Search

In recent decades, numerous popular shrines devoted to saints have emerged in Romani settlements, usually in urban areas. At first sight, these shrines and the veneration of saints are reminiscent of the cult of saints and tombs common in regional Muslim traditions and beyond, and possess particular local features. A detailed analysis of this local case shows new meanings and forms the “wider” tradition gains under new conditions. This paper explores the way the regional Muslim tradition of worshiping holy sites is localized and elaborated within popular religious practice of certain Romani communities in the Balkans. Specifically, it focuses on the contestation of the issues of authenticity and marginality of this vernacular practice in order to reveal the peculiarity of images and meanings Islam gains at the intra-confessional level in a quite heterogeneous social and cultural environment. The material discussed in this paper was collected during ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2011 and 2014 in Serbia, Macedonia, and Kosovo. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

More than 20 years after the violent break-up of Yugoslavia European efforts to create sustainable States in the Western Balkans, as discussed in the papers of this Special Issue, have brought about some progress, but a lot of work remains. This conclusion will draw on some of the themes developed in the previous papers and contrast to what extent EU Member State-Building provides a new framework for enlargement and what the key questions of sustainable expansion of the EU and functional state-building through conditionality will be. It concludes that the EU's current engagement with the Western Balkans faces many problems and obstacles and therefore some reconsideration might be necessary. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The Western Balkans have seen rapid changes since the end of the violent conflicts in the 1990s. The European Union (EU) has been one of the main drivers for change, focusing on the political, economic and social transformation of the region to prepare the countries for membership in the Union. This introduction to the special issue will clarify the key terms and their interaction in the Western Balkans. EU enlargement has never before been this complex and inter-connected with processes of state-building and democratization. The focus on conditionality as the main tool of the EU in the region has had positive and negative effects. It can be argued that the EU is actively involved in state-building processes and therefore the term EU Member State Building will be used to explain the engagement of the Union with the countries in the region. This paper will discuss the concept of EU Member State Building, its potential and its pitfalls. It will be demonstrated that the stabilization of the region is unlikely to take place without an active role for the EU; however, the current approach has reached its limits and it is time to think about alternative options to integrate the Western Balkans into European structures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the role of Greece in the Balkans. This paper presents the views of 300 Greek university students on the role of Greece in the Balkan peninsula on the issue of national identity. How the students perceive the importance of Greek national identity as well as the historical and theoretical overview of the Balkans in terms of economy, culture, and politics.

This special issue investigates contemporary transformations of Islam in the post-Communist Balkans. We put forward the concept oflocalized Islamas an analytical lens that aptly captures the input of various interpreting agents, competing narratives, and choices of faith. By adopting an agent-based approach that is sensitive to relevant actors’ choices and the contexts where they operate, we explore how various groups negotiate and ultimately localize the grand Islamic tradition, depending on where they are situated along the hierarchy of power. Specifically, we outline three sets of actors and narratives related to revival of Islamic faith: (1) political elites, mainstream intellectuals, and religious hierarchies often unite in safeguarding a nation-centric understanding of religion, (2) foreign networks and missionaries make use of open channels of communication to propagate their specific interpretations and agendas, and (3) lay believers tend to choose among different offers and rally around the living dimension of religious practice. Contributions in this issue bring ample evidence of multiple actors’ strategies, related perspectives, and contingent choices of being a Muslim. Case studies include political debates on mosque construction in Athens; political narratives that underpin the construction of the museum of the father of Ataturk in Western Macedonia; politicians’ and imams’ competing interpretations of the Syrian war in Kosovo, Macedonia, and Albania; the emergence of practice communities that perform Muslim identity in Bulgaria; the particular codes of sharia dating in post-war Sarajevo; and veneration of saints among Muslim Roma in different urban areas in the Balkans. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is a great pleasure to respond to these perceptive, inquisitive, and thought-provoking comments of Jenne, Knott, and Mylonas on my "Grounded Nationalisms: A Sociological Analysis" (2019). They all bring up many important questions, which would require elaborate explanations that I cannot provide in this short format. Hence, I will try to offer succinct answers to some of the key points they raise. My response is organized around the three grouped themes – a) theory; b) concepts and c) methodology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present article focuses on the period between 1848 and 1906—between the politicized "discovery" of Balkan Aromanians as a kinfolk by Romanian nation-state builders and the aftermath of the community's recognition by the Ottoman government. Examining how Romania imagined its own entanglement in the Macedonian Question, the article aims to raise the broader question of how a nation-state imagined the agency of kinfolk beyond its borders and, as part of a geographically distributed national division of labor, ascribed a specific task to one part of its ethnic body. In Romania's case, this had a double thrust. One, Aromanians were imagined as the natural bourgeoisie of the southern Balkans, a people superior in their origins, culture, and mores to other ethnic groups—and a natural vanguard for Romania's economic interests in the region. Two, they were imagined as a vanguard for catalyzing the internal development of a native merchant class in Romania proper, which was understood as a primary agent for economic and social progress but perceived to be problematically absent. Thus, this study hones in on the process of ascribing the status of a "prosthetic bourgeoisie" to the Aromanians, and its insistent discursive recurrence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focuses on national identity among Muslims in the Balkan Peninsula. Definition of basic terms prior to investigation; Status of the Muslim minority communities; Reactions of Balkan Christian nationalists to Muslim presence; Influence of Islam on the development of nationalism.

