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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 article sets off from a discussion of some methodological and theoretical issues pertinent to the study of ideological and institutional transfer between "centre" and "periphery" in nineteenth-century Europe. While taking into account the asymmetry in radiation and reception, it probes into the (Balkan) periphery's political and cultural agency in reformulating and re-institutionalizing the "western model." Rather than simply tracing movements, flows and circulation - the conventional concern of the transnational approach - the focus is on studying the transformations which occur in the process. This makes it possible to highlight the dynamics and versatility of ideational and institutional selection, interpretation, adaptation and transformation (or subversion) - in brief, the process of re-signification of ideas and institutions. The article then proceeds by exemplifying this approach in two directions. First, it examines several main channels and agents of transfer to and within the Balkan periphery illuminative of the ways ideas, practices and institutions traveled and mutated in the course of their journey; second, it surveys several characteristic instances of transfer of liberal ideas and institutions in the Balkans focusing on their legitimization and "domestication" which underscore the semantic and functional reinterpretations of modernity and tradition in the process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Balkans with its history, geography, culture, politics and strategic location has been a region that has been closely associated for centuries with the Ottoman Empire and the Republic of Turkey. Within the Muslim Turkish population, the Kosovo Turks that have been historically left from the Ottoman period in this geography have been an element of society that have struggled to continue their existence to this day in the region. The standing of the Kosovo Turks in the past and the situation of being a minority in their country today as brought with it special circumstances and questions particular to them as with other Balkan Turks in the areas they reside. This study will consider the periods the Kosovo Turks have undergone in their country from the past to the present; the changes that they had to undergo during each period; how they have tried to hold on and were left in the middle in their country and the social, political, communal and cultural activities they tried to undertake. The main basis of this study is that if not in the history of Kosovo, today they are defined as a minority and will cover the Kosovo Turks reactions to this situation as well as their actual status in Kosovo. At this point the article will review their expectations and the stalemate that they find themselves in as a community that has lived in Kosovo both as a society as well as politically for centuries and is based on the central thesis that this situation stems from Serbian and Albanian ethnic nationalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

My contribution focuses on the ways in which the new born national communities represent individual and collective identities across the former Ottoman Empire, an area of cultural overlapping, hybridity, and confusion. Its starting point is the parallel reading of two contemporary novels, Birds without Wings by the British novelist Louis de Bernières and Middlesex by the American Jeffrey Eugenides, novels that follow the build up of Turkish and Greek identities in a process of mutual mirroring, calling into question the very logic of identification. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the emergence of the figure of Alexander the Great as a motif or topos in political writings of the 19th and 20th century, particularly in the declining Ottoman Empire and its successor states. The motif is said to have been employed to mirror new cultural possibilities and express diverse nationalist and imperial impulses and dreams. The growth is traced of the motif's popularity following the French general Napoleon's departure from Egypt. The Alexander topos is also investigated as participatory symbol for modernity that recurs in the political discourse of the Modern Period.

The article discusses the political loyalties of the historians Konstantinos Dapontes and Konstantinos Karatzas, who were part of the Phanariot political class of the Rum, the Greek Orthodox community in the Ottoman Empire. It is said that the Ecumenical Patriarch of the Greek Orthodox Romioi created the Phanariots as a political network involved in administering Balkan territories for the Empire. Other topics include the role of Janissary troops in maintaining the Empire, the notion of Greek ethnicity, and the emergence of Greek nationalism.

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.