After World War I, Austria, Germany, Russia, and Turkey moved from dynastic-imperial political regimes to quasi-republican regimes justified on the basis of popular legitimacy. Prior to this transition, in the management and political (in)significance of ethnic categories these empires broadly resembled each other. After World War I, the core successor states to these four empires pursued radically different policies in dealing with ethnicity as a social category. One can therefore speak of distinct Austrian, German, Soviet/Russian, and Turkish models in managing multi-ethnic populations, models which persisted since the 1920s. Both the emergence of different regimes of ethnicity in the 1920s and the persistence of these policies throughout the twentieth century present very intriguing puzzles for political science. It is not possible to “explain” either the emergence or the persistence of these distinct policies within the confines of this paper. Instead, the major differences between state policies in these four countries will be described in detail in order to highlight the important differences and the most significant features of each case. Since the major contours of these policies did not change throughout the twentieth century, I will limit myself to a brief description of period-specific nuances in the distinct national trajectories between the 1920s and the 1990s. Finally, I will focus on a period of significant change in the late 1990s in Germany, Russia, and Turkey, and inquire as to the causes of these changes.

Research on diasporic youth identities in the British and American context has stressed hybridity, heterogeneity and multiplicity. This paper draws upon ethnographic research undertaken with Armenian girls to explore some of the tensions and ambivalences of negotiating diasporic identities in the Russian context. Diasporic identities are constructed through gender, and this paper illustrates how research participants negotiate their identities in relation to both belonging to the Armenian community and wider Russian society. At the same time, this paper examines how research participants draw differently on diasporic identifications in order to overcome tensions and ambivalences in their everyday lives. The paper shows that research participants are not inclined to reject their cultural roots in favor of new hybrid identities, but are able to recognize and appropriate different cultures in their identity negotiations.

Based on ethnographic fieldwork in a Georgian village and supplemented by a range of interviews and observations from different parts of Georgia, this paper explores the creative presence of religion in public schools. In 2005 and in line with the strong secularization and modernization discourse, the Georgian parliament passed a new law on education, restricting the teaching of religion in public schools and separating religious organizations and public schools; nevertheless, mainstream Orthodox Christianity is widely practiced in schools. The paper aims to show how Georgians use religious spaces in secular institutions to practice their identity, to perform being “true Georgians.” At the same time, they are adopting a strong secularization and modernization discourse. By doing so they create a new space, a third space, marked by in-betweenness. The study uses the theoretical lens of Thirdspace for analyzing the hybridity, the in-betweenness of practices and attitudes inherent for politics, religion, and everyday life of Georgians.

This article focuses on the shaping of the aesthetics and ideology of Eduard Limonov's National-Bolshevik Party (NBP) through the pages of the radical newspaper Limonka. In order to study the making of the NBP as a political and intellectual community, the piece discusses Limonka's editorial line, its graphic style, and the alternative cultural canon that this radical publication promoted, as well as several interviews with National-Bolshevik activists involved in this process. During its first years of existence, Limonka proposed a selection of controversial artistic, literary, and political role models, and the creation of an alternative fashion and lifestyle. The article argues that by provocatively combining totalitarian symbols, the aesthetics and posture of the historical avant-gardes, and Western counterculture, Limonka produced a collective narrative that contributed to the shaping of a new language of political protest in post-Soviet Russia. This resulted in a complex combination of stiob, a form of parody that involves an over-identification with its own object, and a neo-romantic impulse. This new discursive mode, which the article defines as “post-Soviet militant stiob” should be seen as part of a series of tactics of radical resistance to what the National-Bolsheviks saw as the dominant neoliberal discourse of the mid-1990s.

The paper explores forms of sociability and partner relationships among pious young Muslims in Sarajevo with a focus on the emic concepts of Islamic cafés (hospitality establishments perceived to operate according to Islamic moral principles) and Sharia dating (premarital relationships perceived to be sanctioned by Sharia). It draws on 10 months of ethnographic fieldwork conducted in different spaces of Islamic worship, learning, and sociability. This paper places the renewed interest in Islam within the context of a post-Dayton Bosnia characterized by complex and impractical government structures, lingering post-war grievances, and a brutal transition to a neoliberal capitalist economy. Although it acknowledges the continuing relevance of Islam as a resource for Bosniak nation building, it suggests treating the Muslim faith community as overlapping but distinct from the Bosniak community. By focusing on gendered interaction and partner-seeking strategies, this paper explores how young members of this faith community contextually negotiate their Islamic beliefs with mainstream local expectations of conventional behavior. The paper argues that believers’ varying responses to this predicament can be observed as an example of the localization of Islam, but they do not constitute a return to local, traditional gender roles and marriage practices, nor are they an introduction of foreign cultural patterns.

