Over the last decade or so there has been renewed interest in the Greek civil war, with a number of important publications shifting the focus of research from the high plane of international relations and Cold War polemics to a critical history of the period, allowing unheard voices and perspectives to be heard and revealed. The volume edited by Mark Mazower, for example, places the experiences of the 1940s in the longue durée of Greek nation-state formation as well as in the wider context of war and post-war violence and resistance—the social character of which is emphasized. Yet the importance of the Greek civil war in the emergence of the Cold War cannot be underestimated as Gerolymatos makes clear. This paper, therefore, aims to demonstrate how the refugees from Greece who arrived in Poland constitute an important part of Cold War history and to show how their experience in Poland can shed light upon both the wider international context and the dynamics of nationality policy in Poland itself. I contend that the arrival of Greek refugees weakened the Polish state's drive to national homogeneity.

After darkness fell over the provincial town of Lihula on 2 September 2004, youths pelted riot police with stones. Nothing like this had ever happened before in the peaceful and orderly small Baltic State of Estonia. The police were protecting a crane and its driver sent by the Ministry of the Interior to remove a monument honouring those Estonians who fought on the German side against the Red Army during the Second World War. In the evening of 26 April 2007 demonstrators in Tallinn pelted riot police with stones and went on a rampage of smashing windows and looting. The Estonian capital had never experienced anything like this. The police were protecting the site of a monument honouring Soviet soldiers who had fought against Nazi Germany. At night, when the rioting had ceased, a crane ordered by the Ministry of Defence removed the monument.

There have been attempts to detail the representation of the Romani community with a focus on both the domestic and transnational political context; however, less is known about how Roma create organizing structures of representation and the role of these structures within the broader social movement. This article seeks to add to this growing research by analysing Roma representation in the transnational political context, as well as unpacking the relationship between ethnic group identity and shared interests. By understanding that ethnic group identity and shared interests are intertwined in the case of Roma, we can begin to understand the numerous challenges faced by the Roma social movement, particularly those relating to political participation and adequate representation.

Elections are one of the major ways in which democratic governments maintain legitimacy. Do elections serve the same functions in transitioning, non-democratic, or semi-democratic systems? Perhaps the relationship between elections and legitimacy is different in systems that are not fully democratic? And what of the media? Is their role the same or is the role they play dependent upon the type of system in which they exist? The Republic of Georgia offers an interesting case in which to look at these relationships. I would posit that in transitioning, non-democratic, and semi-democratic systems, elections serve a different function than in a fully democratic society and the media are one tool that leaders in such systems can use to enhance their legitimacy. When non-democratic leaders enjoy popularity, there is no need to finesse the media since positive coverage is easy to come by when you are popular. But if your popularity is waning and democratic habits are not well ingrained, the temptation to overtly or covertly subvert the media can be quite intense. So instead of maintaining legitimacy, elections may serve to create legitimacy or at least the appearance of legitimacy when legitimacy is lacking. To that end, regimes and leaders cannot afford to lose, and moreover need to win, elections by large margins if their legitimacy is questionable. Therefore, control over the media is more important when this is the case. In fact, there may be an inverse relationship between media freedom and regime insecurity, as the insecurity of the regime goes up, the freedom of the media goes down. Couple this tendency with the fact that the media in these transitioning systems have not fully become a “fourth estate” that is strong, independent, and can hold the government and political leaders accountable and you have a climate in which the media are harassed, biased, and often co-opted. Georgia, through the 2000 presidential election, is such a political system.

Since independence, Central Asian republics have been facing the paradox of developing nation-state ideologies on the basis of a multinational population, inherited from their colonial and Soviet past. This ideology claims historical ownership over the territory, the so-called homeland (rodina in Russian or vatan in local languages). Central Asian governments do perceive the need to assert their sovereign rights on the land. In political terms, it becomes a quest to ensure that the territories claimed contain a majority of titular members of the nation and a minority of other ethnic groups. The census appears here to be the key instrument to measure people and legitimate the power of the titular nation.

The collapse of communism in Central and Eastern Europe promised bold opportunities for the various ethnic groups populating that vast, diverse region. Yet if history had any lessons to teach these groups it was that democracy, or at least the political systems that emerged in the midst of the rubble of the Berlin Wall between 1989 and 1991, was no guarantor of whatever idealized rights the region's ethnic groups hoped would come in the wake of the collapse of the communist dictatorships that had dominated these parts of Europe for decades. Communism, had, in many instances, done nothing more than stifle the festering ethnic tensions that had exploded in the nineteenth century and short-circuited the complex, lengthy process of resolving these conflicts. Consequently, for those knowledgeable about the essence of these conflicts, it should have come as no surprise that Yugoslavia, for example, was torn asunder by ethnic violence so terrifying that it took the intervention of the Western world's great powers to end the most violent aspects of these wars of ethnicity.

The unilateral declaration of independence by Kosovo in February 2008 catapulted the Western Balkans back to the centre stage of international security concerns. Despite affirmations to the contrary, the recognition of Kosovo's independence by major Western powers is seen as a significant precedent in international law and the way in which self-determination conflicts are handled by the international community. At the same time, it raises major questions for the stability of borders across the Western Balkans region, and possibly beyond. At the centre of many of these questions is the role of the international community—defined by the international and regional organizations present in the region, as well as by their powerful member states—in tackling the complexity of interrelated self-determination conflicts, incomplete democratization processes, growing concerns about the economic viability of the successor states of the former Yugoslavia and an ever-increasing presence of transnational organized crime networks with significant reach beyond the region.