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In this paper, I analyze the changing nationalist narratives of golden age in the Balkans. By zooming in on the case studies of the late nineteenth‐ and early twenty‐first‐century South‐East European societies, I explain how and why the images of the mythical past are articulated differently in the two historical periods. I argue that in the nineteenth century golden age rhetoric was mostly a top‐down phenomenon centered on transforming Balkan peasantry into the loyal members of their new nation‐states. By the early twenty‐first century, this process has reached its institutional limits and the golden age narratives have become a bottom‐up phenomenon: the key agents of their creation and dissemination are members of civil society, social movements, and ordinary people. I focus on the structural processes that underpin this change to explain the historical dynamics of nationalisms. The paper is based on the qualitative text analysis using nineteenth‐century and early twentieth‐century archival materials and the documents from the contemporary mass media, official records, educational materials, and popular culture in the Balkans. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The new events and phenomena that appeared in the 19th century marked a new era for the peoples of Balkans, that of national Renaissance. The 19th century for the Balkans is also known as the century of national movements and revolutions, because most of them formed an independent state and were freed from foreign invasions. This era of the formation of nations in the Balkans also affected the Albanians, who formed their independent state and nation. Namely, the birth of Albanian nationalization marked the historical period of the years 1830-40 until the Declaration of Independence of Albania in 1912. In this paper we will deal with the political causes such as the League of Prizren and the creation of national consciousness by the renaissance as a cultural community, linguistic and historical. The articulation of the Albanian nation as a cultural community built on the basis of language made them stand out from other nations in the Balkans. Above all, Albanian nationalists considered language as the main element, turning it into a national symbol. In conclusion, we affirm that the Albanian nation was built on language and did not allow regional and religious ideas to influence national identity. In fact, the national identity was created in difficult time conditions, but above all the most powerful arguments such as the element of language and culture made the preservation of national, cultural and ethnic unity for the creation of an ethnic Albanian state. On the argument of language and culture, we will build the argument of the creation of the Albanian national identity based on the ideas of the Albanian renaissance of that time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As an economic policy, currency substitution – the use of a foreign currency in lieu of a domestic currency – is rarely associated with nationalism. This is due to a natural tendency to equate nationalism with economic mercantilism and with the political need to foster nationalist feelings among the population. This need not to be the case, though, as the case of the newly independent Montenegro demonstrates. How can we explain the apparent inconsistency between nationalist leaders fighting for independence and opting to use the currency of the European Union (EU), the quintessential supra-national entity? This paper suggests that conventional explanations need to be complemented with a contextual historical analysis of nationalism. By incorporating the fluid and multifaceted nature of nationalism which, in the hands of skilful political elites, can be reframed to include apparently contradictory positions, I suggest that euroisation has been extremely consistent with nationalist goals. As the content and directionality of nationalist discourse shifted, the euro was transformed into a symbol of national identity in this Newly Independent Country. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper compares different strategies of legitimation deployed by the nationalist movements in the Balkans and Ireland in the 19th and early twentieth century. In contrast to the traditional accounts that posit nations and empires as mutually exclusive projects, I show how imperial and nationalist discourses can reinforce one another. The paper zooms in on the changing dynamics of imperial and national legacies by exploring how specific social movements strategically deploy concepts such as the 'small' or 'greater' nation to facilitate different nationalist projects. By contrasting the historical experiences of the Balkan states and Ireland I show how geopolitical and historical contexts shape the complex and contradictory relationships between imperial and the national projects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Investigaciones Geograficas is the property of Universidad de Alicante, Instituto Universitario de Geografia and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Barukh Mitrani was an Ottoman maskil who wandered between the Balkans, Istanbul and Palestine. While living in Edirne, Mitrani established his first periodical, Carmi (Pressburg 1881). Carmi 's issues were an ongoing maskilic sermon, drawing on a deep acquaintance with the Jewish bookshelf. This paper examines selections from the fifth article in Carmi , 'Our Nationhood.' Influenced by the moderate Haskalah, Mitrani idealized a 'Golden Mean,' which sought to balance the agendas of 'the two poles': insular Ultra-Orthodox Jews on the one hand, and secularized 'Westernizers' on the other. Mitrani also espoused a Jewish nationalism which had affinities with the Hebrew 'republic of letters' and the national resurgence in the Balkans. He perceived every Jew as part of three circles: the individual, the family, and the nation. Yet his nationalism was not separatist; he obliged Jews to remain loyal Ottoman citizens and promote the Sultanate while also settling in Palestine. