This text provides a sociological account of the events in Bosnia in the 1990s, including ethnic cleansing, mass rape, and the role of political journalists. Drawing upon a diverse group of social theorists, including Merton, Weber, and Baudrillard, this book constructs a social understanding of the experiences of people in Bosnia and the response of western leaders to these experiences. As well as looking at the social causes of these events, th author sheds light on why Bosnia has largely been ignored by sociologists. He shows why the personal and social tragedies of people in Bosnia and the world's tolerance of these tragedies challenge contemporary sociological knowledge. He argues that sociologists must be willing not only to recognise this challenge, but also to respond to it in order to construct meaningfully adequate accounts of war and genocide in a post-modern era. Doing so, he contends, may yield an important and needed reconsideration of sociological knowledge today and how it is applied.