The Yugoslav Wars were a series of separate but related ethnic conflicts, wars of independence, and insurgencies fought in the former Yugoslavia from 1991 to 2001, leading up to and resulting from the breakup of the Yugoslav federation in 1992. Its constituent republics declared independence due to unresolved tensions between ethnic minorities in the new countries, which fueled the wars. Most of the wars ended through peace accords, involving full international recognition of new states, but with a massive human cost and economic damage to the region.

During the breakup of Yugoslavia, initially, the Yugoslav People's Army (JNA) sought to preserve the unity of the whole of Yugoslavia by crushing the secessionist governments, but it increasingly came under the influence of the Serbian government of Slobodan Milošević, which evoked Serbian nationalism to replace the weakening communist system. As a result, the JNA began to lose Slovenes, Croats, Kosovo Albanians, Bosniaks, and Macedonians, and as a result, it effectively became a Serb army. According to a 1994 United Nations report, the Serb side did not aim to restore Yugoslavia; instead, it aimed to create a "Greater Serbia" from parts of Croatia and Bosnia. Other irredentist movements have also been brought into connection with the wars, such as "Greater Albania" (from Kosovo, though it was abandoned following international diplomacy) and "Greater Croatia" (from parts of Herzegovina, until 1994 when the Washington Agreement ended it).Often described as Europe's deadliest conflicts since World War II, the wars were marked by many war crimes, including genocide, crimes against humanity, ethnic cleansing and rape. The Bosnian genocide was the first European crime to be formally classified as genocidal in character since World War II, and many key individuals who perpetrated it were subsequently charged with war crimes. The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) was established by the UN to prosecute these crimes. According to the International Center for Transitional Justice, the Yugoslav Wars resulted in the deaths of 140,000 people, while the Humanitarian Law Center estimates at least 130,000 people who died. The conflicts resulted in major refugee and humanitarian crises.