Estonia enjoys a very delicate geographic position. It is located not just in the neighborhood of Russia, which is modernizing or Westernizing with fluctuating success, but it is situated strategically on the border of two civilizations reminiscent of Samuel P. Huntington's thought-provoking article in the journal Foreign Affairs. However, Estonia has not become a borderland in the classical meaning of the term since the country belongs historically and integrally to the sphere of the so-called Lutheran-German civilization. For centuries this has blocked attempts from the East to incorporate the northern Baltics (which include Finland) into the Orthodox-Slavic Eastern civilization. In the context of conflicting civilizations, each such invasion has been not so much an ethnic matter but rather one of clashing civilizations and of a choice between two competing civilizations. In the last couple of years, Europe has once again witnessed the failure of one more Eastern assault that was launched with the signing in 1939 of the Hitler-Stalin agreement, the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact.

This study analyzes circumstances tied to the implementation of the Dayton Agreement’s provision for the reunification of Sarajevo. Three months after the signing, Sarajevo was again a united city territorially, but pre-war inhabitants of Sarajevo who identified themselves as Serbs were almost entirely absent from the reunited town under the control of the Federation government. This article addresses the causes of the flight of the Serbs, who had been living in Sarajevo’s suburbs before the start of the Bosnian war and stayed, in their view, to defend their homes. I argue that the incentives that led a majority of Sarajevan Serbs to leave the city and its surroundings were the result of actions not only of the Serb leadership but also of Bosniak leaders and the international community. Our analysis is complementary to the scholarship examining the impact of massive population migrations and displacement in the aftermath of conflicts. I analyze the dynamics of Sarajevo’s unification within the Federation and its consequences, demonstrating that once a partition is accepted at a higher level, it is almost impossible to prevent its emergence on a local level.

National identity is constructed through successive identifications with significant Others. This article discusses the phenomenon of change and continuity in Czech identity. It is focused here on the identification towards the EU, which has become the most significant Other of today in two ways: (a) (change) contributing to overcoming the identity crisis provoked by the drastic changes that occurred between 1989 and 1993 (change of regime, disappearance of the USSR and the break-up of Czechoslovakia), and therefore the subsequent drastic changes in relations with past significant Others: communism, the USSR, and the Slovaks; and (b) (continuity) reaffirming one of the fundamental elements during the national revival in the nineteenth century, democracy, upon which the various identifications towards the EU have been aligned. According to the differing interpretations of what democracy means, and three other criteria of the “levels of Othering,” the EU has been “imagined,” on the one hand, as an entity where Czechs can flourish in their identity and ensure their freedom and democratic values (positive Other), and, on the other, as an “oppressor” entity which portrays democratic deficit, restricts freedom, and threatens Czech national identity (negative Other).

Scholars had already suggested the relationship of some Finno-Ugrian languages in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but the linguistic affinity of the Finno-Ugrian languages was proven only at the end of the eighteenth century by two Hungarian pioneers of comparative linguistics, János Sajnovics and Sámuel Gyarmathi. Henrik Gabriel Porthan (1739-1804), professor of rhetoric and a great humanist, brought their ideas to Finland. He was strongly influenced by August Ludwig Schlözer, author of a comprehensive and critical survey of the history of the Finno-Ugrian peoples. Having studied Sajnovics' work in Göttingen, Porthan published an extensive account of it in a Finnish newspaper in 1779, demolishing previous ideas about the kinship between Finnish and Hebrew. Porthan urged Finnish scholars to investigate the Finno-Ugrian languages of Russia, of which very little was then known (some lists of words and short grammars were all that was available).

Current approaches to democratic state building place serious conceptual limits on policy options. A democratic future for Bosnia's people will require far more searching engagement with identity formation and its politicization than reform efforts have so far contemplated. Theories of discursive democracy illuminate how this might be possible. We deploy the discursive idea of symbolic capital to show how one might identify the lines along which people in Bosnia could constitute meaningful, internally legitimated political communities - or that would indicate the experiment was not worth attempting. Unless advocates of democratic state building can articulate, rather than assume, a sufficiency of common ground among the populations’ multiple, overlapping and conflicting identities, they may have to revert to the default of separate political communities.

In June 1996, the newly reconstructed waterfront in Cheboksary, the capital of the Chuvash Republic, was officially opened with a formal ceremony led by the President of the Republic, Nikolai Fedorov, and attended by the Patriarch of All Russia, Alexei II. “We have built a road to the temple,” the President declared. In a literal sense, he was referring to the construction of an embankment leading to one of the city's oldest Orthodox churches. But his phrase had a symbolic meaning as well. Metaphorically the phrase equated the physical reconstruction of the capital city with the cultural and spiritual revival of the Chuvash nation.

Nationalism became the bane of the Soviet empire. The disintegration of the USSR due to nationalistic forces has occurred with a swiftness that few, if any, Western Sovietologists anticipated. The four Central Asian states, with high rates of population growth and a strategic location at the crossroads of Europe, the Middle East and South Asia, now acquire a new significance. Of these Uzbekistan, with a population of twenty million, seventy percent of whom belong to the titular national group, looms largest in terms of demographic and economic potential. The population of Uzbekistan is almost twice as large as the other nascent Central Asian nations combined, and despite severe ecological damage, produces almost two thirds of the cotton in the region, along with natural gas, gold and other minerals.