This past decade has seen the return of Russia into the public discourse. Moscow's influence has been making a comeback across its old sphere of influence and in other parts of the world. In particular, there has been a lot of talk lately of Russian soft power spreading across the Balkan region, especially in Serbia. However, the concept of power can be rather ambiguous, and only a theoretically informed analysis based on empirical methods can lead to genuine conclusions. This article aims to apply an existing theoretical framework on power to the context of Russian influence in Serbia, in order to find out whether Moscow has any power over Belgrade and to gauge its extent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates the role of 1918, the end of the First World War, and the establishment of the Yugoslav state in public memories of post-communist Croatia and Serbia. Analysing history schoolbooks within the context of major works of history and public discussion, the authors trace the developments of public memory of the end of the war and 1918. Drawing on the concepts of public memory and historical narrative, the authors focus on the ways in which history textbooks create historical narratives and on the types of lessons from the past that can be extracted from these narratives. While Serbia and Croatia have rather different patterns of First World War memory, the authors argue that both states have abandoned the Yugoslav communist narrative and now publicly commemorate 1918 as a loss of national statehood. This is somehow paradoxical, since the establishment of the South Slav State in 1918 was supposedly an outcome of the Wilsonian principle of national self-determination. In Serbia, the story of loss is packed in a fatalistic narrative of heroism and victimhood, while in Croatia the story of loss is embedded in a tale of necessary evils, which nevertheless had a positive outcome in a sovereign Croatian state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this article is to inquire how recent and more consolidated historiographical trends consider the impact of nationalism in the late Ottoman Balkans. I focus on historical accounts of Albanian–Slav interaction in the late Ottoman Macedonian context, although the inquiry also includes texts that do not only engage with this epistemological field. I confront research efforts that have been published from the early 1960s to the present in order to understand the continuities and the discontinuities that characterize the work of historians. A preliminary investigation has allowed me to outline two main historiographical approaches: the national historiographies and the postnationalist approach. Such a distinction has become tangible especially after the end of the Cold War when a new generation of historians started to question the validity of the studies conducted by their colleagues in the past decades by pointing at the methodological and ideological issues that limited their work. In this article I evaluate to what extent the work of postnationalist historians is different from that of traditional historiographies and finally reflect on the possibility and benefits that might come from a dialogue between the two approaches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study analyzes transformations of historiography and identity discourses by focusing on the Memory House of Ali Rıza Efendi (the father of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk) as a “site of historical consciousness” which was reconstructed in the western part of the Republic of Macedonia. The House, referred to by the villagers as the “Memory House of Atatürk,” was opened in 2014 in a Muslim village, Kocacık, with the support of the Turkish state. Through material and textual representations of Atatürk’s life, the House speaks to the Turkishness and Turkish presence in the Balkans. The Turkishness, however, is imagined through the neo-Ottoman and Islamic prisms. The House thus becomes the locus of alternative interpretations of the past, and, consequently, narratives of Muslims’ identity and origin in the region. Moreover, as it is reconstructed at the nexus of the local and the transnational, the House is also called a symbol of the “politics of brotherhood” between Macedonia and Turkey. In this way, the institution embodies the reconstruction of the past not only at the local and national levels, but also at the international level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses various reports within the issue on topics including football history, nationalism, and political mobilization.

