Harvard Series in Ukrainian Studies – serie

The biblical image of David and Goliath captures fittingly the nature of the war that Russia, the world’s largest country by surface area, unleashed on neighboring Ukraine, a country that—while still the largest on the European continent—is almost thirty times smaller and has only over a quarter of Russia’s population. Yet Ukraine’s stubborn resistance proves that it is possible to mount a successful defense against an enormously larger, more populous, and better equipped enemy, even despite its threats of nuclear apocalypse should Ukraine refuse to submit and the West dare to interfere. This volume shows that history can help reveal the reasons for Ukraine’s resolve and success on the battlefield and in the public arena.Collected in David and Goliath for the first time are short essays, commentaries, and interviews written and given by Serhii Plokhy, the world’s preeminent scholar of Ukrainian history, on the eve and during the first two years of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Plokhy draws our attention to the unique nature of the truly historic events of the largest war in Europe since the end of World War II.

The warp and weft of political and social relationships among the medieval elite were formed by marriages made between royal families. Ties of Kinship establishes a new standard for tracking the dynastic marriages of the ruling family of Rus´—the descendants of Volodimer (Volodimeroviči). Utilizing a modern scholarly approach and a broad range of primary sources from inside and outside Rus´, Christian Raffensperger has created a fully realized picture of the Volodimeroviči from the tenth through the twelfth centuries and the first comprehensive, scholarly treatment of the subject in English.Alongside more than twenty-two genealogical charts with accompanying bibliographic information, this work presents an analysis of the Volodimeroviči dynastic marriages with modern interpretations and historical contextualization that highlights the importance of Rus´ in a medieval European framework. This study will be used by Slavists, Byzantinists, and West European medievalists as the new baseline for research on the Volodimeroviči and their complex web of relationships with the world beyond.

For the first time, this collection makes available a selection of documents on the history of Jews in old Rus’ that provide unique insight into Slavic–Jewish relations, offering both the original texts in Latin, Hebrew, Church Slavonic, and Arabic, and their English translations.Adding nuance to our understanding of the difficult relations Rus’ had with Khazaria, Jews in Old Rus’ also realigns the position of East European Jews within the larger diaspora of European Jews. This collection meticulously presents legal rulings, religious and liturgical customs, practices regarding food and garments, linguistic acculturation, and the political loyalties of Jews in old Rus’.

In December 1994, Ukraine gave up the third-largest nuclear arsenal in the world and signed the Non-Proliferation Treaty, having received assurances that its sovereignty would be respected and secured by Russia, the United States, and the United Kingdom. Based on original and heretofore unavailable documents, Yuri Kostenko’s account of the negotiations between Ukraine, Russia, and the US reveals for the first time the internal debates of the Ukrainian government as well as the pressure exerted upon it by its international partners.Kostenko presents an insider’s view on the issue of nuclear disarmament and raises the question of whether the complete and immediate dismantlement of the country’s enormous nuclear arsenal was strategically the right decision, especially in view of the 2014 annexation of Crimea by Russia, one of the guarantors of Ukraine’s sovereignty under denuclearization.

Ukrainian nationalism made worldwide news after the Euromaidan revolution and the outbreak of the Russo-Ukrainian war in 2014. Invoked by regional actors and international commentators, the “integral” Ukrainian nationalism of the 1930s has moved to the center of debates about Eastern Europe, but the history of this divisive ideology remains poorly understood.This timely book by Trevor Erlacher is the first English-language biography of the doctrine’s founder, Dmytro Dontsov (1883–1973), the “spiritual father” of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists. Organizing his research of the period around Dontsov’s life, Erlacher has written a global intellectual history of Ukrainian integral nationalism from late imperial Russia to postwar North America, with relevance for every student of the history of modern Europe and the diaspora.Thanks to the circumstances of Dontsov’s itinerant, ninety-year life, this microhistorical approach allows for a geographically, chronologically, and thematically broad yet personal view on the topic. Dontsov shaped and embodied Ukrainian politics and culture as a journalist, diplomat, literary critic, publicist, and ideologue, progressing from heterodox Marxism, to avant-garde fascism, to theocratic traditionalism.Drawing upon archival research in Ukraine, Poland, and Canada, this book contextualizes Dontsov’s works, activities, and identity formation diachronically, reconstructing the cultural, political, urban, and intellectual milieus within which he developed and disseminated his worldview.