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses the role of metonymy, especially place-for-people, in current constructions of national identity. The corpus consists of ten political speeches (commemoration and election speeches) from Germany, Montenegro and North Macedonia used to detect and examine different levels of variation: from text type to cross-linguistic differences in the use of metonymies. The analysis showed that the most frequent metonym in two Western Balkan countries is the country name, referring to both the speaker as representative of an institution, and population. By contrast, the country name is rarely used in German speeches due to particular communicative and cultural factors. At the pragmatic level, metonymies perform a number of functions, such as legitimization, collectivization and evaluation. Moreover, they are used also as euphemisms and argumentation topos. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The creation of the national identity apart that it can take a particular form ojthe collective identity, it can take as well as a way of the transformation of an ethnic group in a multiethnic state into a self-conscious political entity, or eventually as Paul Brass suggests by the amalgamation of diverse groups and the formation of an inter-ethnic, composite or homogeneous national culture through the agency of the modern state. Use identities of nations are mainly defned through the common traditions, history, and culture of their people. But in the case of divided nations it is not easy to structure their identities solely on this basis having in mind that, at the time of partition each parts of the nation it has been almost identical in ethnical, linguistic and cultural view. Ethnicity and ethnic groups are the key players when we speak about the holders of cultural diversity in the political sphere. Ethnic groups are a central source of values and identity, signifcantly more so than class, so much so that the modern state has been unable to absorb them. The paper explores the political importance of the process of creation of the national identity as a particular form of collective identity through comparative analyses of the politics in ethnically plural societies. The emotional link between place and national identity is a crucial factor in the Balkans region, having in mind that one and the same place is often claimed by several nations attached to the politics of ethnically plural societies. Discussing the contemporary dividing line between ethnic and national identity, the paper aims to identify the factors and scenarios of the inability of the nation-states and unclear future of the multi-ethnicity concept. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Mitteilungen der Österreichischen Geographischen Gesellschaft is the property of Oesterreichische Geographische Gesellschaft (Austrian Geographical Society) and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Trakya University Journal of Social Science is the property of Trakya University, Institute of Social Sciences and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Recent imagological scholarship about the Balkans has revised the Balkanism thesis by examining the sympathetic lens through which British liberals viewed the peninsula's Christian and Slavic nationalities following the 1903 establishment of the Balkan Committee. Revisionist historiography has, however, overlooked how non-Christian and non-Slavic communities were represented in Britain beyond overgeneralized orientalist stereotypes of 'the villainous Turk'. This article aims to correct this imbalance by examining representations of Albania in the travel writing and political commentary of Mary Edith Durham and Aubrey Nigel Henry Molyneux Herbert, Britain's most notable supporters of Albania's national movement in the early twentieth century, who came to sympathize with the country because of their own peripheral position in relation to the British cultural and political mainstream, by virtue of gender and an unfashionably conservative worldview. Focusing on their published travel writing and political commentary between the 1904 publication of Durham's first narrative, Through the Lands of the Serb, and Herbert's untimely death in 1923, this article proposes that they articulated a counter-discourse to liberal writing on south-eastern Europe and that their representations of Albania foregrounded the capacity for self-governance, in contrast to the cultural chaos attributed to the country by liberals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Pregled is the property of University of Sarajevo and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The process of Europeanization has been traditionally associated with an economic and political transformation, often undermining the value‑based residual effects such as the state’s or group's acquiescence to take on a European identity. This dual nature of Europeanization is particularly important in the Balkans, where a highly established sense of self is deeply embedded in the fiber of its people. The goal of a unified Europe, and the Balkan ability or even willingness to become “European” is central to this paper's analytical approach. A key facet of Europeanization is to create, promote and, more importantly, sustain a sense of a pan‑European identity. However, within multi‑ ethnic and conflicting environments the idea of a national identity is often irresolute, as in the case of Bosnia and Herzegovina and Kosovo. The paper tries to conceptualize the notion of Europeanization from a firmly identity‑based framework, discrediting the essentialist approach to identity formation in favor of a more constructivist model. It argues that the notion of a European identity is in fact a shared social value, rather than a tangible idea easily applicable to every situation, and with the Balkans being a particularly difficult case study. In essence, the underlying question is what does the process of Europeanization really mean and how viable is it in the context of a complex environment such as the Balkans? