This paper examines the relationship between political power and war remembrance by considering the way war remembrance occurs in a divided society. The purpose of this paper is to explore memory of the violent past and its uses as an ongoing arena of disputes between former adversaries and within ethnopolitical groups pushing their distinct versions of memory. Moreover, this paper examines three key aspects of the politics of remembrance: prevalent narratives, arenas of commemoration, and agencies of war remembrance, based on the case study of Kosovo. The postwar narrative and commemoration in Kosovo have evolved along ethnic lines, perpetuating antagonism and conflicting identities. Memorialization in Kosovo raises serious challenges for comprehensive transitional justice and reconciliation between these ethnic groups. The paper concludes that through appropriate civic education, critical inquiry of commemoration practices, and especially through evidence-based adaptation of the history curriculum, there is a chance to promote a culture of shared memory and to establish inclusive politics of remembrance in Kosovo, as crucial components of reconciliation and peace-building.

National identity was already the object of scholarly studies by the 1950s and 1960s, e.g. by analysts such as Karl Deutsch and Ernest Hass, to a great extent inspired by the start of European integration and German and French reconciliation. One of the crucial questions has been (and still is) to what extent national identity constitutes a barrier to Europeanization and integration, and to what extent overlapping multiple identities can co-exist.

The collapse of socialist regimes resulted in tremendous regional realignments in the regions surrounding the heartland of Eurasia. Remarkably, not only states, but also transnational actors have played significant roles in this process. This study highlights transnational ethnicities (Mingrelians, Armenians, and Muslims) in Abkhazia, and tries to describe how the involvement of transnational religious organizations (such as the Armenian Apostolic Church and Turkey's Diyanet) affected the politics around these minorities. In the Black Sea rim, interstate and transnational politics are rather autonomous from each other. For example, when scores of powerful countries, such as the United States and European Union member states, desperately tried to ignore Russia's recognition of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, regarding it as a lawless act, Turkey's Diyanet admitted that Russia's recognition of Abkhazia created a new legal situation and began to fulfill its long-dreamed-of desire to help the Abkhazian Muslims. According to political conjuncture in Abkhazia, the same Gali population changes from Georgians to Mingrelians and back. This demonstrates how ethnic categories are used in a constructivist way in the Black Sea rim.

A series of events in 2008 influenced the Karabakh conflict resolution efforts: the Kosovo declaration of independence, the August war, and Russian recognition of independent Abkhazia and South Ossetia. Two new diplomatic initiatives to resolve the Karabakh conflict were launched immediately after the August war, one by Russia and the second by Turkey. This article discusses why the two initiatives failed, and the structural problems of Karabakh conflict resolution efforts.

This paper argues that nationalism and neoliberalism should not be considered as conflicting ideologies, but can enter into a productive association. This association creates an entrepreneurial nationalism that people can actively embrace as self-governing subjects in pursuit of a good life and successful career, rather than as subjects governed through state-mandated projects from above. The paper illustrates this argument with material from nine months of fieldwork at a Russian elite university. While students at that university strive to develop their potential and increase their market value to be successful in the competition for the best jobs, they also emphasize that developing themselves is not antithetical to serving Russia and being true to one's country. On the contrary, advancing Russia and advancing one's own career are articulated as two sides of the same coin. At the same time, the Russian nationalist project is reframed in entrepreneurial terms: making the Russian nation strong is about developing its potential and raising its competitiveness in the global marketplace.

The national identities of post-Soviet societies profoundly influenced the politics and economics of Eurasia during the 1990s. These identities varied along two distinct but related dimensions: their content and contestation. Nationalist movements throughout post-Soviet Eurasia invoked their nations in support of specific purposes, which frequently cast Russia as the nation's most important “other” and the state from which autonomy and security must be sought. Nationalists therefore offered specific proposals for the content of their societies’ collective identities. But not everyone in these societies shared the priorities of their nationalist movements. Indeed, the international relations among post-Soviet states often revolved around one central question: did post-Soviet societies and politicians agree with their nationalists or not? The former Communists played a decisive role in contesting the content of national identity. One of the defining differences among post-Soviet states during the 1990s was the political and ideological relationship in each one between the formerly Communist elites and the nationalists—whether the former Communists marginalized the nationalists, arrested them, coopted them, bargained with them, or even tried to become like them. These different relationships revealed different degrees and kinds of societal consensus about national identity after Soviet rule.