Of the hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian women were sentenced to the Gulag in the 1940s and 1950s, only half survived. In Survival as Victory, Oksana Kis has produced the first anthropological study of daily life in the Soviet forced labor camps as experienced by Ukrainian women prisoners.Based on the written memoirs, autobiographies, and oral histories of over 150 survivors, this book fills a lacuna in the scholarship regarding Ukrainian experience. Kis details the women’s resistance to the brutality of camp conditions not only through the preservation of customs and traditions from everyday home life, but also through the frequent elision of regional and confessional differences. Following the groundbreaking work of Anne Applebaum’s Gulag: A History (2003), this book is a must-read for anyone interested in gendered strategies of survival, accommodation, and resistance to the dehumanizing effects of the Gulag.

Documentary Sources on the History of Rus’ Metropolitanate is an extensive collection of letters and documents relating to the late medieval Orthodox Church, edited and curated by the renowned medievalist Andrei Pliguzov. This book is a rich resource for any reader interested in the controversies and preoccupations of the Orthodox hierarchy and the clergy throughout the Rus´ metropolitanate up to the early modern period. For the first time, the volume includes acts, edicts and decrees regarding the lands in the metropolitanate’s jurisdiction, reports prepared for the metropolitans by their secretariat, and the letters of the hierarchs themselves. The published documents pertain to all aspects of the metropolitanate’s activity and reflect the various concerns and debates that defined the life of the Church and its relations with other religious entities and the secular leaders.

The Frontline presents a selection of essays drawn together for the first time to form a companion volume to Serhii Plokhy’s The Gates of Europe and Chernobyl. Here he expands upon his analysis in earlier works of key events in Ukrainian history, including Ukraine’s complex relations with Russia and the West, the burden of tragedies such as the Holodomor and World War II, the impact of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, and Ukraine’s contribution to the collapse of the Soviet Union.Juxtaposing Ukraine’s history to the contemporary politics of memory, this volume provides a multidimensional image of a country that continues to make headlines around the world. Eloquent in style and comprehensive in approach, the essays collected here reveal the roots of the ongoing political, cultural, and military conflict in Ukraine, the largest country in Europe.

The Frontline presents a selection of essays drawn together for the first time to form a companion volume to Serhii Plokhy’s The Gates of Europe and Chernobyl. Here he expands upon his analysis in earlier works of key events in Ukrainian history, including Ukraine’s complex relations with Russia and the West, the burden of tragedies such as the Holodomor and World War II, the impact of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, and Ukraine’s contribution to the collapse of the Soviet Union.Juxtaposing Ukraine’s history to the contemporary politics of memory, this volume provides a multidimensional image of a country that continues to make headlines around the world. Eloquent in style and comprehensive in approach, the essays collected here reveal the roots of the ongoing political, cultural, and military conflict in Ukraine, the largest country in Europe.

In 2014, Russia illegally annexed Crimea, bolstered a separatist conflict in the Donbas region, and attacked Ukraine with its regular army and special forces. In each instance of Russian aggression, the U.S. response has often been criticized as inadequate, insufficient, or hesitant.The Moscow Factor: U.S. Policy toward Sovereign Ukraine and the Kremlin is a unique study that examines four key Ukraine-related policy decisions across two Republican and two Democratic U.S. administrations. Eugene M. Fishel asks whether, how, and under what circumstances Washington has considered Ukraine’s status as a sovereign nation in its decisionmaking regarding relations with Moscow.This study situates the stance of the United States toward Ukraine in the broader context of international relations. It fills an important lacuna in existing scholarship and policy discourse by focusing on the complex trilateral—rather than simply bilateral—dynamics between the United States, Ukraine, and Russia from 1991 to 2016. This book brings together for the first time documentary evidence and declassified materials dealing with policy deliberation, retrospective articles authored by former policymakers, and formal memoirs by erstwhile senior officials. The study is also supplemented by open-ended interviews with former and returning officials.