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper presents a general overview of an ongoing research on representations of multi-religious Epirote society in local textual narratives. Aim of the paper is to explore the interplay between the Greek nationalistic script of anti-Muslim discourses and the local narratives of the Ottoman past. The focus is on the objectification of local memories in textual narratives and how this process has been affected by the diglossic relationships between oral and written Greek, which favoured a textual re-elaboration of local memories through the lens of dominant national narratives. It is argued that the analysis of `marginal texts' in `marginal contexts' can provide a useful ground to reflect on the complexities implied in the reshaping of the Ottoman past and the multi-religious character of Ottoman Balkan society, caught in between the imperatives of national narratives and the selective processes of local memories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses how new concepts of human security or civil liberties that were institutionalized by the 1948 UN declaration of human rights could apply to the pre-Communist Balkan territory, a region that has traditionally shaped its reputation as realm of ethnic conflicts as well as of political and economic backwardness. The paper examines whether concepts of human security that could be traced to the Enlightenment are applicable or not to the Balkan nation-states. It specifically tackles the issues of the nature of Balkan nationalisms, the role of religion in the demarcation of ethnic lines and the enhancement of human security, as well as the role of boundaries and ethnic un-mixing of populations in safeguarding the human security of natives and refugees in the area before the rise of communism. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The continuous rise of the Serbian state in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is often described as a typical example of the Piedmont-style of national unification. The conventional historiography emphasises the role popular nationalism has played in this process, making little if any distinctions between the forms of Serbian nationalisms within and outside of the Serbian state. This article challenges such interpretations and argues that the formation and expansion of Serbia had less to do with society-wide national aspirations and much more with the internal elite politics within the Serbian state. Moreover, the paper makes a case that, rather than being a driving force of national unification, the expansionist nationalism was a by-product of the state development. This argument is articulated further through the comparison of the different nationalist trajectories in Serbia and among the ethnic Serbian populations in Bosnia and Herzegovina. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents the results of the empirical research "Cultural Orientation of Actors/Students, Interethnic Relations, National Identity and the Culture of Peace in the Balkans" performed within the macro project "Tradition, Modernization and National Identity in Serbia and the Balkans in the EU Integration Process" (179074). They are related to attitudes about democracy, social change and global management. The key issue of the research is how people perceive the functionality of democracy, whether they are satisfied with the situation and whether they support the democratic processes and democratic institutions. From the findings we can see that the authoritarian legacy consciousness burden the citizens of Serbia greatly, and in particular the examined population - university students. Confirmation of this was seen in the finding that the majority of respondents believe that the best global management model is technocracy. This leads us to the conclusion that our society does not have a fully developed and mature political culture yet since the people are still inclined to accept (personalized) authorities that are ultimately reflected in the state and the holders of state power rather than citizens and their associations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the highlights of the conference "Revolutions in the Balkans" that was held from October 31 to November 2, 2013 at Panteion University in Athens, Greece. Topics covered include the social and semantic aspects of local revolts and uprisings and nationalism in the Balkans. Speakers include professor Hannes Grandits from the Humboldt University in Berlin, Germany and professor Diana Mishkova from the Centre of Advanced Studies in Sofia, Bulgaria.

Copyright of Cuadernos Judaicos (0718-8749) is the property of Universidad de Chile, Facultad de Filosofia y Humanidades and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

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.

