HINTERLANDS

A foreign correspondent examines the small-scale conflicts that threaten to heat up to major conflagrations.

Turkey-based journalist Smith opens with a little-reported fight that’s been going on intermittently ever since the Soviet Union dissolved, one between Azerbaijan and Armenia over the contested region of Nagorno-Karabakh, inhabited by ethnic Azeris and Armenians alike. The war has larger dimensions, and neighboring Iran, Turkey, and Russia are all keeping an eye open. “What’s happening today in some way resembles the period before the First World War,” Smith writes, for conflicts in small countries on the fringes of Europe can quickly draw in the larger nations, just as happened in 1914. In the Balkans, struggles continue between Bosnian Serbs and Bosnian Muslims, with one Serbian warlord “denying the wartime crimes of Serb militias and repeatedly threatening to hold an independence referendum that would rip federal Bosnia in two.” Meantime, Kosovo still has a hot-button quality; Russia and Romania seem ready to scrap over the small Romanian enclave of Transnistria. Also, Putin’s Russia and its near-puppet in Belarus border on thousands of miles of NATO territories, even as Russia slugs away at Ukraine. Smith has traveled broadly to report on all these places, though she warns that it’s Turkey that bears close scrutiny, with strongman Recep Erdoğan coordinating “his most egregious acts at home to coincide with moments of regional turmoil, when Europe relies on his cooperation.” Within national territories, numerous ethnic groups are also struggling, as with the Tatars of Crimea and the Kurds in Syria, Turkey, and Iraq. “In order to see where the world is heading, we must study these places—but this is only part of the picture,” Smith writes—for history is made by people, and the hinterlands are full of places where people are on the edge, “their lives defined by upheaval.”

Of broad interest to students of geopolitics—and, sadly, warfighters as well.