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.

Military historians have traditionally depicted the Ottoman’s second siege of Habsburg Vienna and the disastrous, ‘Great Turkish War’ that followed (1683–99) as a decisive victory that saved Europe and triggered Ottoman decline. But what gets lost in this historiography is the extent to which the war profoundly altered the confessional and ethnic make-up of the Ottoman army. The recurring defection of Ottoman Orthodox Christian warrior populations like the Serbs to rival armies, followed by Muslim retribution against them, constituted a sea-change in the nature of Ottoman imperial sovereignty and social relations on the ground. Not only would Istanbul henceforth bar Christian warriors from serving in the army; it was forced to outsource imperial governance and defence to pastoral Muslim warrior populations like Albanians on unprecedented levels. The Ottoman state, however, lacked both the resources and the will to pay and offer them sufficient access to status and power, which meant that these new agents of empire were difficult to control. This chapter sketches the nature and repertoire of violence and crime stemming from Istanbul’s massive privatisation of military and policing powers and its deleterious impact on inter-confessional and inter-ethnic relations in Ottoman society.

This history of Kosova since 1989 can be divided into three periods: the period of Serbian rule and Albanian resistance leading to war in 1998–1999; the nine-year period under the United Nations Interim Mission in Kosovo (UNMIK); and the period since Kosova declared its independence in March 2008. In this chapter I focus on institutional transformations of the three periods, economic issues, and interethnic relations of Kosovar Albanians and Serbs. I also contextualize major events and present initiatives of international mediators such as Kai Eide and Martti Ahtisaari. Kosova is the youngest country in Europe. It suffers from high unemployment, poverty, and corruption, as well as isolation due to the European Union’s continued refusal to accord its citizens visa-free travel with the rest of Europe. At the same time it has a committed diaspora population and was able to pull together at crucial times in its history. I present several of its recent leaders, including Ibrahim Rugova, Shpend Ahmeti, Albin Kurti, and Atifeta Jahjaga.

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.