Kočić was one of the most important Bosnian Serb politicians of the Austro-Hungarian era. He was also one of Bosnia and Herzegovina's most important twentieth-century playwrights. Short stories such as "Jazavac pred sudom" inspired an entire generation of young South Slav workers, farmers and intellectuals to oppose Austro-Hungarian rule. The most notable of these was the writer Ivo Andrić, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1961. Kočić's cause was also taken up by South Slav nationalists such as Gavrilo Princip, the Young Bosnian who assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria in June 1914, precipitating the July Crisis and the outbreak of World War I. Young revolutionaries, Butler writes, "learned from Kočić's example that Bosnia could not be freed through the law and the courts."