Independence forced Ukraine to face a set of statehood and nationhood challenges. State and institution building progressed quickly and effectively. In 1996 the country adopted a constitution and based its institution building on pre-existing ones. Having been a Soviet Republic, Ukraine's institutions were shaped well before 1991—if we exclude the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the diplomatic corps. The country also diligently quelled Crimean separatism by granting a high level of autonomy to the region, with Kiev retaining control of financial matters.

Fereydani Georgians are the only Georgian-speaking ethnic group in Iran. Despite being all that is left of the once vast and important Georgian-speaking community in Iran, this ethnic group is still largely unknown, both inside and outside Iran. There is a general consensus that Georgians have played a pivotal role in Iran's history since the seventeenth century. Despite this, the Fereydani Georgians are also still relatively unknown within Iran itself. Also in Georgia there is some (popular) knowledge about them. Nevertheless, even this knowledge is rudimentary and is plagued by a large number of misconceptions. The Fereydani Georgians are virtually unknown outside Iran and Georgia.

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.

One of the greatest challenges currently facing the new states in Central and Eastern Europe is educational reform. After obtaining independence in the early 1990s, these states were confronted with the immense task of transforming an outdated centralized education system, which was aimed at delivering a loyal communist workforce, into a modern system that would be much more responsive to consumer demands and would recognize and further individual talent. The immensity of the undertaking lies in the fact that three discourses make simultaneous demands on the education system: nation building, democratization and globalization.

The conventional approach to describing ethno-cultural relations in a particular nation-state is in terms of the majority/minority dichotomy, that is, a representation of a society as consisting of the core nation and a minority or number of minorities alongside it. The minorities are usually of different ethnic origin, possess distinct linguistic-cultural characteristics and tend to be represented as groups that, owing to their minority status, are discriminated against. This approach has been adopted in Ukraine where in official discourse and state documents the core nation co-exists with national minorities. Ethno-cultural diversity is addressed by policy makers and the academic community, most often in terms of “national minorities,” “protection of minority rights,” “provision of schooling for minorities” and so forth. Ukrainian scholars and policy makers tend to use the same concepts as their counterparts in the West, albeit often modifying them to Ukrainian circumstances. However, as will be argued, this dichotomous treatment of the titular majority and the minority is ill-suited to Ukraine's circumstances as even the very concept of “minority” is unclear owing to the blurred sense of identity amongst many Ukrainians and Russians.

Trivial though they may seem, popular culture and mass media actually present an important part of our quotidian and play significant roles in defining dimensions of our environments—past and present, internal as well as external. Mediatized images of bygone times and faraway places invade and transfix the physical geographies of the living environment; invade and transfix, extremely subtly, symbolic geographies of every single human being. Despite the fictitious nature and perceived triviality of cinema, literature and music, they feature as modes of representation and communication for a wide array of topics and issues that present an important part of human existence. Therefore, archaeology of popular culture might be a useful complement to other past-reconstructing practices.

The words people use reflect their view of the world. In totalitarian societies the primary goal of a regime's language is to influence public opinion. A closer inspection of the most exploited phrases in Serbian public discourse in the period of the late 1980s until 2000 reveals a strong presence of propagandistic language. Thus, it can be argued that the consequences of Slobodan Milošević's politics are visible not only in the devastation of the people and the country but also in the sphere of Serbian public discourse. It is not only that his politics influenced the language. Rather, it is precisely because of the rich and diversified propaganda language of the regime that Slobodan Milošević's was able to maintain his firm grip on power in Serbia for 13 years.

“Belgrade ‘Targets’ Find Unity ‘From Heaven,’” read the front-page headline of a somewhat staggered New York Times, only five days after NATO bombs began falling on Serbia. Instead of hiding in bomb shelters or, as US officials had hoped, rebelling against their government, Serbs were busy singing patriotic songs at public squares, throwing rocks at the Goethe Institute, wearing medieval Serbian military uniforms and carrying signs equating Bill Clinton to Ottoman emperors, Croatian fascists and Napoleon. Thus a population which had for years expressed nothing but discontent with its government suddenly became “unified from heaven—but by the bombs, not by God.” Uniting them “behind their soldiers, their Kosovo and even President Slobodan Milošević” was, Belgrade's then-Mayor explained, a seemingly incomprehensible mélange of “myth and superstition.”

The blood-and-soil concept relates to nationalism tied to land that is tied to specific bloodlines—meaning reconsideration of national membership on the basis of ethnicity. Soil affiliation implies objective criteria of national membership, related to birthplace or residence and associated with providing roots (homeland attachments, friends, marriage, children, or citizenship). The idea of blood and soil is about rejecting a soil claim in those with different, “wrong,” blood. As part of national purification, blood-and-soil nationalism emerges as a political process using the “blood” concept as a mechanism to restrict national membership—to reconsider the soil benefits by not making them accessible to everybody. In this work I will use the term “blood and soil'” to stress the exclusive nature of Soviet Russian ethnonationalism in relation to Jews as its number one target and to show the controversy surrounding Soviet membership.

