Beyond Balkanism

The scholarly politics of region making

Bibliographic Data

ID9918487
AuthorsMarius Stan (0000-0002-4313-1962, University of Bucharest, Romania, corresponding author)
Year2019
Volume95
Issue2
Pages495-496
Publication date2019-03-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueInternational Affairs (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0020-5850 • E-ISSN: 1468-2346
PublisherOxford University Press (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1093/ia/iiz032
OpenAlexW2920357376
LanguageEN
Citations received9

Where Diana Mishkova's new book succeeds so impressively is in ‘highlight[ing] the strategies that were used at the Balkan margins to challenge their asymmetric conceptualization by devising subversive regional categories (and classifications) and alternative regional modes of collective identification. [...] The book thus seeks to prompt academics to think about the transnational roots of their practices beyond the one way, west to east, transfer of ideas and concepts’ (p. 4). The book is an exercise in ‘Balkan’ self-understanding and an inspired continuation of previous demystifying efforts. Beyond Balkanism covers four main periods of ‘academic regionalization’, starting in the late nineteenth–early twentieth century, through the interwar period, then the 1960s and 1970s, and finally, the post-communist landscape, with its highly fissiparous conceptualization. Some of the most exciting parts of the book take readers through an entire labyrinth of subregions and historical periods, adding to this excellent scholarly effort an encyclopaedic touch. The author is right to note that parts of the Balkan project during the Cold War were merely nationalist impulses in disguise (Yugoslavia, Albania, Romania). On the whole, the post-Second World War Balkan project ‘lacked the ideological coherence, political muscle and visionary breadth of its interwar, communist and liberal, predecessors’ (p. 141). The lack of interest in the Balkans as an epistemic subject after 1945 changed suddenly in the early 1990s with the secession wars in the former Yugoslavia. Although they took place only in a small area of the peninsula, the conflicts had been deemed ‘Balkan’. The old stereotypes of a turbulent region—the ‘powder keg’ of Europe—resurfaced stronger than ever, and this book proves how the process was accompanied by a radical reconfiguration of thinking about the region

Archaeology · Communism · Conceptualization · Ideology · Interwar period · Linguistics · Nationalism · Peninsula · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Subject (documents · World War II · Balkans: History, Politics, Society · History · Law · Philosophy

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