This article examines how rebel Serbs in Croatia reinterpreted narratives of World War Two to justify their uprising against the democratically elected Croatian government in 1990 and gain domestic and international legitimacy for the Republika Srpska Krajina (RSK) parastate. While scholars have written about the strategies nationalist elites used regarding controversial symbols and the rehabilitation of World War Two collaborators in Croatia and other Yugoslav successor states, the RSK's “culture of memory” has received little attention. Based on documents captured after the RSK's defeat in 1995, this article shows that it was not only the government of Franjo Tudjman that rejected the Partisan narratives of “Brotherhood and Unity,” but a parallel process took place among the leadership in the Krajina. Ultimately the decision to base the historical foundations of the Croatian Serbs’ political goals on a chauvinist and extremist interpretation of the past resulted in a criminalized entity that ended tragically for both Serbs and Croats living on the territory of the RSK.

This article examines the symbolic politics of three pro-state movements that emerged from the “preventive counterrevolution” launched by the Kremlin in response to Ukraine’s Orange Revolution. In 2005, youth movement Nashi played upon war memory at its rallies and branded the opposition “fascist”; in 2012, the Anti-Orange Committee countered opposition protests with mass gatherings at Moscow’s war commemoration sites; in 2015, Antimaidan brought thousands onto Russia’s streets to denounce US-backed regime change and alleged neo-Nazism in Kiev. I show how evocation of the enemy image, through reference to the war experience, played a key role in the symbolism of the preventive counterrevolution. Interviews with activists in these movements discussing their symbolic politics reveal an opposing victim/victor narrative based on an interplay of two World War II myths—the “Great Victory” and the “fascist threat.” Moving beyond approaches that view the Soviet and Russian World War II cult as a triumphalist narrative of the Great Victory over fascism, I conclude that its threat component is an understudied element.

This article reviews recent literature concerned with the analysis of the relationship between nationalism and economy. First, it discusses scholarship advocating a new understanding of the concept of “economic nationalism” beyond its traditional focus on protectionist state policies. Second, the article branches out to consider a more interdisciplinary body of literature addressing the nationalism-economy nexus, and it relates this literature to broader debates in nationalism studies, distinguishing between three prominent approaches in the discipline: nationalism as political movement and ideology; nationalism as political discourse; and everyday nationalism. The article concludes with suggestions for future research.

This article explores the interplay of religion, anti-Semitism, and personal rivalries in building the ultra-nationalist movement in 1930s Romania, using the career of Nichifor Crainic as a case study. As a theologian, Crainic created and taught a synthesis of nationalism and Romanian Orthodoxy which was broadly accepted by most ultra-nationalists in interwar Romania. As a journalist, Crainic directed several newspapers which spearheaded acrimonious attacks on democratic and ultra-nationalist politicians alike. As a politician, he joined and left both Corneliu Zelea Codreanu's Legion of the Archangel Michael and A.C. Cuza's National Christian Defense League before attempting to form his own Christian Workers’ Party. Crainic's writings ultimately earned him a place as a minister in two governments and membership of the Romanian Academy. His career reveals an ultra-nationalist movement rife with division and bickering but united around a vaguely defined ideology of religious nationalism, xenophobia, and anti-Semitism.