In 2014, Russia illegally annexed Crimea, bolstered a separatist conflict in the Donbas region, and attacked Ukraine with its regular army and special forces. In each instance of Russian aggression, the U.S. response has often been criticized as inadequate, insufficient, or hesitant.The Moscow Factor: U.S. Policy toward Sovereign Ukraine and the Kremlin is a unique study that examines four key Ukraine-related policy decisions across two Republican and two Democratic U.S. administrations. Eugene M. Fishel asks whether, how, and under what circumstances Washington has considered Ukraine’s status as a sovereign nation in its decision-making regarding relations with Moscow.This study situates the stance of the United States toward Ukraine in the broader context of international relations. It fills an important lacuna in existing scholarship and policy discourse by focusing on the complex trilateral—rather than simply bilateral—dynamics between the United States, Ukraine, and Russia from 1991 to 2016. This book brings together for the first time documentary evidence and declassified materials dealing with policy deliberation, retrospective articles authored by former policymakers, and formal memoirs by erstwhile senior officials. The study is also supplemented by open-ended interviews with former and returning officials.

Using Ukraine as a case-in-point, Svitlana Krasynska engages diverse bodies of literature and rich empirical data to reveal the vital role and unique potential of below-the-radar civic engagement in contexts where informal practices abound—a phenomenon largely neglected by scholars of civil society who traditionally focus on formal civic organizations.Civil society in Eastern Europe has long been labeled weak based on a general lack of citizen participation in formal civil society organizations—a key criterion for assessing civic engagement in comparative studies. However, such assessment of civil society fails to recognize the role and impact of informal civic engagement in contexts where informality permeates economic, political, and social spheres. Ukraine offers a valuable counterargument of the importance of informal civil society in Eastern Europe, especially in the post-Soviet countries.Krasynska convincingly shows that informality constitutes an essential component of civil society, shaping popular approaches to addressing social, economic, and political issues. The trailblazing findings in Self-Organization will be of interest to scholars of democratization, informality, and area studies, and they will aid development practitioners and policy makers in determining a more effective approach to helping fledgling democracies around the world.

Millions of innocent people were arrested in Stalin’s Soviet Union during the 1930s in different waves of mass repression. Under violent interrogation, many were forced to confess to crimes they did not commit. Rather than save their lives, as the interrogators had promised, confession was usually the last step to their execution. Very few of those arrested eventually refused to confess.Oleksandr Shums’kyi, the Ukrainian Marxist revolutionary, was one of the most important but least known of them. He not only refused to confess but sustained for over a decade a massive protest against his repression and the Stalinist attack on his country, Ukraine. Stalin punished him mercilessly in response, paralyzing him in jail and murdering his wife, but refrained from assassinating him for more than ten years.This book unravels the Shums’kyi riddle to explain why. In doing so, it opens a new window into understanding the history of Soviet repression and the Russian pathologies toward Ukrainian independence, which help us understand Russia’s current war against Ukraine.

Millions of innocent people were arrested in Stalin’s Soviet Union during the 1930s in different waves of mass repression. Under violent interrogation, many were forced to confess to crimes they did not commit. Rather than save their lives, as the interrogators had promised, confession was usually the last step to their execution. Very few of those arrested eventually refused to confess.Oleksandr Shums’kyi, the Ukrainian Marxist revolutionary, was one of the most important but least known of them. He not only refused to confess but sustained for over a decade a massive protest against his repression and the Stalinist attack on his country, Ukraine. Stalin punished him mercilessly in response, paralyzing him in jail and murdering his wife, but refrained from assassinating him for more than ten years.This book unravels the Shums’kyi riddle to explain why. In doing so, it opens a new window into understanding the history of Soviet repression and the Russian pathologies toward Ukrainian independence, which help us understand Russia’s current war against Ukraine.

In Breaking the Bonds of Corruption, Elena Denisova-Schmidt takes a broad view of corruption and its prevalence in global societies, using the case of Ukraine to examine practices that are considered corrupt in historical, social, and economic perspectives. She investigates corrupt behavior in higher education, both in Ukraine and internationally, as well as reliance on corruption in Ukrainian business. For both areas, the author relies on studies and polling that she and her colleagues administered at a number of Ukrainian universities and with Ukrainian businesses. This is the first English-language book dedicated to examining corruption as a widespread social phenomenon in post-Soviet Ukraine and makes an important contribution to the maturing study of informal practices in Ukraine and the region.