After having published a book, an author must take into account that his text remains unprotected, and becomes an object of new readings which reflect different social and political conditions, and the interests of subsequent generations of readers. Consequently, an author's concepts and opinions are open to various reflections and can be used as arguments or tools of analysis, as inspirations, models, or targets of criticism. These processes occur independently of an author's expectations and original goals. In a broader sense, we can agree with antiquity: “Habent sua fata libelli.” My book on the “Social Preconditions of National Revival” has been no exception, and it is a great pleasure for me to realize that this book has survived so many decades to live its “second life,” and that its original meanings and concepts inspire new interpretations, even if they have sometimes been misunderstood or exploited as arguments in totally different conditions and settings. It is a pleasant surprise to observe that my methods, typologies and generalizations can be (successfully?) discussed and used, naturally in a modified version, as tools to analyze developments and conflicts in very distant countries and times. Alexander Maxwell has given an excellent and well-informed overview of this differentiated and sometimes controversial second life. All other contributions to this issue, analyzing concrete cases, could be understood as indications that my scientific efforts have made sense, and sometimes inspired researchers up to the present day.

This study analyzes transformations of historiography and identity discourses by focusing on the Memory House of Ali Rıza Efendi (the father of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk) as a “site of historical consciousness” which was reconstructed in the western part of the Republic of Macedonia. The House, referred to by the villagers as the “Memory House of Atatürk,” was opened in 2014 in a Muslim village, Kocacık, with the support of the Turkish state. Through material and textual representations of Atatürk's life, the House speaks to the Turkishness and Turkish presence in the Balkans. The Turkishness, however, is imagined through the neo-Ottoman and Islamic prisms. The House thus becomes the locus of alternative interpretations of the past, and, consequently, narratives of Muslims’ identity and origin in the region. Moreover, as it is reconstructed at the nexus of the local and the transnational, the House is also called a symbol of the “politics of brotherhood” between Macedonia and Turkey. In this way, the institution embodies the reconstruction of the past not only at the local and national levels, but also at the international level.

Bosnia Herzegovina is a consociational democracy grounded on three ethnic constituencies. The postwar implementation of power-sharing mechanisms ended to favor ethnocracy and ethnopolitics, eventually compromising an inclusive democracy untied from ethnonational issues. This contribution explores the positive potential held by political parties and ordinary citizens “nonaligned” with the ethnopolitical scaffolding—therefore and consequently not explicitly included in the power-sharing system—because they hold and promote “alternative,” civic, and nonethnic forms of identification. Drawing upon interviews performed in Sarajevo, this article argues that citizens’ political disappointment and dissatisfaction are among the reasons contributing to the existence of a small, yet potentially critical, mass of citizens able to help adjusting an ethnically exclusive model of democracy.

The article seeks to explore the common ground between biopolitics, fashion, patriotism and nostalgia. Taking off from the Foucauldian notion of biopolitics as a control apparatus exerted over a population, I provide an insight into the modern construction of the Russian nation, where personal and collective sacrifice, traditional femininity and masculinity, orthodox religion, and the Great Patriotic War become the basis for patriotism. On carefully chosen case studies, I will show how the state directly and indirectly regulates people's lives by producing narratives, which are translated (in some cases designers act as mouthpieces for the state demographic or military politics) into fashionable discourses and, with a core of time, create specific gender norms – women are seen as fertile mothers giving birth to new soldiers, while men are shown as fighters and defenders of their nation. In the constructed discourses, conservative ideals become a ground for the creation of an idea of a nation as one biological body, where brothers and sisters are united together. In these fashionable narratives, people's bodies become a battlefield of domestic politics. Fashion produces a narrative of a healthy nation to ensure the healthy work- and military force.

Alignment with Europe has been a popular foreign policy objective among post-socialist nations. In the Republic of Georgia, discourse surrounding the country's Euro-Atlantic orientation surged in the decade after the 2003 Rose Revolution. While such discourse has been examined in the context of political reforms and national security goals, this article foregrounds how it was incorporated into alterations of the built environment. Focusing on the urban transformations of the city of Batumi after the rise to power of the United National Movement government, it demonstrates how architecture served as a tool for selectively rewriting Georgia's contemporary European identity. This article concentrates on two parallel initiatives to transform Batumi into a contemporary European city: the reconstruction of portions of the Old City and the new development along the seaside boulevard. Using evidence collected through qualitative methods, it further highlights the contradictions that emerged during this process of redevelopment and rebranding, as the state balanced initiatives for new development with other post-revolutionary state-building objectives, such as political reform and tourism-market production. Accordingly, it unpacks the various national and international politico-economic forces at play in the process of developing Batumi into the image of a contemporary European city.