New information technologies increasingly allow autocrats to shape public opinion outside their borders. Regimes like Russia and China spend millions on such efforts, raising concerns that they may be swaying foreign publics through their illiberal nationalist appeals. We know little, though, about the actual impact of such endeavors. We ask here: Where such regimes can find foreign audiences who support them and the values they represent, does this translate into an ability to sway public opinion on important foreign policy issues through their endorsements? We focus on the Putin regime's ability to shape orientations toward US President Donald Trump's foreign policy through an experiment-bearing survey in two countries that share EU aspirations but have different baseline orientations to the USA and Russia: Serbia and Albania. We first establish that Putin has a considerable number of sympathizers in both countries and that this sympathy is indeed linked to illiberal nationalist ideas. We show, however, that these sympathies do not translate into an ability to move public opinion, and that where pro-American priors are strong, illiberal nationalist endorsement can actually backfire. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

This article focuses on Mikom Zeqo's (1949–2020) work Syri i Tretë ("The Third Eye", 2001) as a New Age reworking of Albanian Bektashism. The success of this book, and the recognition that Bektashi authorities themselves accorded it, make it highly representative of Bektashi neo-intellectualism and beyond: it is a cross-section that enables us to investigate the complex reworking of Sufi knowledge in a post-secular environment, such as Albania. This article examines this specific work while outlining a history of the Bektashiyya from the Ottoman era to the post-socialist Albanian period and highlighting its doctrinal and practical developments. Syri i Tretë is the expression of a secularist engulfment of post-socialist or even post-secular religion, which Bektashism embodies. Thus, Zeqo's work expresses a common trend in Albanian society that is beyond the members of the Bektashi community. [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]

Copyright of Bulletin of the Institute of Ethnography of the Serbian Academy of Sciences & Arts / Glasnik Etnografskog Instituta SANU is the property of Institute of Ethnography, SASA and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Nationalism and protracted warfare are often seen as the most important impediments to social advancement in the Balkans. In contrast to these popular perceptions I argue that for much of its history the Balkan region was characterised by limited inter-state violence and by notable lack of nationalist ideologies. Furthermore by comparing the processes of state and nation formation and warfare in the South East Europe with those in the Western Europe the article aims to show that it is the weakness, not the strength, of nationalism and protracted warfare that historically have been the principal obstacles for social development. The general argument of the paper is developed in dialogue with Tilly's theory that ties state formation to proliferation of wars and Gellner's model that links the rise of nationalism to emergence of standardised educational systems and industrialisation. In an attempt to partially disprove Tilly and vindicate Gellner I argue that the experience of the Balkan region indicates that although wars can prove important catalysts of state formation they may not necessarily contribute to nation formation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nationalism and the national state system is the product of the economic, political, cultural inheritance of the Western European countries. This trend which was not pressed in the region where it was developed produced different methods and different results in the different regions because of the differences of the economic, political, cultural inheritance of those countries and because of the condition of that period. In the Balkans, during the end of the 19th century, different Balkan people under the reign of the Ottoman State which was continuing to loose the sovereignty and independency preferred the nationalistic way as a solution for their future and chosen different methods in order to establish their own national states. However, these differences were not in essence but only in details. The aims of these Balkan nations were common: to establish their own national states. But at the end, they could not be in so different point: They put different kinds of nationalistic examples but these national movements were not strong enough to establish the system as an independent state, no matter these people had economic, political, cultural inheritance and political and economic supports of the imperialistic states. In this paper, it is aimed to insist the idea that it is not possible to establish an independent and sovereign national state with a nationalist movement dependent on foreign countries and aids. To show this, the examples of Serbian, Greek, Bulgarian and Turkish nationalist movements during the 19th century are dealt by using different sources dealing with the Ottoman, Balkan, Turkish and European histories and with the nationalism reflecting different ideas on the subject. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Journal of Criminal Justice Issues / Kriminalisticke Teme is the property of Fakultet Kriminalistickih Nauka Univerziteta U Sarajevu and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

An often underrated but significant debate among Serbian intellectuals is how best to interpret Serbia's political development from the late nineteenth to the early twentieth centuries. Conventional, mainstream understanding is that this period culminated in the golden era of Serbian democracy that lasted from 1903 to 1914. I identify this approach as a liberal‐national interpretation of this period. On their part, Serbian critical historians envision this period in terms of failed modernisation that led to the development of Serbian populism and ethnic nationalism. Even though these depictions involve opposing historical framings of Serbia's past, they both reproduce an ideological picture of the Serbian past rooted within a binary civic/ethnic nationalism framework that constrains analyses of this period to either a modernising civic era or a period that fostered the foundations for ethnic nationalism. Moreover, I argue that, at the discursive level, the debate is not about the past at all. It is primarily about interpreting the contemporary Serbian political system, the role Serbian intellectuals play in it, and whether successful democratisation in a Serbian society could be organised on the principles of further expansion, centralisation, and national homogenisation. [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.