In December 1994, Ukraine gave up the third-largest nuclear arsenal in the world and signed the Non-Proliferation Treaty, having received assurances that its sovereignty would be respected and secured by Russia, the United States, and the United Kingdom. Based on original and heretofore unavailable documents, Yuri Kostenko’s account of the negotiations between Ukraine, Russia, and the US reveals for the first time the internal debates of the Ukrainian government as well as the pressure exerted upon it by its international partners.Kostenko presents an insider’s view on the issue of nuclear disarmament and raises the question of whether the complete and immediate dismantlement of the country’s enormous nuclear arsenal was strategically the right decision, especially in view of the 2014 annexation of Crimea by Russia, one of the guarantors of Ukraine’s sovereignty under denuclearization.

The biblical image of David and Goliath captures fittingly the nature of the war that Russia, the world’s largest country by surface area, unleashed on neighboring Ukraine, a country that—while still the largest on the European continent—is almost thirty times smaller and has only over a quarter of Russia’s population. Yet Ukraine’s stubborn resistance proves that it is possible to mount a successful defense against an enormously larger, more populous, and better equipped enemy, even despite its threats of nuclear apocalypse should Ukraine refuse to submit and the West dare to interfere. This volume shows that history can help reveal the reasons for Ukraine’s resolve and success on the battlefield and in the public arena.Collected in David and Goliath for the first time are short essays, commentaries, and interviews written and given by Serhii Plokhy, the world’s preeminent scholar of Ukrainian history, on the eve and during the first two years of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Plokhy draws our attention to the unique nature of the truly historic events of the largest war in Europe since the end of World War II.

In The Eye of the Mind, Maria Grazia Bartolini investigates how early modern Ukrainian preachers prompted their listeners to see and remember sermons by calling upon vision, memory, and mental imagery. With memorization recognized in Ukraine as a cognitive skill vital to the internalization of texts, these preachers, like their counterparts elsewhere in Europe, designed their sermons to enable listeners to see the subject matter as mental images and situate them in imaginary locations for easy recall.Based on analysis of little-known printed and manuscript sources from the second half of the seventeenth century, Bartolini masterfully demonstrates how verbal and visual images within the sermon functioned as mnemonic devices that helped Ukrainian preachers construct and deliver sermons and evoked intellectual and emotional associations in the minds of the audience. The effect of this rhetorical practice, Bartolini argues, was to create a theatrum meditationis—a memory theater—in which the audience was encouraged to take part as spectators. By fully integrating intellectual history, visual studies, and rhetorical analysis, The Eye of the Mind provides a unique perspective on seventeenth-century religious orators and their audiences in Ukraine and beyond.

The work of Alexander A. Potebnja, a leading Ukrainian linguist of the nineteenth century, has significantly influenced modern literary criticism, particularly Russian formalism and structuralism. Potebnja's theory, known as potebnjanstvo (Potebnjanism), flourished in the Russian Empire and in the Soviet Union during the 1920s. It attracted scores of adherents and gave rise to an influential literary journal and a formal critical school at Kharkiv. Yet despite his remarkable achievements in linguistics and literary theory, Potebnja's work was officially renounced in the Soviet Union in the 1930s, and in the West he remains virtually unknown.In his study, John Fizer carefully reconstructs Potebnja's theory of literature from the psycholinguistic formulations found in his works on language, mythology, and folklore. Elaborating Potebnja's concept of internal form, energeia, polysemy, and the semiosis of poetic discourse, Fizer develops the central tenets of Potebnja's theory with regard to their philosophical, psychological, and linguistic bases. Largely influenced by Kant and by Humboldt's philosophy of language, Potebnja conceived of language and the verbal arts as coterminous phenomena. He identified the internal form with the etymon of the word, which he considered the preeminent locus in the structure of poetic art. He insisted on the dynamic role of the Self in poetic creation and perception but, unlike many of his contemporaries, he believed that the diachronic depth of the signifiers was ethnic and had measureable limits. According to Potebnja, this depth (or internal form) reveals itself as a semantically multivalent image that induces self-knowledge and transforms the primary data of consciousness into syntagmatic wholes.A great deal of Potebnja's theory shares similarities with the work of Benedetto Croce, Leo Spitzer, and Charles S. Pierce. It anticipated modern literary criticism, and, as the author convincingly argues, retains existential and epistemological cogency even today. Fizer's volume offers the first thorough study of Potebnja's literary theory, and his insightful analysis restores Potebnja to his rightful place in the history of literary criticism.

