This book uses a specialized corpus of public language-related discourse to investigate links between language ideologies and ethnonationalism in contemporary West Central Balkans. Despite a century and a half of shared linguistic history, the nations making up the central part of former Yugoslavia continue to debate the ownership over the common language, creating much animosity, some legal issues, and often absurd circumstances. At the heart of the ongoing language debate over Central South Slavic is the belief in language as the cornerstone of ethnonational identity and the legitimacy of ethnic groups’ claims to sovereignty. Given a history of conflict and the recent resurgence in extreme ethnonationalism, an understanding of ethnolinguistic contestation in the region is as important as ever. This book will be of interest to social scientists working in fields as diverse as (applied) linguistics, anthropology, media studies, political science, sociology and history, as well as other scholars with an interest in language and society.

This comprehensive survey of ethnic groups of Europe reveals the dynamic process of ethnic identity and the relationship of ethnic groups to modern states. Part of a five-volume series on ethnic groups around the world, Ethnic Groups of Europe: An Encyclopedia provides detailed descriptions of more than 100 European ethnic and national groups. Each entry provides an overview of the group as well as in-depth information on the group's origins and early history, cultural life, and recent developments. Among the information presented for each group are global and national population figures and accounts of geographical distribution, diaspora populations, the group's historic homeland, predominant religions and languages, and related groups. The entries also highlight places, people, and events of particular importance to each group, and sidebars introduce related topics of interest. Throughout the text, special attention is focused on the relationship between ethnicity and nationalism. An explanation of the methodology used for selecting the ethnic groups in the encyclopedia is also provided, as is an introductory essay on the topic of ethnicity in Europe.

The Encyclopedia of Historians and Historical Writing contains over 800 entries ranging from Lord Acton and Anna Comnena to Howard Zinn and from Herodotus to Simon Schama. Over 300 contributors from around the world have composed critical assessments of historians from the beginning of historical writing to the present day, including individuals from related disciplines like Jürgen Habermas and Clifford Geertz, whose theoretical contributions have informed historical debate. Additionally, the Encyclopedia includes some 200 essays treating the development of national, regional and topical historiographies, from the Ancient Near East to the history of sexuality. In addition to the Western tradition, it includes substantial assessments of African, Asian, and Latin American historians and debates on gender and subaltern studies.

This theoretically and empirically grounded book uses case studies of political graffiti in the post-socialist Balkans and Central Europe to explore the use of graffiti as a subversive political media. Despite the increasing global digitisation, graffiti remains widespread and popular, providing with a few words or images a vivid visual indication of cultural conditions, social dynamics and power structures in a society, and provoking a variety of reactions. Using qualitative and quantitative methods, as well as detailed interdisciplinary analyses of "patriotic," extreme-right, soccer-fan, nostalgic, and chauvinist graffiti and street art, it looks at why and by whom graffiti is used as political media and to/against whom it is directed. The book theorises discussions of political graffiti and street art to show different methodological approaches from four perspectives: context, author, the work itself, and audience. It will be of interest to the growing body of literature focussing on (sub)cultural studies in the contemporary Balkans, transitology, visual cultural studies, art theory, anthropology, sociology, and studies of radical politics.

Decentering European Intellectual Space challenges the conventional view of intellectual history as a debate over the interpretation of a limited number of texts produced by a small group of prominent scholars, writers, and intellectuals from the cultural centers of Europe. Addressing the question “What is European intellectual space?”, this collection of essays seeks to demonstrate how this space is shaped, ordered, and communicated between Europe’s fluctuating cores and peripheries. Focusing on the asymmetrical relations between large and small, centers and peripheries, cores and margins, in scholarly and other forms of interaction – and within Europe as well as globally – the volume brings forth a variety of trajectories and strategies developed by intellectuals outside the culturally dominant centers. Contributors are: David Cottington, Narve Fulsås, Tommaso Giordani, Marja Jalava, Zsófia Lórand, Łukasz Mikołajewski, Diana Mishkova, Stefan Nygård, Emilia Palonen, Manolis Patiniotis, Johanna Rainio-Niemi, Tore Rem, José María Rosales, and Johan Strang.

From 1941 to 1945, a small number of Jews were given the rights of Aryan citizens in Croatia by the pro-Nazi Utasha regime. This study seeks to explain why these exemptions from Ustasha racial laws came to be, how they were justified by the race theory of the time, and how the "Croats of the Mosaic faith" were eventually rejected as racial aliens.

Though persistently overshadowed by the Great War in historical memory, the two Balkan conflicts of 1912–1913 were among the most consequential of the early twentieth century. By pitting the states of Greece, Bulgaria, Serbia, and Montenegro against a diminished Ottoman Empire—and subsequently against one another—they anticipated many of the horrors of twentieth-century warfare even as they produced the tense regional politics that helped spark World War I. Bringing together an international group of scholars, this volume applies the social and cultural insights of the “new military history” to revisit this critical episode with a central focus on the experiences of both combatants and civilians during wartime.

This book bridges the gap between academic researchers and policymaking experts working on the Western Balkans and those dealing with the Baltic States. Within the frame of a comparative and cross-regional approach, Vassilis Petsinis generates new insights in subjects as diverse as: how geopolitics shape the management of ethnic relations; the variants of Euroscepticism; opposition to immigration and LGBTQI rights; the patterns of multi-ethnic cohabitation; as well as the endeavour by parties of the populist and radical right to embed their platforms into the longer trajectories of ethno-nationalism in the countries and societies studied (Estonia and Latvia from the Baltic States; Croatia and Serbia from the Western Balkans). This work also assesses the extent to which the centrality of ethnic cleavages can be contested, temporarily effaced, or ultimately transformed by the increasing significance of the economy (social welfare and transparency) in multi-ethnic societies. The book adds a sound contribution towards updating and upgrading the study of ethnopolitics not solely across Central and Eastern Europe, but as a whole.

The disintegration of Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union in 1991 shed entirely new light on the character of their political systems. There is now a need to re-examine many of the standard interpretations of Soviet and Yugoslav politics. This book is a comparative study of the disintegration of Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union - as multinational, federal communist states - and the reaction of European and US foreign policy to the parallel collapses of these nations. The authors describe the structural similarities in the destabilization of the two countries, providing great insight into the demise of both.

In the wake of the devastating First World War, leaders of the victorious powers reconfigured the European continent, resulting in new understandings of nation, state, and citizenship. Religious identity, symbols, and practice became tools for politicians and church leaders alike to appropriate as instruments to define national belonging, often to the detriment of those outside the faith tradition. Religion, Ethnonationalism, and Antisemitism in the Era of the Two World Wars places the interaction between religion and ethnonationalism – a particular articulation of nationalism based upon an imagined ethnic community – at the centre of its analysis, offering a new lens through which to analyze how nationalism, ethnicity, and race became markers of inclusion and exclusion. Those who did not embrace the same ethnonationalist vision faced ostracization and persecution, with Jews experiencing pervasive exclusion and violence as centuries of antisemitic Christian rhetoric intertwined with right-wing nationalist extremism. The thread of antisemitism as a manifestation of ethnonationalism is woven through each of the essays, along with the ways in which individuals sought to critique religious ethnonationalism and the violence it inspired. With case studies from the United States, France, Italy, Germany, Finland, Croatia, Ukraine, and Romania, Religion, Ethnonationalism, and Antisemitism in the Era of the Two World Wars thoroughly explores the confluence of religion, race, ethnicity, and antisemitism that led to the annihilative destruction of the Second World War and the Holocaust, challenging readers to identify and confront the inherent dangers of narrowly defined ideologies.