In the process of nation-building in Eastern Europe in general and in particular in the territories that were under Ottoman occupation in the Balkans, the formation of the Albanian national identity is the most atypical and perhaps the most complicated case. This is due to the fact that the Albanians as a nation, after the Ottoman conquest, faced a situation of confrontation with some very strong identities or sub-identities, such as religious identity, provincial identity, dialect-linguistic identities, etc. Particularly problematic is the fact that Albanians as a population and as a nation even today belong to at least three major religious traditions: Catholicism, Islam and Orthodoxy. The clash with these religious sub-identities in the face of the emphasis on ethnicity and language as the projected foundation of the Albanian nation by the intellectuals of the Albanian national Renaissance, but also of the state power of independent Albania, presents the object of study and the importance of this scientific research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article revisits the history of the 'Eastern Question' and its impact in late Victorian England through the lens of the British scholar Arthur J. Evans. Evans is best known for his archaeological discoveries in the island of Crete in the beginning of the twentieth century. His journalistic and archaeological ventures in the Balkans in the 1870s and 1880s have received scant attention. The article recovers Evans' activities which straddled humanitarianism, political activism, archaeology, anthropology/ethnography and journalism. Although Evans was not a systematic thinker on international affairs, his writings typified the liberal internationalist ambivalences on the 'plight' of eastern christians in southeastern Europe and the Balkans. The article argues that his thought fused two interrelated temporal frames: the deep anthropological and archaeological time of ancient civilizations and the modern framework of nationalist politics. These different horizons guided his understanding of the world of international affairs and underpinned the key role he played in debates on the Bosnian and Albanian questions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates how some prominent and less known Albanian activists perceived their Southern Slav neighbors at the turn of the twentieth century. The research explores the way in which the spread of nationalism conditioned the positioning of Albanians and Slavs in the process of identity construction and how such identities mirrored their reciprocal political claims. Recent scholarship has often emphasized that the affirmation of national ideas led to the fragmentation of Balkan communities by turning Albanian-speaking populations and their Slavic-speaking neighbors into "others." My analysis expands this assertion by elaborating a theoretical approach that allows us to explore the impact of nationalism on the post-1878 Balkan context from a more dynamic point of view. National discourses did not only lay the foundation for a differentiation between the Balkan communities, but were also tools for promoting joint political activism. National activists often felt it necessary to cooperate in order to deal with the challenges posed by the surrounding environment, which was common to both Albanians and Slavs. Various contingent circumstances led Albanian activists to project long-term forms of coexistence with their neighbors, and to imagine forms of political, cultural, and social synthesis with the Slavs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What universal features of the mind interact with specific ecologies to produce expressions of violent religious nationalism? To shed light on this question, we focus on a case study of the Yugoslav Wars, asking: How did different religious groups in the Balkans move from cooperative relationships to violent ones? We argue that the most prevalent theories invoked to answer this question fail to adequately explain the change, namely, both the rise and fall of violent religious nationalism in the Balkans. To that end, we employ a systemic framework of religious change to examine historical data and ethnographic interview excerpts from ex-fighters and survivors of the Yugoslav Wars. This framework takes religion as it is practiced by communities to be a complex adaptive system, and models how religions adapt to local socioecologies. In employing this framework, three questions are addressed: (1) What features of cognition contributed to religiously motivated mass violence; (2) Which constituents of the religious system triggered those features; and (3) What socioecological factors were those constituents responding to? We argue that popular support for religious violence--and eventually its rejection--involved a set of higher-order functions, which McNamara calls the centralized executive self. This decision-making system was decentered by religious specialists who raised social pressures; group rituals that sustained community engagement; and identity-markers that signaled group commitments. While support for violence was a response to community threats during state-level succession, the eventual rejection of violence by religious leaders and communities was due to socioecological factors, such as rising health threats and declining birth rates brought about by the wars. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is a strong tendency in Turkish historiography to approach Kemalist policies as purely domestic affairs that emanate from the centre in a top-down manner, reflecting the clear ideological positions of Ankara. The existing scholarship on the Settlement Law (1934), too, has read the development of Kemalist demographic policies in ideological terms, framing them in top-down modernist trajectories that were long in the making since the late Ottoman times. These perspectives often remained analytically singular and nation-centred, failing to engage with the broader transnational developments that were in fact crucial to the making and timing of a range of Kemalist policies. As such, the processes of demographic engineering are framed as devoid of historical conjuncture and immune from unintended consequences or the constraints presented by state capacity. In this article, I seek to overcome such limitations by situating the Settlement Law within its due transnational context of heightened interstate rivalries since the 1930s. Unfolding in myriad ways across the borderlands of Eastern Europe, the complex dynamics of interstate competition created the necessary push and pull factors that started dislodging the Balkan Muslims from those areas coveted by various territorially revisionist states in the region. The demographic engineering their arrival triggered in Turkey, I argue, was therefore as much national as international. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Western Balkan countries are stuck in a hybrid status quo on their way to democracy. Traditional arguments related to cost–benefit calculations, national identity or conflicting objectives fail to explain the observed decoupling between gradual improvements in formal compliance with membership criteria and stagnating, if not declining, democratic performance. We explain the limited impact of the EU's political conditionality in the Western Balkans with rampant state capture and proceed to unpack how EU conditionality has effectively contributed to the consolidation of such detrimental governance patterns. First, EU pressure for simultaneous economic and political reforms opened opportunities for business actors to build powerful clientelist networks that reach into politics. Second, top-down conditionality has weakened political competition and mechanisms of internal accountability and deliberation. Finally, formal progress towards membership and high-level interactions with EU and member state officials legitimize corrupt elites. A congruence analysis of the Serbian case provides empirical evidence for the hypothesised linkages between EU conditionality and state capture. [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 manuscript uses recently declassified documents to examine the factors shaping US policy toward Bosnia from 1993 to 1995. Drawing upon IR theoretical insights from constructivism and realism, these documents reveal that the halting and inconsistent nature of US actions during this period can be explained by a mismatch between US identity-driven goals and the constraints of the post-Cold War world. Having committed themselves to bold yet largely unattainable objectives in the region, US officials feared a loss of credibility and, for much of the period under investigation, did just enough not to ‘lose’ Bosnia without taking the kinds of decisive actions that would have made a difference on the ground. Eventually, atrocities in Sarajevo and Srebrenica convinced the US that more forceful action was necessary to preserve US and NATO credibility. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

While the connection between war and state making in the ascendancy of the western state system has been well explored, the war-state linkages in the peripheries of the Great Powers, especially in times of imperial decline and collapse, have attracted insufficient attention among peace and conflict studies analysts. This contribution helps to fill this gap by revisiting the Balkan Wars of 1912-1913 to underpin correlations between state making and political violence in this case which scholars are only now starting to research in more detail. The article contributes above and beyond the existing state of scholarship by grounding the analysis in a focused and explicit comparison between state formation processes in the Balkans and those in western Europe, which have provided the template for modern state making in the rest of the world. The focus is primarily on the initial stages of state formation in the context of the growing influence of the Great Powers in the region and the emergence of nationalism as a rationale for the nation-state notwithstanding the multiethnic setting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introducing the category 'weak nationalism', this article emphasises the scales of intensity and the different operational modes of nationalism across time and space, as well as within the same space. It refuses to create a model or another dichotomy - strong/weak - on a par with earlier ones like organic/civic, Eastern/ Western, bad/good. Rather, it approaches nationalism as a binary variable on a scale from weak/low to strong/high. It argues to extend the research focus beyond the fixation on extreme cases to so-called weak or weaker manifestations that remain subordinate and under-researched, all the time stressing the changeability of nationalisms in their local context and in the course of time. While it is a category more recognisable in a common sense approach than in a strictly quantifiable one, it can be identified and comparatively evaluated by the mobilising ability of the nationalist message in the public sphere. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article looks into the history of the Albanian national question and the Balkans. It talks about the intellectual movement known as the Albanian National Renaissance which was considered the key catalyst of many important processes for the organization of Albanians. It mentions the Albanian nationalism that represents a sui generis nationalism, which has gone through transformations over time and created as an intellectual and cultural nationalism through a nationwide movement.