ABSTRACT
It is often said that the end of the Cold War saw a radical change in the character of violent conflict, as demonstrated in particular by the apparent shift from interstate wars to intrastate armed conflict and the emergence of a host of so-called ‘new’ wars (see Kaldor 2007). Yet this perception is partly erroneous, as the Cold War system and the overriding concern about the threat of nuclear war meant that Western observers were either oblivious to or ignored the plethora of existing, brewing or temporarily suppressed conflicts beyond the borders of the Western hemisphere. Whilst the Cold War and military competition between the United States and the Soviet Union bankrolled many of the proxy wars in the developing world, it also served to contain, sideline or co-opt the interests and grievances of communal groups within the communist bloc. Many of the conflicts that emerged after the fall of communism, therefore, were not new but manifestations of unresolved, protracted conflicts dating back to the pre-communist, nation-building era in Eastern Europe. Some conflicts, such as the inter-communal conflict in Bulgaria, were a direct result of perverted communist policies. Similarly, the Macedonian-Albanian in Macedonia conflict owed much of its complexities both to communist-era politics as well as to Great Power politics in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
