Suvremene teme / Contemporary Issues is a peer-reviewed online journal of the Political Science Research Centre (Zagreb), with a focus on Southeastern Europe. It publishes research in Croatian and English in the areas of political science, sociology, contemporary history,
philosophy, law and economics.
Showing posts with label history. Show all posts
Showing posts with label history. Show all posts
Friday, May 3, 2013
Monday, October 11, 2010
Call for Papers: Continuity and Change in Southeastern Europe
Posted on behalf of
Ilyana Sawka
Program Coordinator
Kokkalis Program on Southeastern & East-Central Europe
A Harvard University conference – February 4, 2011
The Kokkalis Program on Southeastern and East-Central Europe, John F. Kennedy School of Government, and the Southeastern Europe Study Group, Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies, Harvard University, invite scholars, researchers, university faculty, public policy practitioners, and graduate students at advanced stages of research to submit 500-word proposals for papers to be delivered at the symposium “Continuity and Change in Southeastern Europe” on February 4, 2011, at Harvard University.
Deadline for submission: November 15, 2010. Proposals should be submitted along with a recent CV to Andrew Hall at Andrew_Hall@hks.harvard.edu. Small stipends for travel and accommodation will be available for selected participants.
Proposals must fall into one of the below thematic units:
I) Institutional Legacies: Tracing Historical Continuities
Over the last century and a half, Southeastern Europe has been marked by a large number of critical junctures: from the collapse of multinational empires to the long period of wars form 1912-18 and World War II to the emergence of Communist states and their collapse. These monumental changes often disguise lines of continuity, especially in regard to institutions. This panel will bring together papers that help understand how and why institutional continuities and legacies persist over time. Avoiding historical determinism, the papers will shed light on particular paths institutional developments have taken and how this helps understand Southeastern Europe today. From ethnographic micro-cases to larger comparative studies, papers representing a variety of disciplines and approaches are welcome.
Chair: Dr. Florian Bieber, Editor-in-Chief, Nationalities Papers
II) Domestic-International Relationships in Political Reform in Southeastern Europe
What do case studies of political reform in post-socialist Southeastern Europe tell us about the conditions under which international actors can work together with domestic actors to develop institutions that are responsive to and valued by ordinary citizens? How have domestic actors in Southeastern Europe been able to incorporate domestic values and traditions into new institutions in the face of pressure to adopt Western models? Under what conditions are international actors who promote reform sensitive to local knowledge? This panel seeks to learn from case studies of reform that are considered unsuccessful, as well as those considered successful. Papers will increase our understanding of the processes and outcomes of political reform viewed as valuable by Southeastern European peoples through investigations of case studies that cover various Southeast European countries and issue areas.
Chair: Dr. Paula Pickering, Associate Professor, Department of Government, College of William and Mary
III) Gender, Nation and Globalization
The last two decades have been a time of tremendous upheaval for the nations of Southeastern Europe, which have variously weathered the storms of sudden economic change, political disintegration, social instability, increasing crime and corruption, massive out migration, violence, and war. Most recently, the region has been wracked with the economic turmoil of the global financial crisis and individual men and women are facing the ever-growing hardships of recession and IMF-imposed structural adjustment. Throughout these twenty years, idealized notions of masculinity and femininity have shifted and been reimagined to take account of the local realities in an era of globalization. In some cases, traditional gender norms and expectations have been subverted and/or overthrown altogether, with both men and women gaining from an increase of possible gender subjectivities. In other cases, traditional roles for what makes a “real man” or a “good woman” have reasserted themselves with newfound force, finding allies in new or old religious movements and nationalist political rhetorics. This panel aims to explore the continuities and changes in gender norms and gender politics in Southeastern Europe, and welcomes all papers that explore these dynamics with an eye to seeing the complex interactions between local and global forces.
Chair: Dr. Kristen Ghodsee, Associate Professor of Gender and Women's Studies, Bowdoin College
Areas of focus: Albania § Bosnia-Herzegovina § Bulgaria § Croatia § Cyprus § F.Y.R. of Macedonia § Greece § Hungary § Kosovo § Moldova § Montenegro § Romania § Serbia § Slovenia § Turkey
For more information on the Kokkalis Program, visit:
http://www.hks.harvard.edu/kokkalis
Ilyana Sawka
Program Coordinator
Kokkalis Program on Southeastern & East-Central Europe
A Harvard University conference – February 4, 2011
The Kokkalis Program on Southeastern and East-Central Europe, John F. Kennedy School of Government, and the Southeastern Europe Study Group, Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies, Harvard University, invite scholars, researchers, university faculty, public policy practitioners, and graduate students at advanced stages of research to submit 500-word proposals for papers to be delivered at the symposium “Continuity and Change in Southeastern Europe” on February 4, 2011, at Harvard University.
