During the last years of the Second World War, some 30,000 Yugoslav refugees found shelter in the Egyptian desert from the German occupation of Dalmatia. In the camp El Shatt, the Partisan movement, the nascent UN, western aid groups, and the British Army worked together to take care of the refugees and also to negotiate future relations. The Communist Party, with victory in Yugoslavia in sight, sought to showcase its ability to organize and motivate its future citizens. Thus, the camps in Egypt became a testing ground for state-building back home. The article will explore the tensions that emerged between the self-confident Partisans, the suspicious British and UN officials, and the refugees, who experienced the end of the war in the Egyptian desert.

Meykhana is spoken word improvisation, verbal recitatives, and a kind of entertainment that in the last two decades has largely spread across Azerbaijan. Contemporary meykhana, although it retains its characteristic rhythm, increasingly resembles popular songs rather than classical Middle Eastern poetry, and is now often being sung, not read. Thus, in its form and function, it has become an element of mass popular culture. At the same time, meykhana is increasingly considered to be one of the national symbols on a par with other traditional musical genres such as mugham and ashig art. Meykhana's contemporary dual nature, which is understood differently by different constituencies within the Azerbaijani population, with their own politicized agenda, is inherently nationalist in nature. Using such aspects of nationalism as ethnicity, tradition, modernization, and folkloricization I analyze different levels of meykhana and the various actors involved in its implementation. This paper contributes a case study to the rich body of literature on nationalism in musical performances by analyzing the ways in which identities are constructed and mobilized.

Following the argument of urban geographers that “superstar” cities are the engines of economic growth in a globalized era, Kremlin advisor Aleksei Kudrin and others have argued that Russia should invest in a handful of major cities including Moscow and St. Petersburg. That advice has now become part of official government planning. In stark contrast to the developed world, however, Russia's population is not concentrated in a few urban centers, but in several hundred medium-sized cities and towns, many distributed across Russia's vast territory, often far from other metropolitan agglomerations. These include more than a hundred officially-designated “monotowns,” whose fate is dependent on a single industry, which the government ranks according to the severity of their “socio-economic conditions.” This paper will explore the dilemmas faced by monotowns in particular, and the challenge to authorities of balancing the need for new economic growth from urban metropolises against preventing social unrest in declining industrial communities.