To many in both the East and the West it seemed axiomatic that the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 was due to “nationality reasons,” which were viewed as a natural process in the last empire's decline. Then, during the democratic reform of a totalitarian state, ethnic minority rights were first spoken of, and the growth of national self-awareness appeared to be an integral part of society's liberalization. Time has since shown that liberal changes in the economy and in the political and social spheres are not always accompanied by the establishment of social justice; indeed, it has frequently been minorities who are among the most unfortunate and marginalized groups in society. Defending the rights of minorities and combating ethnic and racial discrimination remains one of the most relevant issues in practically all post-socialist countries of the former Soviet Union and Eastern and Central Europe.

Official government educational pronouncements and policy in the Kyrgyz Republic have called for wider access and participation in higher education as an essential part of the general strategy to build democracy and a market economy. The number of higher education institutions (vuzy) has increased from approximately 10 at the end of the Soviet period to 50 institutions, with over 200,000 students now in attendance. Various international statistical sources show that higher education enrollments peaked above 70% of secondary school graduates in the early 1990s. For the past decade, these figures are lower yet still substantial. UNDP reports between 53% and 63%, while the World Bank and UNESCO report between 41% and 45%. In any of these calculations, however, higher education enrollments in Kyrgyzstan have at least trebled since independence, which is even more remarkable considering that the Kyrgyz system of higher education has become almost entirely paid for by students and parents rather than by the national government.

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.

Popular music is one of the cultural phenomena that has been most shared among the peoples inhabiting the territory of the former Yugoslavia; indeed, considering the persistence of a common popular music culture there even after the break up of the Yugoslav federation in 1991, there is perhaps little in cultural life that unites them more. It was in the 1950s that a Yugoslav popular music culture emerged through the development of local festivals, radio programs and a recording industry, at a time when popular music was also referred to as “dance,” “entertainment” or “light” music, and when jazz, pop and, by the end of the decade, rock and roll were the styles of it that were being listened to in Yugoslavia and around the world. However, the development of a Yugoslav popular music culture at this time was rooted not only in international cultural trends but was also shaped by the domestic and foreign policies that were pursued by the ruling Communist Party of Yugoslavia (CPY), which was renamed the League of Communists of Yugoslavia (LCY) in 1952. Through its cultural, economic and foreign policies, the party sought to define Yugoslavia's position in Cold War international relations, develop a sense of Yugoslav identity among its multinational citizenry, and reconstruct and modernize a country that had suffered some of the greatest losses in Europe in the Second World War—and which had, just before it, been one of the Continent's least developed states, not only economically but also in terms of cultural infrastructure. In the cultural sphere, investments were needed immediately after the war to redress the facts that Yugoslavia had high rates of illiteracy and low rates of radio ownership by European standards, that cultural activities beyond folklore remained the purview of a small urban elite, and that it lacked musical artists, schools and instruments—with great disparities in all of these measures existing between its more developed northern areas (Slovenia, Croatia and northern Serbia) and the poorer south (Bosnia-Herzegovina, Macedonia, Montenegro and southern Serbia). For example, with regards to radio ownership, in 1946 the number of individuals per radio ranged from 40 in Slovenia, 48 in Croatia and 91 in Serbia to 137 in Macedonia, 288 in Bosnia-Herzegovina and 702 in Montenegro, with the average for all of Yugoslavia being 78.

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.

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.

On 15 February 2007 Vladimir Putin accepted the resignation of Alu Alkhanov as President of Chechnya and nominated the Chechen prime minister—Ramzan Kadyrov—to act as his successor. This appointment, duly rubber-stamped by Chechnya's parliament, brought to an end to more than four months of speculation since 5 October 2006, when Kadyrov attained the age of 30 and thus became eligible for the post of Chechnya's head of state. Kadyrov's elevation to de jure rather than de facto supremacy in Chechen society not only completed the final stage of the remarkably rapid transformation of this one-time rebel, juvenile thug and political ingénue but also put Putin's policy of Chechenization firmly back on track, which had been effectively derailed since the assassination of Chechnya's first pro-Russian president—Akhmad Kadyrov—Ramzan's father, in May 2004.

Every nation has its own ways of telling its national story. Such narratives attempt to incorporate and explain the terms of a nation's history, culture, language, territory, economic welfare, and its citizens' sense of belonging. Some national stories are more complicated than others and require specific terminology to describe their nation and its “other.” Belarus is one of these complicated cases. Belarusian national character is often defined by the concept of tuteishaść, or “localness,” by which the people of Belarus identify themselves in relation to other nations and countries.