"In From Voting to Violence, Jack Snyder shows how democratization can actually exacerbate nationalist fervor and ethnic conflict if the conditions permitting a successful transition are not in place.".

"Snyder grounds his argument in modern political history, drawing upon four definitive types of nationalism from four different countries: civic Britain of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, revolutionary France, Serbia from 1840 to 1914, and pseudo-democratic Weimar Germany. It is by the light of these examples that Snyder examines the sometimes rash optimism of liberal democracy that would rush to democracy at the cost of freedom."--BOOK JACKET.