Observers and participants came to read the Yugoslav wars as religious wars

Evidence

All the parties to, and most outside observers of, the Yugoslav wars thus came to see them as religious or ethnoreligious wars. The conflict, Misha Glenny pointed out, “increasingly assimilated the characteristics of a religious struggle, defined by three great European faiths—Roman Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy, and Islam, the confessional detritus of the empires whose frontiers collided in Bosnia.” — Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the…, 751

Categorization

• DEFINE: Glenny’s phrase ‘the confessional detritus of the empires whose frontiers collided in Bosnia’ is a vivid definition of how civilizational fault lines leave religious leftovers that re-ignite identity conflicts.
• SEED: Huntington’s core insight — that actors actively ASSIMILATE local conflicts into civilizational frames rather than such frames being mere description — is a strong essay angle: ‘identity as weaponized narrative rather than inherited fact.’