Balkan Idols

Balkan Idols: Religion and Nationalism in Yugoslav States (ISBN 0-19-517429-1) is a book by Vjekoslav Perica. It was first published in 2002 by Oxford University Press.

Balkan Idols

Author	Vjekoslav Perica
Publisher	Oxford University Press
Publication date	2002
ISBN	0-19-517429-1

The book explores the political roles of different religious organisations in the republics of the former Yugoslavia. Balkan Idols was described as a significant work in several reviews in academic journals.^{[1][2][3][4][5]}

Reception

Balkan Idols was praised by Josip Mocnik in Contemporary Church History Quarterly as "masterfully written and extensively researched".^[6] Writing for the Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Franke Wilmer described the book as a "remarkably balanced" work that shows "how socially and politically destructive the volatile interplay between fundamentalism and the magnification of unresolved or unreconciled narratives of victimization ... can be."^[3]

Peter Korchnak of the Global Review of Ethnopolitics wrote that "[the] merging of national and religious identity defines the objective of Perica’s monograph: rather than attempting to explain the dissolution of Yugoslavia by factors related to religion, the aim is to trace the influence of religious institutions on nation-formation and political legitimacy in Yugoslavia."^[5]