Deadline for submission: November 15, 2010. Proposals should be submitted along with a recent CV to Andrew Hall at Andrew_Hall@hks.harvard.edu. Small stipends for travel and accommodation will be available for selected participants.
Proposals must fall into one of the below thematic units:
I) Institutional Legacies: Tracing Historical Continuities
Over the last century and a half, Southeastern Europe has been marked by a large number of critical junctures: from the collapse of multinational empires to the long period of wars form 1912-18 and World War II to the emergence of Communist states and their collapse. These monumental changes often disguise lines of continuity, especially in regard to institutions. This panel will bring together papers that help understand how and why institutional continuities and legacies persist over time. Avoiding historical determinism, the papers will shed light on particular paths institutional developments have taken and how this helps understand Southeastern Europe today. From ethnographic micro-cases to larger comparative studies, papers representing a variety of disciplines and approaches are welcome.
Chair: Dr. Florian Bieber, Editor-in-Chief, Nationalities Papers
II) Domestic-International Relationships in Political Reform in Southeastern Europe
What do case studies of political reform in post-socialist Southeastern Europe tell us about the conditions under which international actors can work together with domestic actors to develop institutions that are responsive to and valued by ordinary citizens? How have domestic actors in Southeastern Europe been able to incorporate domestic values and traditions into new institutions in the face of pressure to adopt Western models? Under what conditions are international actors who promote reform sensitive to local knowledge? This panel seeks to learn from case studies of reform that are considered unsuccessful, as well as those considered successful. Papers will increase our understanding of the processes and outcomes of political reform viewed as valuable by Southeastern European peoples through investigations of case studies that cover various Southeast European countries and issue areas.
Chair: Dr. Paula Pickering, Associate Professor, Department of Government, College of William and Mary
III) Gender, Nation and Globalization
The last two decades have been a time of tremendous upheaval for the nations of Southeastern Europe, which have variously weathered the storms of sudden economic change, political disintegration, social instability, increasing crime and corruption, massive out migration, violence, and war. Most recently, the region has been wracked with the economic turmoil of the global financial crisis and individual men and women are facing the ever-growing hardships of recession and IMF-imposed structural adjustment. Throughout these twenty years, idealized notions of masculinity and femininity have shifted and been reimagined to take account of the local realities in an era of globalization. In some cases, traditional gender norms and expectations have been subverted and/or overthrown altogether, with both men and women gaining from an increase of possible gender subjectivities. In other cases, traditional roles for what makes a “real man” or a “good woman” have reasserted themselves with newfound force, finding allies in new or old religious movements and nationalist political rhetorics. This panel aims to explore the continuities and changes in gender norms and gender politics in Southeastern Europe, and welcomes all papers that explore these dynamics with an eye to seeing the complex interactions between local and global forces.
Chair: Dr. Kristen Ghodsee, Associate Professor of Gender and Women's Studies, Bowdoin College
Areas of focus: Albania § Bosnia-Herzegovina § Bulgaria § Croatia § Cyprus § F.Y.R. of Macedonia § Greece § Hungary § Kosovo § Moldova § Montenegro § Romania § Serbia § Slovenia § Turkey
For more information on the Kokkalis Program, visit:
http://www.hks.harvard.edu/kokkalis
Saturday, January 30, 2010
Dobrogea, Добруджа
The new (76th) volume of the series SÜDOSTEUROPA-STUDIEN edited by Gernot Erler is devoted to the multifaceted discussion of this region on the Black Sea coast divided between Romania and Bulgaria and currently united within the European Union.
HELLER, Wilfried; SALLANZ, Josef (Hrsg.): Die Dobrudscha. Ein neuer Grenzraum der Europäischen Union: Sozioökonomische, ethnische, politisch-geographische und ökologische Probleme. München - Berlin, Verlag Otto Sagner, 2009. ISBN 978-3-86688-068-9.
HELLER, Wilfried; SALLANZ, Josef (Hrsg.): Die Dobrudscha. Ein neuer Grenzraum der Europäischen Union: Sozioökonomische, ethnische, politisch-geographische und ökologische Probleme. München - Berlin, Verlag Otto Sagner, 2009. ISBN 978-3-86688-068-9.
Tuesday, November 10, 2009
Институт за съвременни дигитални архиви (ИСДА)
A great new resourse for those interested in the last twenty years of Bulgarian history: the Institute for Contemporary Digital Archives, an independent non-profit foundation, was established in 2008 by the historian Martin Ivanov (Institute for History of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences/Sofia University), the sociologist Venelin Stojchev (Sofia University) and the communications scholar Orlin Spasov (Sofia University). The institute aims to identify, digitalize and place in the public domain important organizational and private documents. The three current projects of the institute are: A Citizens' Transition Archive (1989-2009), Interviews with Key Figures in Bulgarian post-1989 Civil Society and Interviews with Key Figures of the Bulgarian post-1989 Liberal Political Formations.
