Of the bloody conflicts accompanying the fall of Yugoslavia, the conflict in Macedonia has received the least attention, owing to its brevity and distance in time and space from the more famous conflicts in Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Kosovo. In some ways, Macedonia follows the disturbing pattern set by preceding cases, whereby breakaway republics failed to compromise between titular majorities and minorities that found themselves on the wrong side of a border from their ethnic brethren. The paradox referred to in the subtitle emerges from the unenviable position of the Macedonian state when it gained independence in 1991: surrounded by four potentially hostile neighbors, two of which had minority populations within Macedonia (pp. 33–37). Despite this situation and the lack of an army with which to defend itself, Macedonia avoided conflict for a decade following its independence. Conflict in Macedonia is concerned primarily with the ways in which international intervention first shielded Macedonia from conflict and then allowed limited violent conflict to spill over once the international focus turned away from the Balkans.

The book is structured as a narrative of Macedonian politics from the final stages of Yugoslavia through the first decade of the twenty-first century, followed by an analysis that focuses on the roots of ethnic conflict in Macedonia and the role of international organizations in preventing and resolving those conflicts. The narrative is based primarily on extensive interviews conducted with an impressive number of influential policymakers, officials, and politicians representing both Macedonian and international perspectives on events. The resulting analysis is rich with the intentions and reflections of the individuals making the decisions. The strength of the book is the way that Sasho Ripiloski weaves the results of his fieldwork into a clear and balanced account that solidly places Macedonia's experience within the context of the wider dissolution of Yugoslavia. Ripiloski's research efforts and the resulting account alone make the book worth the attention of those with interests in the region. The balance of interviewees skews sharply away from Albanian-Macedonians and Serbian-Macedonians, but the lack of balance in source interviews does not result in a deeply skewed narrative.

Ripiloski argues that international intervention succeeded only while troops were present in Macedonia and ultimately failed to resolve underlying issues between the Macedonian-speaking majority and Albanian-speaking minority (p. 93). Rather than the more limited military mission undertaken by the United Nations Preventive Deployment Force (UNPREDEP) Macedonia should have been included at an earlier stage in the European Union accession process in order to maintain pressure on Macedonian elites to make concessions to the Albanian-speaking minority and thereby prevent the violence that erupted in 2001 (p. 178). While progress toward accession was part of the EU's response to violence, it is hard to imagine such concrete steps ahead of the conflict, given the immaturity of the EU accession process at that time. However, it is certainly reasonable to argue that it was a mistake to disengage from Macedonia, particularly considering the then-ongoing struggles to contain the Kosovo Liberation Army in Kosovo and Serbia.

The great weakness of the book is that it declines to link the narrative and policy prescriptions to current research on ethnic conflict and minority rights. The opening chapter includes a review of literature on conflict prevention, but the concepts and ideas do not play a role in the text that follows. In particular, Ripiloski's work would have benefitted from a stronger comparative perspective in order to gain leverage on the question of the way in which international actors can play a role in inducing majority ethnic groups to protect minority rights and minority groups to find redress in nonviolent political mechanisms.

Despite these weaknesses, Conflict in Macedonia makes an important contribution to scholarly understanding of ethnic and political processes in Macedonia. It is the only book-length treatment of Macedonian politics that has been released since the cessation of hostilities. The richness of the fieldwork and clarity of exposition makes it an essential work for scholars of Macedonia and the Balkan region.