Introduction

Threats to a society’s identity may range from the conquering of historic territory and the deportation or killing of members of the community, to the suppression of society’s expression of its own identity and interference with its ability to reproduce itself. According to nature of used means, threats to societal security may be military ones as well as non-military ones. Studying societal security in Yugoslavia’s successor states entails looking at populations and how the elements of national identities are combined with different weights to define the identity of different nations, and whether these are majority or minority nations in the states where they are found. One problem is how to identify a situation where one group of people sees another as a societal threat and how to distinguish this from other kinds of threats. One direction is language; the other is behaviour.