Mila Dragojević has written a terrific book. Well crafted, empathic, and insightful, Amoral Communities seeks to understand the conditions that make it possible for individuals who previously lived in relatively harmonious relationships with their neighbors to participate in heinous crimes against them. This is a classic question in the political violence literature, but Dragojević develops a series of fresh claims using some remarkable interview data. The book is a valuable contribution to the local-level study of political violence, especially mass atrocities, complementing the works of Lee Ann Fujii, Stathis Kalyvas, and Elisabeth Wood, among others.

Dragojević frames the research question as “How is it possible for a safe and peaceful community to transform itself, temporarily, into a violent and cruel place?” (p. xi). The question is personal for the author, who recounts how she experienced such a transformation of her family’s community in the former Yugoslavia. Throughout the book, the author sustains a sense of specificity and connection to the events under study and to those being interviewed. That infuses this book with humanity and poignancy, which social science scholarship on the topic rarely exhibits.

One key innovation is to focus on the meso level—the community level—and to develop the concept of “amoral communities.” The community level is among the least developed in the literature on mass violence. The book’s powerful claim is that communities, not individuals or the state, are the spaces in which mass violence takes hold. The author does not ignore the macro or micro level, but her analytical emphasis is on communities.

The concept of “amoral communities” emphasizes locales where neighbors turn against neighbors, where everything is filtered through a lens of what the author calls “political ethnicities,” and where violence is considered acceptable and just, not criminal. The author anchors the term in Benedict Anderson’s notion of “imagined communities,” but amoral communities exist in wartime and engage in confrontation. She argues that amoral communities accept that “the use of unlimited violence with the aim of eliminating external and internal enemies is justified by the necessity to protect the image of a nation-state as a representation and extension of a human life” (p. 25).

Dragojević claims that amoral communities facilitate the perpetration of “collective crimes,” a broad outcome variable that signifies not only lethal violence, but also forced displacement, arrest, torture, rape, and destruction of cultural property. Collective crimes target particular communities; I would describe such violence as “group-selective,” in that the violence is oriented against individuals categorized into particular groups. Genocide is a form of such group-selective violence. Although the author references the genocide literature, she casts her explanatory net wider to consider a range of “collective crimes.” This is a nice addition to conceptual work in political violence. Given the community orientation of the analysis, one question, however, is whether “collective” refers to the group nature of perpetration or to the group nature of the targets (or both). “Crime” also tees up a legal framework, which is not the main register for the analysis.

Another central claim in the book is that the strategic aims of collective crimes are political, not military. Collective crimes shore up political support. The argument is not that violence awakens ethnic consciousness or mobilizes voting turnout, but rather that in certain circumstances ethnicity becomes synonymous with political loyalty. Dragojević hence emphasizes “political ethnicities,” ones for which ethnic identity is equivalent to partisanship. Amoral communities perpetrate collective crimes in order to kill or force out opposing politicized identity groups.

The main empirical work in the book draws on Croatia in the early 1990s. The author contrasts Croatian communities where collective crimes took place and those where they did not. Dragojević also builds in shorter comparisons to civil wars in Uganda and Guatemala, both primarily from the 1980s. She conducted interviews with subjects in all locations, but throughout the empirical chapters the most powerful material comes from Croatia.

The interview material is particularly effective in showing how everyday attitudes and interactions shifted in communities from cordial neighborliness to tension, fear, and hostility. Dragojević here demonstrates one of the book’s central claims: how ethnicity rapidly shifts from becoming part of the background to a dominant focus. The descriptions in the book reminded me of similar rapid shifts in Rwanda in the early 1990s.

Dragojević sets out to describe more of the how than the why of these processes (p. 3), particularly the exclusion of moderates and the production of borders. The claim about moderates is particularly insightful; Dragojević documents how those who resist ethnicization are intimidated, pushed aside, or attacked. Border production entails the establishment of physical divides that become barriers for enforcing exclusionary communities and division between them.

Less addressed is why these dynamics take hold. Implicit to the argument is the importance of war. Although Dragojević generally emphasizes political calculations—and in particular, she argues that much of the large-scale violence occurred after military victories—the interview data suggest that threat, fear, and insecurity in wartime are central to the formation of amoral communities. For example, she describes how ethnic politics were linked to “existential” concerns (p. 37). The book’s title further suggests that war is crucial to the described dynamics. Even if war was not a key driver, the book might have more squarely addressed why the described dynamics—amoral communities, exclusion of moderates, border production, and violence against civilians—took place.

Another concern is the use of “amoral.” Even if scholars consider exclusion and violence “amoral,” the actors themselves who seek to fashion community, create solidarity, and protect themselves might think of their actions as “moral.” A related issue is how the formation of amoral communities relates to the manifestation of violence. The book includes an effective chapter (chap. 6) detailing mass violence against civilians in certain locations. Less clear is whether these locations were the same as those where the author had done interviews showing the presence of amoral communities. More generally, how and when amoral communities lead to mass violence, and whether all amoral communities do so, could have used greater discussion.

Lastly, although the empirical work on Croatia is powerful, the cross-national material is less compelling. One concern is case selection: in Uganda, although ethnicity mattered in the 1980s civil war, the main insurgent group, the National Resistance Movement/Army, was not primarily an ethnic movement. In the material on Guatemala, it was unclear (to me) which community was the “amoral” one, because the main descriptions are of indigenous groups (fighting an insurgency against the state), whereas the primary perpetrator of the violence was the state’s armed forces. These cases had less granularity to them, which is understandable, but also raised questions about their utility.

All told, Amoral Communities is an important contribution. Meso-level studies of violence are unusual in political science, the book develops a range of compelling concepts, detailed political science research on violence in the former Yugoslavia is rare, and the interviews are often powerful. The book deserves a wide audience among scholars of political violence, mass atrocities, social identity, and Eastern Europe.