The first half of the twentieth century was in many respects crucial for the evolution and character of Modern Standard Ukrainian. Prior to World War I, the Ukraine was divided between the Russian and the Austro-Hungarian Empires. The standard language lacked uniformity even though the primacy of the standard established in Russian-dominated Ukraine was theoretically accepted in Austrian-ruled Galicia and Bukovina. Up to 1905 the tsarist government forbade the public use of Ukrainian beyond belles-lettres, and excluded it from education until 1917. In the interwar period the country was divided among the USSR, Poland, Romania, and Czechoslovakia, and social and cultural conditions differed drastically.George Shevelov’s book, based on extensive study of factual material, traces the development of Modern Standard Ukrainian in relation to the political, legal, and cultural conditions within each region. It examines the relation of the standard language to the underlying dialects, the ways in which the standard language was enriched, and the complex struggle for the unity of the language and sometimes for its very existence. While shunning excess linguistic terminology, the book presents the essentials of linguistic development in connection with broad political and cultural conditions.

This volume contains the papers presented at the Third Quinquennial Conference on Ukrainian Economics, held at the Ukrainian Research Institute, Harvard University, in 1985. The first two conferences and their proceedings were devoted to the Ukraine’s current economic conditions and to selected contributions of its scholars to economics. The present proceedings contain fourteen previously unpublished essays dealing with the one thousand years of Ukrainian economic history prior to the outbreak of the First World War.The contributions are divided chronologically into three parts, covering the periods of Kievan Rus’, the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and the nineteenth century. They are not intended to give a comprehensive survey of Ukrainian economic history, but primarily to deal with important economic issues of particular periods. The problem of the orientation of the Kievan Principality with regard to the Nomadic East and the Byzantine South is discussed in the first part. The authors of the volume’s second part analyze the economic ties of the Ukrainian economy during the rise and fall of Cossackdom and, subsequently, the Hetman State, with the West and Muscovy. The contributions in the third part deal with the important problems of economic development during the Ukraine’s rebirth as a modern nation in the past century. Issues discussed include: population change, industrialization, relations with the Russian Empire’s metropolis, urbanization, and the development of the southern and western (within the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy) regions. Finally, the introductory essay offers a proposal for a periodization scheme of Ukrainian economic history.

Odessa, one of the world's unique cities, was founded by Empress Catherine II in 1794 on the northern shore of the Black Sea. Settled close to the fertile Ukrainian steppe, Odessa soon became the Russian Empire's chief exporter of cereals to western Europe. Attracted by trade and the liberal policies of its early governors, Greeks, Italians, Jews, French, Armenians, and other nationalities immigrated to the city and the surrounding countryside. By the late nineteenth century Odessa was the most polyglot and cosmopolitan city in the empire. In the first decades of the twentieth century, however, strikes, revolutionary agitation, and pogroms brought about the city's decline.In this book Patricia Herlihy contrasts Odessa's rapid development during the nineteenth century with the growing tension within its society up to the First World War. Besides Ukrainian and Russian sources, she makes use of travel literature and consular reports, which offer an especially lively portrait of this bustling and turbulent port. The book is an important contribution not only to Ukrainian and Russian history, but also to the history of agricultural settlement, international commerce, urban expansion, and social life within a large and variegated nineteenth-century community.

From its inception just before World War I to its demise during the Stalinist repression of Ukrainian culture in the 1930s, Ukrainian Futurism was much maligned and poorly understood. It has remained so into the late twentieth century. Professor Oleh Ilnytzkyj seeks to rectify the misinterpretations surrounding the Futurists and their leader Mykhail Semenko, providing the first major English-language monograph on this vibrant literary movement and its charismatic leader.This study places Ukrainian Futurism within the context of other major Ukrainian literary movements of the time and examines its relationship to Russian and West European Futurism; it also includes critical analyses of the major works of the leading figures within the Ukrainian movement.