Saturday, September 19, 2009
The Revolutions of 1989
The international conference Die Revolutionen von 1989, organized by the Austrian Academy of Sciences, will take place in Vienna on 1-3 October 2009.
Panel 3 (1 October 2009, 4:30-6:30 pm) contains presentations on Southeastern Europe by Vesna Pešić, a Serbian politician, one of the leaders of the opposition movement in Serbia (on Yugoslavia), Ulf Brunnbauer, a historian from the University of Regensburg (on Bulgaria) and Anneli Ute Gabanyi, a political scientist from the German Institute for International and Security Affairs in Berlin (on Romania).
Panel 3 (1 October 2009, 4:30-6:30 pm) contains presentations on Southeastern Europe by Vesna Pešić, a Serbian politician, one of the leaders of the opposition movement in Serbia (on Yugoslavia), Ulf Brunnbauer, a historian from the University of Regensburg (on Bulgaria) and Anneli Ute Gabanyi, a political scientist from the German Institute for International and Security Affairs in Berlin (on Romania).
Sunday, August 16, 2009
Four new books in Southeast European Studies
Source of the overviews: Google Books
Vintilă Mihăilescu, Ilia Iliev, Slobodan Naumovic. Studying Peoples in the People's Democracies II: Socialist Era Anthropology in South-East Europe. LIT Verlag Berlin-Hamburg-Münster, 2009 [Volume 17 of Halle Studies in the Anthropology of Eurasia]
Was there anything like a "socialist anthropology" common to Bulgaria and Serbia? Did Soviet and/or Marxist influences, in the discipline and in society in general, penetrate so deeply as to form an unavoidable common denominator of anthropological practice? The answers turn out to be complex and subtle. While unifying ideological forces were very strong in the 1950s, diversity increased thereafter. Anthropology was entangled with national ideology in all three countries.
Roderick Beaton, David Ricks. The Making of Modern Greece: Nationalism, Romanticism, and the Uses of the Past (1797-1896). Ashgate Publishing, Ltd., 2009 [Publications for the Centre for Hellenic Studies, King's College, London]
Every Greek and every friend of the country knows the date 1821, when the banner of revolution was raised against the empire of the Ottoman Turks, and the story of 'Modern Greece' is usually said to begin. Less well known, but of even greater importance, was the international recognition given to Greece as an independent state with full sovereign rights, as early as 1830. This places Greece in the vanguard among the new nation-states of Europe whose emergence would gather momentum through to the early twentieth century, a process whose repercussions continue to this day. Starting out from that perspective, which has been all but ignored until now, this book brings together the work of scholars from a variety of disciplines to explore the contribution of characteristically nineteenth-century European modes of thought to the 'making' of Greece as a modern nation. Closely linked to nationalism is romanticism, which exercised a formative role through imaginative literature, as is demonstrated in several chapters on poetry and fiction. Under the broad heading 'uses of the past', other chapters consider ways in which the legacies, first of ancient Greece, then later of Byzantium, came to be mobilized in the construction of a durable national identity at once 'Greek' and 'modern'.The Making of Modern Greece aims to situate the Greek experience, as never before, within the broad context of current theoretical and historical thinking about nations and nationalism in the modern world. The book spans the period from 1797, when Rigas Velestinlis published a constitution for an imaginary 'Hellenic Republic', at the cost of his life, to the establishment of the modern Olympic Games, in Athens in 1896, an occasion which sealed with international approval the hard-won self-image of 'Modern Greece' as it had become established over the previous century.
Ryan Gingeras. Sorrowful Shores: Violence, Ethnicity, and the End of the Ottoman Empire 1912-1923. Oxford University Press US, 2009 [Oxford studies in modern European history]
The Turkish Republic was formed out of immense bloodshed and carnage. During the decade leading up to the end of the Ottoman Empire and the ascendancy of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, virtually every town and village throughout Anatolia was wracked by intercommunal violence. Sorrowful Shores presents a unique, on-the-ground history of these bloody years of social and political transformation. Challenging the determinism associated with nationalist interpretations of Turkish history between 1912 and 1923, Ryan Gingeras delves deeper into this period of transition between empire and nation-state. Looking closely at a corner of territory immediately south of the old Ottoman capital of Istanbul, he traces the evolution of various communities of native Christians and immigrant Muslims against the backdrop of the Balkan Wars, the First World War, the Armenian Genocide, the Turkish War of Independence, and the Greek occupation of the region. Drawing on new sources from the Ottoman archives, Gingeras demonstrates how violence was organized at the local level. Arguing against the prevailing view of the conflict as a war between monolithic ethnic groups driven by fanaticism and ancient hatreds, he reveals instead the culpability of several competing states in fanning successive waves of bloodshed.