For several years, various nationalist groups and the Russian state have been competing over nationalism as a political concept and for popular support to nationalist claims. This paper analyzes the relationship between the state and anti-government, ethnocentric nationalistic groups that gather annually in an event called “the Russian March.” Emphasis is on the change in that relationship that happened in 2014, when the state added efforts to channel and mobilize the nationalists to its previous repressive and controlling measures. The article conceptualizes the competition over the nationalist argument in contemporary Russia as a case of dissentful and consentful contention in hybrid regimes, and shows how the dissentful nationalists have been forced to make way for the more consentful ones. Until recently, the room for maneuver for the radical nationalists was relatively wide. The events in Ukraine, however, divided the nationalists, and since 2014 radical nationalists have faced increased state repression. At the same time, pro-government nationalist actors have strengthened, and new players have appeared in the field. These developments tell us not only about the Kremlin's diminished tolerance for dissentful contention, but also about the importance of the nationalist argument in Russian politics today.

The article examines the political and cultural processes of nation-building over thirty years of independence in Belarus. It argues that in becoming a nation-state Belarus has faced challenges similar to the other post-Soviet nations but has proved an exception in the choice of strategies it used to address them. The paper examines how, on the eve of independence, the nationalist elites devised policies aimed at consolidating statehood around the national revival in opposition to the Soviet past. It explores the role played by linguistic policy and historical memory as the two main arenas for implementing their visions of Belarusian identity. The paper then maps a shift in this trajectory from Lukashenka’s rise to power to a national project based on reappropriation of Soviet legacy. Up until 2020, the state effectively navigated a geopolitical environment and adjusted its sociocultural parameters to preempt the society’s shifting expectations. Finally, the paper reflects on how protests in 2020 demonstrated both the lack of support for Lukashenka and his reliance on the violent repression and external support for remaining in power. The war in Ukraine revealed limits of Belarus’s sovereignty, while the society’s ability to consolidate for its defense has been seriously undermined by the repression.

Both Yugoslav wars and Yugoslav basketball were conspicuous in Western media in the 1990s. While CNN transmitted scenes of horror from battlefields of Bosnia and Kosovo, several dozen professional athletes of Yugoslav background could be seen in action on U. S. sport channels. Yugoslavs, by far the most numerous among foreign players in the strongest basketball league in the world—the American professional basketball league (NBA)—sparked the audience's curiosity about their background and the peculiar Yugoslav style of basketball. The literature concerning the Yugoslav crisis and Balkan wars noted sporadic outbursts of ethnic hatred in sport arenas, but did not provide any detailed information on the otherwise important role of sport in Yugoslav history and society. Not even highly competent volumes such as Beyond Yugoslavia, which highlighted the country's culture, arts, religion, economy, and military, paid attention to what Yugoslavs called “the most important secondary issue in the world”—sport. Yet sport reveals not merely the pastimes of the Yugoslav peoples, but also the varieties of nationalism in the former Yugoslavia, including probably the most neglected of all local nationalisms: the official communist-era patriotic ideology of interethnic “brotherhood and unity.” The goal of this article is to highlight this type of nationalism manifested via state-directed sport using as a case study the most successful basketball program outside the United States.

Football (soccer) provides a useful prism for analysis of the long transition of the Serbian state and society since 1991. To a striking extent, the world of professional football and the attendant phenomena of financial corruption and football hooliganism have informed both the dissolution of the former Yugoslavia and the current concerted attempt to create a “European Serbia.” During the 1990s, football in Serbia to a significant extent became synonymous with organized crime and the criminalization of the Serbian state. Since 2000, the persistent phenomena of crime, violent hooliganism and lethargic reforms have mirrored the difficult and halting transition of the post-Milošević state. Although recent events highlight the reluctance of the Serbian authorities to confront these problems, both government and sports officials are coming to see reform of Serbian football as a key element of the establishment of the rule of law.

