Abstract This paper aims to shed new light on the phenomenon of Islamist violent extremism across the Western Balkans. This phenomenon has recently drawn worldwide attention due to the risk that the ...self-proclaimed Islamic State (IS) has raised as an international actor. The main theoretical argument is that the main driver of foreign fighters aligns with the Roy theory about the “Islamization of radicalism”. So far, academic literature on Islamist terrorism has often considered the Western Balkan region as the one with the highest percentage of foreign fighters. Notwithstanding this being correct, such analysis seems superficial, since it misrepresents the image of the region itself. In this paper, the countries taken into account are those with a high percentage of Muslim population (e.g. Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo) and with a large Muslim autochthonous minority group (e.g. the Republic of North Macedonia). The comparison of the estimates of foreign fighters in Syria from the Western Balkans with data from several sources led us to understand the existence of a precise narrative towards the region and the Islamist religion.
The inspiration for the following research arose from an identified ambivalence regarding the question of how relevant ethnic belonging – being Bosniak, being Croat, being Serb – is in everyday life ...of ex-Yugoslavian Viennese people. A qualitative analysis of narrative interviews as well as participant observations on Vienna’s Ottakringer Straße, a neighbourhood highly frequented by immigrants from the former Yugoslavia and their descendants, indicates that ethnicity indeed matters, particularly when it comes to questions of partner choice. The research, however, also reveals that there are further, intersecting boundaries encompassing or dividing the ‘ex-Yugoslavian community’: In light of being othered by the Austrian majority society and defined as ‘incomplete self’ Maria Todorova, i.e. as representatives of a sphere between the own and the foreign, educationally alienated young adults across ethnic boundaries notably celebrate the culture of ‘turbo folk’ on Ottakringer Straße – a lifestyle that emphasises their own ‘glamour and passion’ as opposed to Austrian ‘bleakness’. Therewith they reinforce the image of the ‘Balkan Other’. Simultaneously, ‘ex-Yugoslavian’ Viennese with higher education levels exhibit a substantial need to not only distinguish themselves from turbo folk and (night-)life on Ottakringer Straße, but also from the image of the ‘Balkan Other’. By emphasising their own ‘more sophisticated’ taste, they express their social position in terms of a specific lifestyle and set themselves apart from the ‘uneducated and common immigrants’. Hence, the analysis shows that, with regard to the ‘ex-Yugoslavian communities’ in Vienna, different symbolic boundaries are at work: the ethnic boundaries – (re-)constructed and (re-)enforced by the wars in the former Yugoslavia – the ‘Balkanised’ symbolic boundaries between ex-Yugoslavian minorities and the Austrian majority as well as the milieu-specific symbolic boundaries within the community itself.
This article challenges imagological historiography that contends Bosnia-Herzegovina represented a no-go zone for British tourists before the First World War because of its reputation for cultural ...backwardness and political instability. Through an analysis of published travelogues, travel guides, and travel journalism, as well as their reception in Britain, it places the evolution of images of Bosnia-Herzegovina in dialogue with British anxieties about the detrimental effects of industrial society. This article argues that the country (administered by Austria-Hungary from 1878 and annexed in 1908) became a popular destination for upper-class British tourists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century as it was constructed as unspoiled by mechanical civilisation and free from lower-class tourists. Travel writers, most notably Henri Moser whose travel guide An Oriental Holiday (1895) will be closely examined, were imbricated with Austro-Hungarian authorities and regularly employed by the regime to promote this romantic image of Bosnia-Herzegovina to British audiences. This article concludes by demonstrating that the upsurge in touristic interest in Bosnia-Herzegovina was short-lived because of growing political tensions between Britain and Germany but provides a forceful counterpoint to imagological historiography that suggests the imagined geography of the region was defined in entirely negative terms.
This paper will compare and contrast Visegrád and Southeast European mobility towards (and away from) the European Union (EU) ideal of cohesion, in the process investigating conflicting “core” and ...“peripheral” assertions of “Europeanness.” Though the Visegrád states have exceeded economic expectations, they have to varying degrees stood in opposition to the values of the EU’s self-professed “European identity,” with Hungary and Poland in particular demonstrating increasing illiberalism. Meanwhile, in Southeast Europe, lacklustre economic performance has tended to contrast with increasingly liberal democratic rule and strong popular support for the EU “project.” The EU’s cohesion strategy has prioritized economic convergence and, ultimately, this has meant that budgetary considerations, and political rhetoric and scrutiny, have often favoured the rebellious but economically resurgent Visegrád states over the weaker economies of a more compliant Southeast Europe. The EU’s integration strategy of constructing “identity hegemony” depends upon both economic and socio-political convergence. This paper questions the congruence of these focuses, given the discriminatory application of integration incentives and the persistence of Orientalism/Balkanism in West European rhetoric.
Despite being a Muslim-majority society, Kosovo increasingly securitizes practising Muslims by politicizing the ostentatiously pious among them as a threat to Europe's security and Kosovar identity. ...Given the EU's significant discursive and political power in Kosovo, this article pursues the question of how European representatives conceive of pious Kosovar Muslims, and whether this image might explain their securitization. On the basis of 24 semi-structured interviews with various European officials conducted in 2018, I argue that they predominantly imagine pious Kosovar Muslims as influenced by foreign powers through indoctrination, material incentives or appeals to identity, which does condone their securitization. However, this image is in fact shaped by local Kosovar elites who instil such conceptions in European officials because such an image helps them in the pursuit of their own political agendas. The article exposes the intricate mechanism and power relations that underlie this process of policy-relevant knowledge production.
In this article, we adopt a socio-anthropological approach to understand how hegemonic international representations are constructed in the politics and theory of international relations, ...specifically how Southeast Europe is perceived in West European imagination. We focus on various forms of travel writing, media reporting, diplomatic record, policy making, truth claims and expert accounts related to different narrative perspectives on the Balkan wars, both old (1912-1913) and new (1991-1999). We show how these perspectives are rooted in different temporalities and historicizations, and how they contribute to international representations that affect international politics, particularly in relation to perpetuating othering and containment of Southeast Europe. We demonstrate through a detailed analysis and problematization how these international representations are culturally and politically constructed. They do not neutrally refer to a reality in the world; they create a reality of their own. As such, how international representations are constructed is itself a form of power and hegemony in both the practice and the theory of international relations.
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