Why do people go to war? My own interest in this question emerged from the context of my dissolving country and Serbia's increased engagement in a very strident form of ethnonationalism. Although social scientists have sought to understand the roles of ethnonationalism in fostering state-organized violence, few scholars have sought to understand the gendered nature of men's motivations for participating in war. The case of the inter-ethnic wars in Croatia and Bosnia, following the break-up of Yugoslavia, presents an unparalleled opportunity to understand more about how the processes of ethnonationalization and masculinization operate in everyday life, and about how men from Serbia made sense of their decisions about participation in the wars. In the present paper I explore the ways nationalism and masculinity intersect and overlap, influence and are influenced by war participation, by looking closer into the war volunteers from Serbia who joined the Yugoslav wars of secession, 1991–1995.

In 2005, years after an enforced peace was constructed between Serbia and its Albanian-majority province Kosovo, the outcome of a better life for ordinary citizens seemed yet to be fulfilled. However, this was not the most important change in the lives of Kosovars. I will argue that the lives of Kosovars are characterised by a lack of economic growth and the increased importance of the normative concept of the hegemonic man. Kosovars, like many “traditionally” patriarchal societies, have constructed identities of the patriotic man and the exalted childbearing woman as icons of national survival. These designated identities often negate the realities of war-affected communities. The gendered places of man and woman in political reality are marred by the traumatic events of life. Within this framework, I analyze interviews with people who have developed “alternative” identities or, as phrased by Carver, “bonded” senses of self-esteem as a result of viewing themselves as somewhat unable to live up to the iconic emblem. In the context of a continued occupation of the province by both the international bodies assigned to the province and the Serbian state (Kosovo is not yet independent from Serbia), one of the main questions asked by many Kosovars today remains: “What was the war about if not independence and where are the spoils of victory?”

In 2000, when conducting a household survey as part of my research on consumption and ethnicity in the small western Macedonian town of Kumanovo, I received explicit proof of how important education has become for ethnic Albanians. It was a Friday afternoon on a hot summer day. I was in my top-floor apartment, working with my research assistant, Adnan, a 28-year-old ethnic Albanian man who had been helping me for the past year. We had grown to be a well-synchronized team. It was his turn to dictate while I entered data from the survey into the computer. The questionnaire concerned interior decorations, but it began with several general questions about the ages, education, and number of family members. After we finished entering around thirty of the questionnaires completed in Albanian, Adnan suddenly stood up without a word. He went into the kitchen, and started drinking water from the first thing he saw, which was an empty olive jar drying on the dish rack. Then he came back, clearly upset. He wiped the sweat from his forehead with the upper part of his hand, and exclaimed,

Since the 5 October revolution that formally ushered Serbia into a democratic era, political commentators, scholars, civic activists and others have watched the country for signs of resurgent nationalism. Many perceived the primary threat to the new democratic order as the persistence of nationalism, particularly in the years after the 2003 assassination of Zoran Djindjić. Such nationalism, forged in the 1980s and 1990s, was subject to eruptions among unsavory politicians, pensioners, Mafiosi and denizens of Belgrade's suburbs and Serbia's “backward” countryside. The problem underlying this model of resurgent nationalism is that it assumes, and simultaneously constructs, nationalism as a static and unchanging arrangement of ideological and social factors that flare up and die down in response to political stimuli—the arrest of indicted war criminals, the outrageous rhetoric of populist politicians, negotiations over the status of Kosovo, or high-stakes sporting events. While there is no question that such events create discursive space for nationalist, sexist and racist agendas, the flare-up model presents a dangerous simplification of how nationalisms work.

Many Bosnians I talked to were skeptical about my plan to do research among local police in the central Bosnian town of Zenica. They told me that no one would talk to me there. “They're too scared of foreigners,” they said, meaning especially Westerners who might be connected to the powerful international institutions that have acted as de facto protectorate to the fragmented and unstable state after the collapse of socialist Yugoslavia and the devastating 1992–1995 war. In their efforts to neutralize the police as enforcer of ethnonational separatism and to promote the new democratic values of rule of law, respect for human rights, and ethnic and gender equality, the “international community” had sacked hundreds of officers, restricted police powers, and introduced quotas for ethnic minorities and women. There was thus a sense that “foreigners” posed a threat to the masculinized coercive power of the state as embodied in the police. As it happened, the police did talk to me, though always in reference to this context of shifting relations of state and state-like power, as well as the economic and social instability that characterizes postwar Bosnia-Herzegovina (hereafter Bosnia).