This article examines the dynamic relationship between the two major dimensions of memory and justice in the context of post-communist countries: truth-telling and retroactive justice. This interdependent and uneasy relationship is illustrated by recent attempts at constructing a new historical narrative of the communist past in Romania in the wake of the de-secretization of the files of both the Communist Party and the communist secret police (Securitate). A systematic analysis of the activity of institutions that have been directly involved in research and public education about the recent past – the National Archives, the National Council for the Study of Securitate's Archives, and the Institute for the Investigation of Crimes of Communism – is undertaken. The work of these three institutional actors shows a direct relationship between truth-telling in its various forms (access to archives, opening the files and exhumations) and any subsequent retroactive justice and restitution. The main argument of the paper is that while deep-seated dichotomies between former communist and anti-communists in addressing the past still persist, a more nuanced way of seeing the regime that explores the ambiguous line that divides outright repression from cooptation is emerging.

Latvia's education system shows little movement toward ethnic integration in the sense of homogenization, yet there is integration in the sense of a widely accepted status quo. Linguistically separated schools act as safeguards of cultural identity for Latvians and non-Latvians alike and may well be the linchpin guaranteeing ethnic peace. As argued by pluralist thinkers, comprehensive ethnic mixing and homogenizing of multiethnic populations can be problematic, whereas providing a framework for the stable preservation of distinct identities can lead to better integration overall. The multi-lingual school system of Latvia that operates in the broader context of smooth economic integration illustrates the merits of such a mixed integrative policy.

As “music of commitment,” in the period from the late 1970s to the late 1980s rock music in Yugoslavia had an important purpose of providing a popular-cultural outlet for the unique forms of socio-cultural critique that engaged with the realities and problems of Yugoslav society. The three “music movements” that embodied the new rock'n'roll spirit – New Wave, New Primitives, and New Partisans – used rock music to critique the country's “new socialist culture,” with the purpose of helping to eliminate the disconnect between the ideal and the reality of socialist Yugoslavia. This paper examines the New Partisans as the most radical expression of music of commitment through the works of its most important rock bands: Bijelo dugme, Plavi orkestar, and Merlin. The paper's argument is that the New Partisans’ socio-cultural engagement, animated by advocacy of Yugoslavism, was a counter-logic to the nationalist dissolution of a distinctly Yugoslav fabric of a socialist community in crisis. Thus, the movement's revolutionary “spirit of reconstruction” permeating its “poetics of the patriotic” was a mechanism of socio-cultural resistance to political, cultural and moral-ethical de-Yugoslavization of Yugoslav society. Its ultimate objective was to make the case that the only way into the future – if there was to be any – rested on strategic reanimation of the Partisan revolutionary past as the only viable socio-cultural foundation of the Yugoslav socialist community.

This paper examines two contrasting cases of ethnic-group political activism in China – the Uighurs in Xinjiang and the Mongols in Inner Mongolia – to explain the former's political activism and the latter's lack thereof. Given similar challenges and pressures, how can we explain the divergent patterns in these two groups’ political behavior? This paper forwards the argument that domestic factors alone are not sufficient to account for differences in the groups’ political behavior. Instead, international factors have to be included to offer a fuller and satisfactory explanation. The paper illustrates how three types of international factors – big power support, external cultural ties, and Uighur diaspora community activism – have provided opportunities and resources to make the Uighur political activism sustainable. In Inner Mongolia, its quest for self-determination reached the highest fervor in the early half of the twentieth century, particularly with the support of imperial Japan. However, since the end of WWII, Inner Mongolia has not received any consistent international support and, as a result, has been more substantially incorporated into China's geopolitical body.

