This section focuses on a set of occupied countries whose internal conflicts during and/or immediately after occupation rose to a level of violence that can be described as civil war. Although each of these clashes featured particular characteristics arising from local conditions, participants were usually acutely aware of their connection to the continental and global theaters of warfare as well as to analogous internal conflicts in other occupied countries. One can therefore speak of a sort of archipelago of loosely analogous, temporally overlapping (though not necessarily synchronous), and at least indirectly interconnected civil wars fought across a wide array of lands amidst the overarching global conflict. Indeed, this archipelago extended well beyond Europe, as will be seen in the discussion of the Chinese case.

Bosnia-Herzegovina experienced a traumatic war that led to the death of over 100,000 citizens and the displacement of half the population. The Dayton Peace Accords have regulated post-war reconstruction and politics since 1995, resulting in a complex power-sharing system that relied heavily on extensive international intervention in the first post-war decade. Subsequent international disengagement and the persistence of nationalist and clientalist political parties has led to stagnation characterized by high levels of political polarization and limited progress in terms of economic development or Euro-Atlantic integration. The narratives of the war remain present and mutually exclusive.