The five Central Asian Muslim republics (Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan) count many Christian—Orthodox, Catholic, Armenian and Protestant—minorities. Unlike the religious communities in the Near and Middle East, most Christians in Central Asia consist of Slavic/European minorities (Russians, Germans, Poles, Armenians, Greeks, etc.), which came in the area during the Russian colonization in the eighteenth-nineteenth centuries. The main traditionally Christian nationalities living in Central Asia are Slavs and Germans. Today, Russians are mainly present in Kazakhstan (4.5 million), in Kyrgyzstan (600,000) and in Uzbekistan (at least half a million). There are only several tens of thousand Russians in Turkmenistan and Tajikistan. Like Russians, the number of the other Slavic nationalities has considerably decreased in Central Asia since the last three decades. There are 50,000 Ukrainians in Kyrgyzstan, 500,000 in Kazakhstan and about 100,000 in Uzbekistan. Byelorussians number 111,000 in Kazakhstan, and about 20,000 in Uzbekistan. According to the 1999 census, there are only 47,000 Poles in Kazakhstan. Today there are 353,000 Germans in Kazakhstan, 21,000 in Kyrgyzstan, and less than 8,000 in Uzbekistan, and their community is nearly nonexistent in Turkmenistan and Tajikistan. Other nationalities are also present in the Christian communities, though more modestly: among them, Koreans (about 160,000 in Uzbekistan, close to 100,000 in Kazakhstan in 1999), Greeks (10,000 in Uzbekistan), Tatars (248,000 in Kazakhstan) as well as Armenians (there remained 40,000 Armenians in Turkmenistan in 1995, with 42,000 in Uzbekistan today). Armenians have only one cult building in Samarkand. Moreover, after the fall of the USSR, more and more natives have been converted to Christianity: many—especially Protestant—missions, are now acting among Kazakhs, Kyrgyz, Uzbeks, etc.

This research examines and analyzes how the politicization of the environmental issue in Armenia led to the emergence of the Nagorno-Karabakh (N-K) nationalist movement in Azerbaijan as the USSR went into terminal decline in 1991. It is important to stress that the Karabakh movement that emerged in Armenia in February 1988 with a clear agenda on serious ecological problems escalated quickly in the subsequent weeks and months to demand the preservation of the cultural identity of Karabakh Armenians in Azerbaijan. Air pollution of Yerevan, Ashdarag, Yegheknatsor, and later Sdepanavan and Ghapan was a significant threat to the existence of the Armenian people. For the Armenians, air pollution was ecological genocide, and cultural discrimination against Karabakh Armenians was cultural genocide. The Armenians associated ecological and cultural genocides with the 1915 genocide committed by the Ottoman Empire against the Armenian nation. This study shows that initially the Karabakh movement did not have political goals. However, as it intensified with an enormous consciousness it transformed to a nationalist movement with a political and ecological agenda. This study also analyzes ethnic mobilization by activists in Armenia and the emergence of the N-K nationalist movement from 1985 to 1991 in light of Soviet nationalities policy and the window of opportunity caused by the political transformation at the center (Moscow). The activists of the environmental and nationalist movements were the same.

Katherine Verdery writes that “[i]n the modern period, nation has become a potent symbol and basis of classification within an international system of nation states”; in turn, nationalism “is a political utilization of the symbol nation through discourse and political activity, as well as the sentiment that draws people into responding to this symbol's use.” However, the idea of “nation state” and its functioning can be seen as a part of the larger hegemonic constructions that operate on the level of “common” beliefs that legitimize existing social hierarchies and divisions of economic resources, and on the level of relationships between states and nations.

There are two common ways of reflecting upon the disintegration of the former Yugoslavia. The first one, journalistic, transmits and animates the images of horror, brutality, deprivation, and displacement. The second one, historicist—as opposed to historical—invests its energy into interpretation, construction and reconstruction of the past, attributing it with a self-explanatory power. “When and where did it all start? … So what does the past tell us?” (Sinclair-Loutit, 1994, p. 230). In this way, history is given the power to serve as an undisputed indicator and guide in the disarray of myths and facts. Both these positions share a common denominator; they both help us to assume a position of contemporary voyeurs—comfortable, distant observers who can do nothing but consume the provided imagery.

Traditionally in Eastern Europe, one national group constituted a majority in the countryside but a minority in the urban areas. Thus, while the cities of Eastern Europe possessed a disproportionate share of an area's political and socio-economic resources, for the most part they were ethnically alien to the peasantry. This was not a problem until the nineteenth century, which by 1914 turned Eastern Europe into a cauldron of inter-ethnic and anti-Semitic tensions. In the subsequent struggle for power, the national movements of both the urban and rural areas claimed the cities as well as the surrounding countryside. Inasmuch as these movements did not possess a common set of interests, whatever the proposed solution — whether territorial autonomy, irredentism, independence, expansion, or the maintenance of the status quo — hardly any provision was made for minority rights.