First Nationalism then Identity: On Bosnian Muslims and Their Bosniak Identity.

• Author: Lika, Idlir

First Nationalism then Identity: On Bosnian Muslims and Their Bosniak Identity

By Mirsad Krijestorac

University of Michigan Press, 2022, 330 pages, $85.00, ISBN: 9780472075508

In First Nationalism then Identity: On Bosnian Muslims and Their Bosniak Identity, Mirsad Krijestorac undertakes an ambitious exploratory study to test the relationship between two key social science concepts, nationalism, and identity, focusing specifically on how a populations exposure to elite-driven nationalist projects affects the likelihood of a strong ascription of the elite-desired national identity. Krijestorac is primarily concerned with determining the direction of interaction between nationalism and identity (p. 146) and for that he examines in depth the case of Bosnian Muslims. They are a rare historic instance of "an autochthonous and distinct ethno-religious Balkan group that is at the stage of emergence into a full-fledged European nation" (p. 146), a process that has been going on for the past three decades. Based both on participant observation of Bosnian Muslim diaspora members in the U.S., and on statistical analysis of 670 surveys he collected from a sample of them between August 2013 and May 2014 (p. 93). The author found that "nationalism is not triggered by a strong sense of pre-existing identity among a particular group" (p. 175; italics in original), rather it is the other way around. It was the elite-driven Bosnian Muslim nationalist project, developed in itself in response to the aggressive Croatian and Serbian nationalists of the early 1990s, that eventually increased the possibility of the acquisition and strong ascription of the elitedesired Bosniak identity among the Slavic-speaking Muslims of former Yugoslavia. Furthermore, the author found that the likelihood of a strong ascription of the Bosniak identity is affected by the sense of the strength of nationalism in an individual (with the important caveat that the correlation scores observed in this regard are low to moderate) but not by the type of nationalism that an individual possesses (conceptualized by the author in binary terms as civic or ethnic nationalism) (pp. 168-171).

Empirically rigorous, methodologically rich, and overall convincing, this book makes an important contribution to scholarly debates on the relationship between nationalism and identity in comparative politics. Just the focus on the case of Bosnian Muslims is a very important empirical contribution in itself I...