For all its geographical, cultural and political uniqueness, the definition of the Caucasus as a region is problematic. Geographers, geologists, political scientists, anthropologists and historians—all have disagreements between themselves and each other about such issues as what constitutes its borders, and what are the features of both its homogeneity and heterogeneity. Often, the use by representatives of one discipline of the conclusions and terminology from other disciplines in order to substantiate their positions complicates the problem even further. In any case, in general geographical terms the Caucasus is the territory between the Black, Azov and Caspian Seas, extending from the Kuma-Manych depression in the north to Georgia's and Armenia's borders with Turkey, and Azerbaijan's borders with Iran in the south. In physical-geological terms the Caucasus is predominantly a mountainous region which is shaped by the trajectories of the two mountain ranges, namely the Greater and Lesser Caucasus. The trajectory of the Greater Caucasus represents a diagonal stretching from the north-west to the southeast, while the trajectory of the Lesser Caucasus forms an ellipsoidal bow. At the Suram Passage the Lesser and Greater Caucasus practically merge. The Caucasus mountain range is divided lengthwise into the western Caucasus which stretches to Elbrus; the central Caucasus, which is between the Elbrus and Kazbek mountains; and the eastern Caucasus, which is to the east of the Kazbek.

This article explores the policies of Nazi Germany towards the Karaites, a group of Jewish ancestry which emerged during the seventh to the ninth centuries CE, when its followers rejected the mainstream Jewish interpretation of Tanakh. Karaite communities flourished in Persia, Turkey, Egypt, Crimea, and Lithuania. From 1938 to 1944, the Nazi bureaucracy and scholarship examined the question of whether the Karaites were of Jewish origin, practiced Judaism and had to be treated as Jews. Because of its proximity to Judenpolitik and later to the Muslim factor, the subject got drawn into the world of Nazi grand policy and became the instrument of internecine power struggles between various agencies in Berlin. The Muslim factor in this context is construed as German cultivation of a special relationship with the Muslim world with an eye to political dividends in the Middle East and elsewhere. Nazi views of the Karaites’ racial origin and religion played a major role in their policy towards the group. However, as the tides of the war turned against the Germans, various Nazi agencies demonstrated growing flexibility either to re-tailor the Karaites’ racial credentials or to entirely gloss over them in the name of “national interests,” i.e. a euphemism used to disguise Nazi Germany's overtures to the Muslim world.

In December 1995, Kazakstan celebrated its fifth anniversary as a sovereign state, although the rich, tumultuous history of the Kazaks themselves encompasses more than five centuries. The complexity of this history is revealed in a statement by Kemal Akishev, a well-known archeologist: “Kazakstan reveals itself through territorial contact, where, beginning in ancient times, infiltration and aggression, immigration and ethnic immigration, the integration and spreading of culture, and racial and linguistic palimpsests took place.” The ethnogenesis of the Kazak people can be divided into three periods: the pre-Turkic, the Turkic, and the Turko-Mongolian periods. The development of modern Kazakstan likewise falls into three periods: the pre-revolutionary, the Soviet, and the modern republic.

Once upon a time there lived a rich widow, with a beautiful face and vigorous body, not old and not young, by the name of Mother Russia. She had been married twice, the first time to the peasant-bogatyr Mikula Selianinovich, and the second to the no less renowned warrior-bogatyr Il'ia Muromets.

Her husbands had left her countless riches. And God had blessed both her marriages with many children. For the most part, her children were hard-working people and valiant warriors. They worked their father's land and protected it from hostile neighbors.

But, as always happens, the family was not without its black sheep. Mother Russia also had some children who were good-for-nothings, idlers, drunkards, and empty-headed chatterboxes. And it was not surprising that these good-for-nothings grabbed power over all the widow's other children.

As the loving mother began to grieve and take ill from their indecent debauchery, they assumed control over her and all her possessions. And they began to squander and drink up her wealth, and to send all sorts of healers to try and cure their sick mother.

In the summer of 1978, a Crimean Tatar man named Musa Mamut walked out of his home in a small village in the Crimea toward a policeman waiting for him at his front gate. He was to be taken to the station for questioning, and quite possibly arrested for “violation of the passport regime.” But Mamut had already drenched himself with gasoline and, lighting a match, was engulfed in flames. He ran toward the policeman, who ran the other way. A deliveryman tripped Musa, and two friends who had been passing by extinguished the flames. His friends took him to the Simferopol city hospital, where he died six days later, never expressing any regret for what he did.

