Politics & Power Quote by John Keegan

Keegan’s line does something both clarifying and dangerous: it tries to name Bosnia’s war as not just a contest of power, but a relapse into something older and uglier. By calling it “partly atavistic,” he’s reaching for a category that sits outside normal policy language, a word that suggests tribal memory, pre-modern hatred, blood inheritance. It’s a rhetorical move that lowers the temperature of political explanation and raises the temperature of anthropology. The intent is diagnostic: if you treat Bosnia as ordinary politics, you’ll apply the wrong tools and expect negotiators to behave like negotiators.

The subtext, though, is where the controversy lives. “Atavistic” doesn’t just describe; it subtly absolves. If violence is framed as ancestral instinct, responsibility shifts from leaders, institutions, and strategic choices to “ancient” forces. That framing can make atrocities feel inevitable, almost meteorological, and it can flatter outside observers into thinking they’re confronting irrational savagery rather than a cold, modern project of ethnic cleansing with propaganda, logistics, and deliberate statecraft.

Context matters: Keegan wrote as a military historian watching the early 1990s post-Cold War order fail to prevent mass violence in Europe. Western commentators struggled to fit Yugoslavia’s collapse into the familiar script of ideology versus ideology. Keegan’s phrasing cuts through that confusion, but it also risks importing an old Western habit: treating Balkan conflicts as timeless feuds, a narrative that can justify hesitation, limited intervention, or moral distancing. The line works because it’s blunt; it unsettles. It also reveals how language can turn a political catastrophe into a story about “nature.”