Balkans: History, Politics, Society

The Balkans has long been a site where competing national identities, religious loyalties, and imperial legacies collide, making it one of the most analytically rich regions for understanding how societies construct meaning out of conflict and rupture. Scholars working here examine how communities remember wars, how ethnic and religious boundaries are drawn and redrawn, and how the dissolution of Yugoslavia continues to shape political life and personal identity across the successor states. Central questions remain unresolved: how do post-conflict societies reconcile divergent memories of the same events, and to what extent do nationalist narratives persist or transform as the region integrates further into European institutions? Answering these questions requires drawing on history, anthropology, and political theory together, since no single discipline captures the full weight of what it means to rebuild collective life after mass violence.

Works

84,130

Total citations

167,678

Keywords

BalkansNationalismIdentityMemoryConflictYugoslavia