Meletij Smotryc’kyj was one of the outstanding figures in the great flourishing of Orthodox spirituality that occurred in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century in response to the challenge posed first by Polish heterodox religious movements, and later by the Polish Counter-Reformation. His biography reflects the tensions and contradictions that characterized his “nation”—the Ruthenians, the Orthodox Christians of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Ruthenian patriots were torn between various allegiances to nation, church, and traditions. Thus, in Smotryc’kyj’s life we witness one of the later acts in the drama of the European Age of Reform, all the more important because for the first time the Reformation and Counter-Reformation came into direct daily contact with the Byzantine world of Orthodox Slavdom.David Frick’s biography—the first major English-language work on Smotryc’kyj—examines the ways in which established cultures were altered by cross-cultural understandings and misunderstandings, resulting from the confrontation and mutual adaptation of two or more diverse cultures. This study, which has affinities with the “microhistorical approach,” seeks to reconstruct details in the lives of individuals and pays special attention to the ways in which individual world views conflicted with each other and with various higher authorities. Meletij Smotryc’kyj will be of interest to scholars and students of Ukraine, Belarus, Poland-Lithuania, and those researching the history of the Uniate, Orthodox, and Roman Catholic Churches in Eastern Europe.

What is the Ruthenian language? A simple answer is that it was the precursor to modern Ukrainian and Belarusian. But the history and synchronic realization of this language are much more complex. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries Ruthenian was the language of the Orthodox and Uniate inhabitants of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. It enjoyed a culture and prestige greater than that of its Muscovite (Russian) neighbor to the east, but was often denigrated in comparison with the dominant language—Polish—of the Commonwealth.In Testament to Ruthenian, Stefan Pugh analyzes the Ruthenian language use of one of its most outstanding practitioners, Meletij Smotryc´kyj (ca. 1578–1633): polemicist, cleric, and scholar. This is the first study to survey comprehensively a Ruthenian speaker’s oeuvre, and it will provide the groundwork for the next generation of scholarship on the Ruthenian language.

From the Renaissance to the Enlightenment, the geopolitical placement of Ukraine drew the attention of some of Europe’s most influential cartographers. Many of these maps, including ones of exceptional rarity, were collected by the Ukrainian scholar and journalist Bohdan Krawciw. Krawciw traced the physical and aesthetic depiction of Ukraine across its changing borders as a means of self-recognition and as a cultural and political history of the contested nation and its peoples. Of special interest are his maps of Ukraine from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, at the crossroads of four empires: Habsburg, Ottoman, Russian, and Soviet. As part of his personal archive, Krawciw’s maps were bequeathed to Harvard University upon his death in 1975. This book serves as both a catalog of his collection and a description of how the maps he collected serve as an invaluable source for Ukraine’s history and a symbol of Ukrainian national identity. The book contains nearly 100 examples from the collection, many in full color, as well as indices listing maps by cartographer and by place name.

Icons and murals depicting the biblical scene of the Last Judgment adorned many Eastern-rite churches in medieval and early modern Ukraine. Dating from the twelfth to the eighteenth centuries, these images were extraordinarily elaborate, composed of dozens of discrete elements reflecting Byzantine, Novgorodian, Moldavian, and Catholic influences, in addition to local and regional traditions. Over time, the details of the iconography evolved in response to changing cultural resources, the conditions of material life at the time, and new trends in mentality and taste.The World to Come lists and describes more than eighty Last Judgment images from present-day Ukraine, eastern Slovakia, and southeastern Poland, making it the largest compilation of its kind. Photographs show overviews and details of the images, and most are printed in full color. The icons and murals provide a valuable source of knowledge about the culture in which they were created: what was meant by good and evil, what was prophesied for the future, and what awaited in the afterlife.

Regional diversity such as Ukraine's often embodies potential for friction and conflict, in particular when it involves territorialized ethnicity and divergent historical experiences. Political elites interested in stability and conflict prevention must find ways either to accommodate or control this diversity. In the early to mid-1990s, the Western media, policymakers, and academics alike warned that Crimea was a potential center of unrest in the aftermath of the Soviet Union's dissolution. However, large-scale conflict in Crimea did not materialize, and Kyiv has managed to integrate the peninsula into the new Ukrainian polity. This book explores the factors that led to the largely peaceful transition and places the situation in the larger context of conflict-prevention studies, explaining this critical case in which conflict did not erupt despite a structural predisposition to ethnic, regional, and even international enmity.