The article discusses the relationship between nationalism and religion and its adaptation to cultural values and ideological differences in countries on the Balkan Peninsula. The incorporation of religious concepts in movements for state formation and ethnonational expansion in the Balkans, the effects of institutionalization and de-institutionalization in the post-communist era, the historical association of nationalism with ethnic identity, the secular reforms in Turkey, the influence of the Ottoman Empire in Greece, and the impact of post-colonialism in Cyprus are discussed.

The article focuses on a study related to the gender ideals of the Serbian Radical Party (SRS), which is presently the most extreme right party in the Balkans. According to the article, the gender messages and practices of the SRS appear to be restricting women. Although, SRS ideals of masculinity are influenced by notions of male control, aggression and power, its acceptance of women's participation in economic and political life has allowed some degree of modernity among its female followers.

Examines the political significance of the presence of Balkan Egyptians as a distinct population group in the Republic of Macedonia. Political influence exerted through representative and cultural organizations in Kosovo and Albania; Formation of an Egyptian diaspora that led to and sustained the creation of elites and gained some measure of international political support for the groups in question; Historical evidence for a long-standing Egyptian presence in the Balkans in order to find a possible link between early migration from Egypt and the current groups in question.

The debate about the Roma's fate throughout the Second World War has taken on a controversial character in recent years. The focal point of this controversy is whether the Roma's persecution was racially motivated or not. Reflecting upon the Roma's treatment throughout the war period, various scholars regard social-political factors such as the wandering way of life and especially the ascription of criminality as the main reasons for discrimination against and persecution of Roma. Ultimately, the authority most responsible for the crimes against Roma in the "Old Reich" was the Criminal Office. An extreme stance is the thesis of G. Lewy, who denies not only the planned character of the persecution but also its racial/racist intention. Lewy also refutes the comparability of the Roma's fate with that of the Jews. Seemingly, such assertions may be put down to the terminological confusion concerning the concept of race which has characterized the racism debate in the postwar period. Therefore, in order to deal with the question of the Nazis' "imaginary of the Gypsies" and their persecution of them we ought to give some terminological explanations, primarily for the concepts of race, racism and their associative connection with ascribing collective social behaviours, especially their connection to "Gypsiness." Against the background of the current debate, this article will deal primarily with the Roma in the Balkans and the ways they were imagined by the Nazis. In any case the Nazis' ideology and practice can give only a partial explanation of the fate of the Balkan Roma during the Second World War. A crucial and nevertheless scarcely researched issue concerns the Balkan states themselves. This article will focus on only the former aspect, while the latter will be the subject of a further study. This article will emphasize the peculiarities of the perception of "Balkan Gypsies" by Nazis as a collective category , partially by comparison with the common Gypsy stereotype and its diachronic components. This analysis of discourse will be based on an indicative contemporary bibliography, mainly journals that appeared in the Nazi era with the evident goal of supporting and explaining National Socialist politics and ideology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Examines the development of Muslim national identity in the Balkan Peninsula. Perceptions of Ottoman Muslims on Muslims in Istanbul; Effect of the decline of the Ottoman Empire; Significance of the Islamic conversions to Christian-Muslim relationship and identity construction among Balkan Muslims.

Investigates Muslim communities in the Balkan Peninsula for the period 1919 to 1991. Tension between Christian rulers and the Muslim minority population; Attempts of creating homogenized nation states; Concern over the political development of Muslim Balkan communities.

Focuses on the history of Turks and Tatars in the Balkan Peninsula. Association of constructed identities with social constructs and history; Lack of ethnic recognition in Greece; Perpetuation of the negative image of Islam and Muslims; Efforts made by several Balkan states to reconcile different ethnic groups.

Focuses on the Muslim Roma population in the Balkan Peninsula. Identification of the Roma communities as gypsies; Hostilities toward the Albanian Roma; Groups of Bosnian Roma; Creation of policies designed to destroy the Roma self-identity in Bulgaria; Problem of illiteracy.