the War on Terror — produced the invasions of Afghanistan (2001-2021) and Iraq (2003-2011), expanded surveillance regimes across the West, normalized drone warfare and targeted killing, and ran a network of secret prisons and “enhanced interrogation” practices that the US government later acknowledged as torture. The cumulative civilian death toll from the post-9/11 wars exceeds 200,000 by conservative estimates — more than sixty-five times the toll of the attacks themselves. Each wave of casualties became recruitment material for the next wave of extremists, and so on.
No tradition is exempt
A particular Western tendency in this period was to identify Islam as uniquely violent or politically dangerous. The historical record does not cooperate. Violent fundamentalist movements have emerged in every major religious tradition. Buddhist monks have led pogroms against Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar and Tamils in Sri Lanka. Hindu nationalists have orchestrated lynchings of Muslims and Dalits across India. Christian Identity militants carried out the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995 (168 dead). Neo-Sikh fundamentalists destroyed Air India Flight 182 in 1985 (329 dead). The Aum Shinrikyo cult — a syncretic neo-Buddhist apocalyptic sect — released sarin gas in the Tokyo subway in 1995 (12 dead, more than 5,000 injured). And as Stalin’s career demonstrated, ideologies that reject all religion can still produce mass killing. The pattern is human; the religion is a vehicle, not a cause.
Key takeaways
Key takeaways
- The end of the Cold War in 1991 removed superpower pressure that had held many local ethnic and sectarian conflicts in check.
- The Yugoslav Wars (1991-2001) killed an estimated 140,000 people and produced systematic ethnic cleansing, especially against Bosniak Muslims.
- The Srebrenica massacre of July 1995 killed more than 8,000 Bosniak men and boys in a designated UN safe area.
- The Rwandan genocide of 1994 killed about 800,000 Tutsi and moderate Hutu in 100 days while UN peacekeepers stood aside.
- The September 11, 2001 attacks killed about 3,000 people in the deadliest single terrorist attack in modern history.
- The post-9/11 wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have killed at least 200,000 civilians by conservative estimates.
- Fundamentalist movements are intrinsically modern — they use modern tools and respond to modern conditions, not ancient ones.
- Violent sectarianism appears in every major religious tradition (and in explicitly anti-religious ideologies); no tradition is exempt.
Mental model
Read it as: The diagram is a loop, not an arrow. Each round of violence generates the conditions for the next. The Nigerian proverb the chapter quotes captures it: “When two elephants fight, it is the grass that suffers” — and the grass, trampled, becomes recruiting ground for the next elephant.
Key figures
Osama bin Laden (1957-2011)
The Saudi-born scion of a wealthy construction family who became a CIA-supported mujahideen commander in Afghanistan in the 1980s, then turned against his former patrons after US troops were stationed in Saudi Arabia during the 1991 Gulf War. He founded al-Qaeda, planned the 1998 East Africa embassy bombings, the 2000 USS Cole attack, and the September 11 attacks, and lived as a fugitive until US Navy SEALs killed him in his compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan in May 2011.
Slobodan Milošević (1941-2006)
The Serbian nationalist leader of Serbia and then Yugoslavia (1989-2000) whose mobilization of Serb grievance drove the wars in Croatia, Bosnia, and Kosovo. He was arrested in 2001, handed over to the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, and died in his cell in The Hague in 2006 before his verdict was delivered.
Paul Kagame (1957-)
A Tutsi exile who led the Rwandan Patriotic Front into the country in 1994 and stopped the genocide militarily, having received essentially no support from the international community while it was happening. He has ruled Rwanda since (as vice president, then president), presiding over remarkable economic development and equally remarkable suppression of political dissent.
Example
How a “safe area” became a killing field
In April 1993, the United Nations declared the eastern Bosnian town of Srebrenica a “safe area” for Bosniak (Bosnian Muslim) civilians fleeing Serb forces. UN peacekeepers — a Dutch battalion of about 400 lightly armed troops — were stationed there to enforce the designation. Tens of thousands of refugees crowded into the town.
In July 1995, Bosnian Serb forces under General Ratko Mladić surrounded Srebrenica. The Dutch commander requested NATO air support; the request was bungled through the UN chain of command and never delivered in time. Mladić’s forces entered the town, separated the men and boys from the women and small children, and over the following week shot more than 8,000 of them. They were buried in mass graves, then dug up and reburied to hide the evidence. It was the worst massacre on European soil since the Second World War.
The lesson is not that the UN is useless. It is that consent-based peacekeeping has narrow limits. UN troops can only do what the warring parties allow them to do, and when one party decides to commit a massacre, lightly armed peacekeepers under restrictive rules of engagement cannot stop it. After Srebrenica, the UN doctrine was revised to allow more robust mandates, and the International Criminal Court was created in 1998 to prosecute the architects of mass atrocity directly. Mladić was convicted of genocide in 2017 and is serving a life sentence. The dead remain dead.
Related lessons
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