Taking into consideration several seemingly contradictory characteristics of Yugoslav geography, this article examines the employment of transnational spaces by the competing nationalist geographical ...narratives in interwar Yugoslavia. Though preoccupied with Yugoslavia and its political crises, at the beginning and the end of the interwar period Yugoslav geographers were concerned with international political developments, especially in East Central Europe. There were tensions between a geographical region and a national space as a preferred framework of research as well as between the belief that the political, economic and cultural development of Yugoslavia was unique and that it was comparable to development of other parts of East Central Europe. The determinist understanding of the nation as shaped by the physical landscape emphasized not only the ability, but also the necessity, of nationalist geographies to function on multiple spatial levels. Yugoslav geographers used the conceptual apparatus developed by French and German geographical traditions to establish a comparative framework in which they elaborated on various geographical characteristics of Yugoslavia, especially those politically significant, by referring to other European countries because it seemed difficult to describe the new country in terms of itself. German Geopolitik became particularly influential and, although taking different stands on it, several Yugoslav geographers pointed to geopolitical similarities with Czechoslovakia and Poland to draw conclusions regarding Yugoslavia. But geographical comparison had ambiguous implications, as it was used both to fortify and challenge the interwar Yugoslav state.
Acta geographica Slovenica is a research journal for geography and related disciplines published by the Anton Melik Geographical Institute of Scientific Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of ...Sciences and Arts. It has been published since 1952 and is the second-oldest Slovenian geographical journal. Volume 50 was published in 2010, and this article is dedicated to this special anniversary. The journal was only published occasionally until 1976, when the volume 14 appeared, but afterwards it began to be published annually, with two volumes a year since 2003 (volume 43). With volume 43, the journal was included in Science Citation Index Expanded (SCIE). Since 2010, it has also had an impact factor. For 2009, this factor was 0.714, which ranks the journal in third place among all indexed Slovenian journals. In all the volumes, a total of 273 research articles have been published on more than 12,000 pages; half of these articles were written by the institute members.
The book, published to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of Anton Melik Geographical Institute, outlines the main features of the institute, such as the establishment and development as well as the ...main stages of the research work over the years. The institute, being part of the Scientific Research Centre of Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts since 1981, is comprised of five departments: the Department of Geoecology, the Department of Regional Geography, the Department of Natural Disasters, the Department of Geographical Information Systems and the Department of Thematic Cartography. Besides this it houses a library, geographical collections, a cartographic collection and the Commission for the Standardisation of Geographical Names appointed by the Government of the Republic of Slovenia.Rich additional material, mainly photos, that result from the research projects (the Triglav glacier and the glacier below Skuta, natural disasters and alpine farms) as well as from the preparatory work for numerous geographical publications about Slovenia and its landscapes, complements the text.
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