Skip to main content
Trade Books For Courses Tradebooks for Courses

Blood and Belonging

Journeys into the New Nationalism

Michael Ignatieff

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

opens in a new window
opens in a new window Blood and Belonging Download image

ISBN10: 0374524483
ISBN13: 9780374524487

Trade Paperback

276 Pages

$24.00

CA$26.50

Request Desk Copy
Request Exam Copy

TRADE BOOKS FOR COURSES NEWSLETTER

Sign up to receive information about new books, author events, and special offers.

Sign up now

Until the end of the Cold War, the politics of national identity was confined to isolated incidents of ethnic strife and civil war in distant countries. With the collapse of Communist regimes across Europe and the loosening of the Cold War's clamp on East-West relations, a surge of nationalism swept the globe. In Blood and Belonging, Ignatieff makes an examination of why blood ties—in places as diverse as Yugoslavia, Kurdistan, Northern Ireland, Quebec, Germany, and the former Soviet republics—may be the definitive factor in international relations today. He asks how ethnic pride turned into ethnic cleansing, whether modern citizens can lay the ghosts of a warring past, why—and whether—a people need a state of their own, and why armed struggle might be justified.

Reviews

Praise for Blood and Belonging

"Vivid and readable, [Blood and Belonging] provides unforgettable impressions of societies that are going in the wrong direction on the highway to brotherhood and unity."—David Fromkin, Washington Post Book World

"An extraordinary guide, by a richly talented writer and reporter, to the pustular outbreaks of nationalism that keep marring the smooth complexion we expected the world to show after the Cold War. Ignatieff's eye for the heartbreaking detail makes the seeming madness of recent news stories comprehensible in human terms."—Robert MacNeil

"An immensely impressive meditation on nationalism in the post-Cold War world . . . powerful and subtle [with] a sublime understanding of the histories and politics of Croatia and Serbia, Germany, Ukraine, Quebec, Kurdistan, and Northern Ireland."—Library Journal

Reviews from Goodreads

BOOK EXCERPTS

Read an Excerpt

Blood and Belonging

SIX JOURNEYS
CHAPTER 1
Croatia and Serbia
THE ANCIEN REGIME
WILD strawberries were served in a silver cup at breakfast, I remember, followed by hot rolls with apricot...

About the author

Michael Ignatieff

Michael Ignatieff is a frequent contributor to The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books, among other publications, and the author of many acclaimed books, including Isaiah Berlin, The Warrior's Honor, The Russian Album, and The Needs of Strangers. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Paul Musso / Hay Festival