We contact the world
only through our boundaries.
Blaga Dimitrova

In a recent issue of the Bulgarian periodical Sega (Now) a reporter related an extraordinary tale of how various name-changing campaigns had marked the experience of a Bulgarian-speaking Muslim—hereafter “Pomak”—in the village of Bachkovo. The story began during the Balkan Wars in 1912–1913 when Hasan, the aforementioned Pomak from the Rhodope mountains of southern Bulgaria, was forced to change his name to Dragan as part of the wartime state campaign for Muslims with “Slavic origins” to “reclaim their Bulgarian names.” A change in politics at the beginning of World War I opened the door for Dragan to change his name back to Hasan; and so he did. In the late 1930s, however, he was again compelled to change his name back to Dragan, in line with the Rodina (Homeland) directed name-changing campaigns, described in depth below. After the Communist takeover in 1944 Dragan was able, again, to change his name back to Hasan as wartime “Fascist” policy was reversed. But with the movement towards “national integration” in the 1960s Hasan was forced, again, to change his name back to Dragan. After the fall of Communism in Bulgaria in November 1989 “Dragan” again was allowed to change his name back to Hasan; and so he did. In his one lifetime this “Bulgarian” of Islamic faith, subject to the whims of the fickle and contested Bulgarian national project, changed his name six times. Admittedly, the Pomak's fate in Balkan history seems to be primarily as pawn in Bulgarian and other Balkan national rivalries and domestic designs. Pomak history is, more often than not, the story of the center looking to the margins and imposing its own designs. Having said that, these designs—generally driven by the dual forces of modernity and nationalism—were always subject to a spectrum of Pomak responses and strategies.

In the 1990s, efforts were launched in the Republic of Sakha (Yakutia) in the Russian Federation to support the revival of Sakha (Yakut) language education. This interdisciplinary study examines the evolution of school-based Sakha language education in the city of Yakutsk over a 25-year period beginning with the launching of the first reforms in the 1990s. Language education reform in the capital city has been shaped by a dynamic interplay between federal, regional, and local factors. Grassroots social and cultural activism continues to play a key role in school-based language revitalization in Yakutsk, influencing how policies have been received and implemented at the local level. Local community stakeholders are working together to counteract federal education policies, which direct school resources away from minority language education. This case study shows that the Sakha (Yakut) language revival has taken root in the capital city, and it provides important evidence that civic activism continues to develop in urban areas of the republic.

The national movements of sub-state national societies are divided into two or three competing political orientations (independentists, autonomists, and federalists), which vary over time. This article compares the process that led to the founding of the ADQ (autonomism) in Quebec, with the process that culminated in the transformation and de facto re-founding of ERC (independentism) in Catalonia during the period 1976–2005. Using the cases of two nationalist parties in two different national movements that have successfully established new political orientations, I analyze the political origins of this form of temporal variation. My outcome variable is the “tipping point” at which these nationalist political parties get established. This “tipping point” was reached through a temporal sequence that evolved in four phases. In each of these phases, a key variable was involved: the existence of a preexistent ideology, the occurrence of a central state constitutional moment, an impulse from the sphere of sociological nationalism, and the consolidation of a new leadership nucleus.

Reactions to the brutal Syrian War from European governments and Europe's Muslims have been diverse and subject to many shifts over the past few years. This paper focuses on how Albanian political and Islamic religious figures living in the Balkans have come to interpret the war. I focus on discourse, the ways in which these different agents communicate with their audience, and the wider contexts they evoke. Government sources and religiously themed lectures delivered by prominent imams on the social networking site YouTube are used to assess these trends. The most obvious aspect of these debates is the ways in which these agents use the war to press their own agendas, the government to affirm their commitment to the “West” and an ethnicized view of Islam, while Islamic religious leaders use it to reconnect their audiences to a more cosmopolitan vision of their past. War thus becomes a catalyst for a resurgent contestation between different groups vying for control over what it means to be “Albanian” and “Muslim” in the twenty-first century.

This article addresses the reasons why ethnic diversity has never posed a challenge to the stability of Transnistria (also called the Transnistrian Moldovan Republic), an unrecognized state that broke away from Moldova during the collapse of the Soviet Union. We analyze the major societal and political patterns relevant to ethnic relations in the region and focus on the structure, content, and effectiveness of Transnistrian legislation concerning ethnic and linguistic diversity along with the practices of its implementation. In our view, formal and informal ethnic divisions do not hinder the political stability of Transnistria. We conclude that the stability of ethnic relations in Transnistria in part results from a deliberate policy aimed at managing diversity. This policy provides for the dependence of the populace on the state apparatus achieved through a dense plethora of government-orchestrated activities as well as the reproduction of nonconflictual, eclectic, and thus socially acceptable national narratives inherited from the Soviet past.