The world wars, genocides and extremist ideologies of the 20th century are remembered very differently across Central, Eastern and Southeastern Europe, resulting sometimes in fierce memory disputes. ...This book investigates the complexity and contention of the layers of memory of the troubled 20th century in the region. Written by an international group of scholars from a diversity of disciplines, the chapters approach memory disputes in methodologically innovative ways, studying representations and negotiations of disputed pasts in different media, including monuments, museum exhibitions, individual and political discourse and electronic social media. Analyzing memory disputes in various local, national and transnational contexts, the chapters demonstrate the political power and social impact of painful and disputed memories. The book brings new insights into current memory disputes in Central, Eastern and Southeastern Europe. It contributes to the understanding of processes of memory transmission and negotiation across borders and cultures in Europe, emphasizing the interconnectedness of memory with emotions, mediation and politics.
Religion as a Conversation Starter is the first comprehensive analysis of the present state of interreligious dialogue for peacebuilding in Southeast Europe. It is based on empirically grounded and ...policy-oriented research, carried out throughout the Balkans. The study maps recent interreligious relations in this part of the world, throwing light on both the achievements and challenges of interreligious dialogue for peacebuilding in particular, and offering a set of up-to-date policy recommendations, whilst contributing to a greater understanding of the local particularities and how they relate to broader trends transnationally. Interreligious dialogue has been a central tool in the continuous international efforts to promote peaceful living together in multicultural and multireligious societies. This fascinating monograph explores the place of interreligious dialogue as a primary method in conflict resolution and peacebuilding, and will be of interest to scholars of religious and peace studies, as well as those who advocate and carry out organized interventions in religion-related spheres.
In The World Refugees Made, Pamela Ballinger explores Italy's remaking in light of the loss of a wide range of territorial possessions-colonies, protectorates, and provinces-in Africa and the ...Balkans, the repatriation of Italian nationals from those territories, and the integration of these "national refugees" into a country devastated by war and overwhelmed by foreign displaced persons from Eastern Europe. Post-World War II Italy served as an important laboratory, in which categories differentiating foreign refugees (who had crossed national boundaries) from national refugees (those who presumably did not) were debated, refined, and consolidated. Such distinctions resonated far beyond that particular historical moment, informing legal frameworks that remain in place today. Offering an alternative genealogy of the postwar international refugee regime, Ballinger focuses on the consequences of one of its key omissions: the ineligibility from international refugee status of those migrants who became classified as national refugees.
The presence of displaced persons also posed the complex question of who belonged, culturally and legally, in an Italy that was territorially and politically reconfigured by decolonization. The process of demarcating types of refugees thus represented a critical moment for Italy, one that endorsed an ethnic conception of identity that citizenship laws made explicit. Such an understanding of identity remains salient, as Italians still invoke language and race as bases of belonging in the face of mass immigration and ongoing refugee emergencies. Ballinger's analysis of the postwar international refugee regime and Italian decolonization illuminates the study of human rights history, humanitarianism, postwar reconstruction, fascism and its aftermaths, and modern Italian history.
Zones of Conflict Fouskas, Vassilis K
2003, 2003-02-20, 20030101
eBook
The US has major interests in the Balkans, the Greater Middle East and the Eurasian zone, which determine its political and military strategies in the region. What are these interests, and what ...strategies are used to ensure that they are maintained? Examining the balance of power between the US, the EU and key EU states, Vassilis Fouskas offers a critique of US foreign policy and its underlying motivations. Fouskas argues that the major US objectives include control over gas and oil producing zones; safe transportation of energy to Western markets at stable prices; and the elimination, but not destruction, of America's Eurasian competitors. He asserts that US foreign policy is therefore driven by the desire to maintain a strategic partnership with key EU states, while preventing the emergence of an alternative coalition in Eurasia capable of challenging US supremacy. How does the US manage its interests in Eurasia and what are the particular strategies the EU has elaborated so far to deal with America's supremacy? Has US foreign policy undergone a dramatic U-turn after the end of the Cold War or, for that matter, after September 11th? What are the roles of Germany, France, Britain and Turkey, and how do EU-Cyprus relations affect the balance of power? This book tackles these questions and argues that the emergence of a social democratic administration in Eurasia is a feasible alternative to American unilateralism.
A hybrid between Salix triandra and S. xanthicola, occurring in the Rhodope Mountains in northeastern Greece, is described as a new nothospecies. It differs from S. triandra by having distinctly ...hairy young stems and more deeply serrate-dentate leaf margins, and from S. xanthicola by a smooth, unstructured (without conicoids) wax layer on the lower side of the leaves and the presence of subsessile glands on the petioles.
This volume is a collection of chapters that deal with issues of health, hygiene and eugenics in Southeastern Europe to 1945, specifically, in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Greece and ...Romania. Its major concern is to examine the transfer of medical ideas to society via local, national and international agencies and to show in how far developments in public health, preventive medicine, social hygiene, welfare, gender relations and eugenics followed a regional pattern. This volume provides insights into a region that has to date been marginal to scholarship of the social history of medicine.
By examining available demographic data and petitions submitted by non-Muslims for accepting Islam, this volume convincingly reconstructs the stages of the Islamization process in the Balkans and ...offers an insight to the motives and factors behind conversion.
Reconciliation by Stealth advances a novel approach to evaluating the effects of transitional justice in postconflict societies. Through her examination of the Balkan conflicts, Denisa Kostovicova ...asks what happens when former adversaries discuss legacies of violence and atrocity, and whether it is possible to do so without further deepening animosities.Reconciliation by Stealth shifts our attention from what people say about war crimes, to how they deliberate past wrongs. Bringing together theories of democratic deliberation and peacebuilding, Kostovicova demonstrates how people from opposing ethnic groups reconcile through reasoned, respectful, and empathetic deliberation about a difficult legacy. She finds that expression of ethnic difference plays a role in good-quality deliberation across ethnic lines, while revealed intraethnic divisions help deliberators expand moral horizons previously narrowed by conflict. In the process, people forge bonds of solidarity and offset divisive identity politics that bears upon their deliberations. Reconciliation by Stealth shows us the importance of theoretical and methodological innovation in capturing how transitional justice can promote reconciliation, and points to the untapped potential of deliberative problem-solving to repair relationships fractured by conflict.