By analysing two commemorative events organized shortly before and after the 2010 parliamentary elections in Slovakia, this article demonstrates how the Prime Minister Robert Fico and his collaborators exploited these ceremonies to promote a more inclusive definition of political community than their right-wing counterparts. Although commentators have interpreted the continuous political success of the political party Smer-SD in terms of negatively connotated nationalism and national populism, Fico's discursive framework allows him to address those who have been stigmatized by post-1989 neoliberalism, especially former communists and people unable or unwilling to adapt to the rapid changes brought about by post-socialist social, economic, political as well as cultural transition(s). Instead of backwardness, Fico's anti-elitist and anti-capitalist rhetoric opened a new symbolic universe to these groups. The history narratives that formed an important part of this universe were not used to exclude the Other, but rather to create a meaningful future for those who have been ignored by (neo-)liberal ideals. This paper argues for an interpretation of post-socialist populist parties that would take into account culturally relevant symbolic structures advanced by these parties.

For more than six years, Ukrainian society has been constantly searching for ideas as to how to write a new “national biography.” In a society divided by armed conflict, the so-called decommunization process is considered to be an idea capable of uniting a nation. This process started back in 2015, with the passing of a specific law that required not only the deconstruction of Soviet-time monuments in public spaces, but also a huge decommunization of place names. The article will explore the main practices of place (re-)naming during the different stages of the decommunization (but not de-ideologization) of spaces, as well as describing the problems that may emerge in society as a result of a rapid transition from one narrative to another. Based on a case study of spatial identities of internally displaced people, I am going to answer the question of how people perceive renamed spaces, and how they reclaim and re-appropriate these spaces in the midst of an identity crisis.

This review article outlines the progress that the literature on the causes of ethnic cleansing has made in the last 10–15 years. The article specifically focuses on two lines of research that have expanded our understanding of ethnic cleansing: (a) the studies that focus on the role of wars (this literature can in turn be divided into those works that treat “wars as strategic environments” and those that treat “wars as transformational forces”); (b) the studies that focus on the pre-war domestic or international conditions that hinder or promote ethnic cleansing. The last section of the article suggests several future avenues of research that could further refine the study of ethnic cleansing and its relationship to other types of mass violence.

Despite its early promise, Armenia's transition to democracy has stalled. The literature on post-Communist transitions ascribes this outcome to the autocratic preferences of its first generation of leaders, and particularly the country's first president Levon Ter-Petrossian. I argue in this article that that literature depicts a profoundly distorted picture of the Armenian politics of the 1990s. The failure of Armenia's transition was primarily due to the conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh and the political processes it set in motion.

The article aims to compare the conditions of migrants from Central Asia into Russia with that of migrants from the Maghreb into France. Despite many similarities in conditions (related to the experience of social exclusion), there are deep differences. The precarious legal status of the majority of Central Asian newcomers in Russia has prevented them from embarking on an effective struggle for public recognition; this is in sharp contrast with North African newcomers in France who have been engaged in such struggle since the 1980s. In addition, Islam plays different roles in the migrants’ perceptions by host societies and in identification of the migrants themselves. Whereas Islam has become a marker of overarching collective identity among the Maghreb migrants’ descendants, this is not the case with Central Asians in Russia, for whom Islam remains part of their individual identity, rather than the basis of social consolidation and political mobilization.

The Czech–German borderlands are an archetypal European border region. They evoke not only Cold War histories, but also shelter layers of European memories of the ethnic reshaping of early post-war Europe. By means of life story interviews with German speakers of the border region, this article analyzes the symbolic meaning of and the individual dealing with the local Iron Curtain. It will shed light on the biographical and narrative interconnectedness of experiences of ethnic cleansing in the early post-war period and retrospective perceptions of the Iron Curtain in these borderlands. In particular, it inquires whether and to what extent the local Iron Curtain intensified fractures caused by the region's post-and pre-war attempts to halt the multiethnic composition of the border communities. The article suggests that the local Czech–German Iron Curtain would have never endured as strongly if the border communities’ common identity had not already been severely damaged in the course of the region's traumatic history and forced population transfers.

It has already been pointed out by many scholars that the supranational Soviet state meets many sociological criteria of an empire. Thus, it is populated by many different ethnic groups; they did not join the state voluntarily, having all been conquered in the past or incorporated into the state by force; and they are still forcefully kept together, even though force is far from being the only factor. Last but not least, the Soviet empire, like any other, has one dominating nation: the Russians. Thus, many regularities in other empires may also be applicable to the Soviet Union.

In 2000, when conducting a household survey as part of my research on consumption and ethnicity in the small western Macedonian town of Kumanovo, I received explicit proof of how important education has become for ethnic Albanians. It was a Friday afternoon on a hot summer day. I was in my top-floor apartment, working with my research assistant, Adnan, a 28-year-old ethnic Albanian man who had been helping me for the past year. We had grown to be a well-synchronized team. It was his turn to dictate while I entered data from the survey into the computer. The questionnaire concerned interior decorations, but it began with several general questions about the ages, education, and number of family members. After we finished entering around thirty of the questionnaires completed in Albanian, Adnan suddenly stood up without a word. He went into the kitchen, and started drinking water from the first thing he saw, which was an empty olive jar drying on the dish rack. Then he came back, clearly upset. He wiped the sweat from his forehead with the upper part of his hand, and exclaimed,