Dimitrije Golemovic. Balkan Refrain: Form and Tradition in European Folk Song. Scarecrow Press, Inc., 2009
Balkan Refrain studies various aspects of the refrain, such as its origin, development, forms, and use in traditional and popular music. It attempts to establish what refrain actually is and how it can be defined in folk and scholarly practice based on musical examples from Serbia, Montenegro, and the Republic of Srpska, with the aim of finding general rules applicable to refrains in the songs of other nations. The refrain is observed from musical and linguistic perspectives, as well as its religious, social, and economical uses. The book includes an audio CD featuring traditional folk songs as well as some examples of newly composed folk songs.
Vintilă Mihăilescu, Ilia Iliev, Slobodan Naumovic. Studying Peoples in the People's Democracies II: Socialist Era Anthropology in South-East Europe. LIT Verlag Berlin-Hamburg-Münster, 2009 [Volume 17 of Halle Studies in the Anthropology of Eurasia]
Was there anything like a "socialist anthropology" common to Bulgaria and Serbia? Did Soviet and/or Marxist influences, in the discipline and in society in general, penetrate so deeply as to form an unavoidable common denominator of anthropological practice? The answers turn out to be complex and subtle. While unifying ideological forces were very strong in the 1950s, diversity increased thereafter. Anthropology was entangled with national ideology in all three countries.
Roderick Beaton, David Ricks. The Making of Modern Greece: Nationalism, Romanticism, and the Uses of the Past (1797-1896). Ashgate Publishing, Ltd., 2009 [Publications for the Centre for Hellenic Studies, King's College, London]
Every Greek and every friend of the country knows the date 1821, when the banner of revolution was raised against the empire of the Ottoman Turks, and the story of 'Modern Greece' is usually said to begin. Less well known, but of even greater importance, was the international recognition given to Greece as an independent state with full sovereign rights, as early as 1830. This places Greece in the vanguard among the new nation-states of Europe whose emergence would gather momentum through to the early twentieth century, a process whose repercussions continue to this day. Starting out from that perspective, which has been all but ignored until now, this book brings together the work of scholars from a variety of disciplines to explore the contribution of characteristically nineteenth-century European modes of thought to the 'making' of Greece as a modern nation. Closely linked to nationalism is romanticism, which exercised a formative role through imaginative literature, as is demonstrated in several chapters on poetry and fiction. Under the broad heading 'uses of the past', other chapters consider ways in which the legacies, first of ancient Greece, then later of Byzantium, came to be mobilized in the construction of a durable national identity at once 'Greek' and 'modern'.The Making of Modern Greece aims to situate the Greek experience, as never before, within the broad context of current theoretical and historical thinking about nations and nationalism in the modern world. The book spans the period from 1797, when Rigas Velestinlis published a constitution for an imaginary 'Hellenic Republic', at the cost of his life, to the establishment of the modern Olympic Games, in Athens in 1896, an occasion which sealed with international approval the hard-won self-image of 'Modern Greece' as it had become established over the previous century.
Ryan Gingeras. Sorrowful Shores: Violence, Ethnicity, and the End of the Ottoman Empire 1912-1923. Oxford University Press US, 2009 [Oxford studies in modern European history]
The Turkish Republic was formed out of immense bloodshed and carnage. During the decade leading up to the end of the Ottoman Empire and the ascendancy of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, virtually every town and village throughout Anatolia was wracked by intercommunal violence. Sorrowful Shores presents a unique, on-the-ground history of these bloody years of social and political transformation. Challenging the determinism associated with nationalist interpretations of Turkish history between 1912 and 1923, Ryan Gingeras delves deeper into this period of transition between empire and nation-state. Looking closely at a corner of territory immediately south of the old Ottoman capital of Istanbul, he traces the evolution of various communities of native Christians and immigrant Muslims against the backdrop of the Balkan Wars, the First World War, the Armenian Genocide, the Turkish War of Independence, and the Greek occupation of the region. Drawing on new sources from the Ottoman archives, Gingeras demonstrates how violence was organized at the local level. Arguing against the prevailing view of the conflict as a war between monolithic ethnic groups driven by fanaticism and ancient hatreds, he reveals instead the culpability of several competing states in fanning successive waves of bloodshed.
Dimitrije Golemovic. Balkan Refrain: Form and Tradition in European Folk Song. Scarecrow Press, Inc., 2009
Balkan Refrain studies various aspects of the refrain, such as its origin, development, forms, and use in traditional and popular music. It attempts to establish what refrain actually is and how it can be defined in folk and scholarly practice based on musical examples from Serbia, Montenegro, and the Republic of Srpska, with the aim of finding general rules applicable to refrains in the songs of other nations. The refrain is observed from musical and linguistic perspectives, as well as its religious, social, and economical uses. The book includes an audio CD featuring traditional folk songs as well as some examples of newly composed folk songs.
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