Balkans

Горан Давидовић, Милош Тимотијевић, Затамњена прошлост : историја равногораца чачанског краја. Књ. 3, Агонија и слом : ратне 1944. и 1945. године (Чачак : Међуопштински историјски архив ; Краљево : Народни музеј, 2004 (Чачак : Графика Јуреш). - 462, [32] стр. с таблама ; 24 cm

Тираж 500. - Стр. 311-312: Рецензија / Коста Николић, Бојан Димитријевић. - Напомене и библиографске референце уз текст. - Summary: Darkened Past. The history of the Ravna Gora movement in the Čačak region. Book 3, Agony and breakdown of war 1944 and 1945- Библиографија: стр. 304-310. - Регистар.

ISBN 86-80609-29-3 (брош.)
94(497.11)"1944/1945"

COBISS.SR-ID 118526220

[Uncorrected Page Proofs] -- Montgomery, David W. 2019. "The Hardest Time Was the Time without Morality": Religion and Social Navigation in Albania. In Everyday Life in the Balkans, edited by David W. Montgomery. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. 265-277.

The monograph examines the political ideology and philosophy of history of Constantine Leontiev (1831-1891), who was one of the most peculiar and original figures in the Russian literary and social circles of the 19th century. His life and writings were closely related to the Balkan provinces of the Ottoman Empire, where he was a consul (1863-1874). The book consists of preface, four chapters with nine subchapters, conclusion, and bibliography. The first two chapters (The Charm of the Orient and The Image of the Balkan Middle-Class) are dedicated to the everyday life, customs, traditions, and character of the Balkan peoples. Special attention is paid to Leontiev’s comparative characteristics of the Balkan peoples and the study of their national and social psychology. The second part of the book (chapters National Policy vs Ecclesiastical Policy and Byzantism and the Future of the Balkans) examines Leontiev’s political views on the Eastern and Ecclesiastical Questions and his philosophy of history and social development. The most sizable part of the book is the subchapter of the Greek-Bulgarian Church controversy in which Leontiev’s position is presented in the context of the Russian ecclesiastical policy and the broader historical and ideological context of the time. Political theories and philosophical concepts of Constantine Leontiev are universal despite they are based on the Balkan realities and problems of the second half of the 19th century. This makes them highly valuable and productive for the study not only of the Balkan history, but for the understanding of the global history and social development. The main focus of the book is the Bulgarian matters in the writings of the Russian diplomat, which provide a great source for the study of Bulgarian social, political, religious, cultural history and ethnology. The research is interdisciplinary due to the personality and works of Leontiev himself. He was not just a diplomat and political thinker, but also a philosopher and novelist.

This paper explores changing representations of the nation in 19th and 21st century Serbia and Croatia. I analyse how the changed structural conditions influence different visualisation strategies of a nation over long periods of time. More specifically I attempt to show how the dominant 19th century visual representations of nationhood in Croatia and Serbia were centred on violent images: representations of battlefields, personal sacrifices, national martyrdom, large-scale forced migrations of the nation, the past military glories of medieval kingdoms, and the production of maps depicting more expansive future states. In contrast to this mode of representation, the imagery of 21st century nationalist tends to focus on the nation’s international achievements in the fields of economy, science, technology, art and sports. Whereas the 19th century was saturated with violent images of the nation, in the 21st century such representations are less visible. On the surface this significant visual shift would indicate that nationalism was a far more influential force in 19th Serbian and Croatian societies than is the case today. However I argue that the opposite is the case: the changing representations of the nation in fact reflect a greater organisational and ideological penetration of nationalism in present-day Serbia and Croatia. While in the 19th century violent images of the past largely served as a didactic tool for the socialisation of mostly peasant, and thus nationally ambiguous populations, in the 21st century there is no need to perform such a role, as most citizens are already highly nationalised. Instead the visualisation of national success in sports or science and the relative absence of violent images reflect the organisational and ideological strength of nationalism in both cases.

Alevi inanç sisteminde dem, dolu gibi isimlerle adlandırılan ve Alevi cemlerinde önemli bir yere olan içki kültü üzerine oluşturulan ritüeller ve inanç pratikleri mevcuttur. Alevi inanç sistemindeki içki kültüne bazı yayınlarda değinilmiştir. Fakat bu yayınlar doğrudan konuya odaklanmadıkları için geneli ortaya koymaktan uzak bir tablo çizmektedir. Mevcut yayınların temel eksikliklerinden biri de görsel unsurlarla desteklenememiş olmasıdır. Bu çalışmada Anadolu ve Balkan coğrafyasında yerleşik Alevi topluluklarında yaşamaya devam eden dem merkezli ritüellerden tespit edilenler farklılıkları ile birlikte analiz edilerek sunulacaktır. Dem kültü merkezli icra edilen ritüellerden biri olan “Dem Geldi Semahları” makalede farklı yörelerden örneklerle görsel unsurlarla desteklenerek analiz edilecektir. Dem Geldi Semahları farklı yerleşim birimlerinde cem ritüeli içerisinde dem hizmeti ile birlikte icra edilen semah ritüellerinden birisidir. Çalışmada Türkiye’nin muhtelif yerleşim birimlerinde yaptığımız alan araştırmalarında kayıt altına aldığımız Dem Geldi Semahları, semahların icra şekilleri, ritüel içerisindeki yeri, icra edilen eserler ve notaları ile mukayeseli bir şekilde verilecektir. Analizlerde, sadece semah merkezli bir bakış açısı ile odaklanılmadan inanç zümresinin içki kültüne bakışı da gerekli yerlerde içki ile ilgili diğer inanç pratiklerine atıflar yapılarak ortaya konulmaya çalışılacaktır.

In the Alevi belief system, there are rituals and belief activities known as dem or dolu formed around the cult of drink which has an important place in the Alevi cems. Some publications have mentioned this cult within the Alevi belief system. However, those publications are far from revealing the overall of this subject because they aren’t focusing directly on the subject. Also, one of the basic lacks of available publications is that they don’t include visual elements. In this paper, determinations from dem based rituals that are continuing to live in the Alevi communities in Anatolia and Balkans, together with differences between them will be analyzed and presented. It will be made an analysis of “Dem Geldi Semahs”, one of the rituals that are dem based practiced, supported with examples from different regions and visual elements. “Dem Geldi Semahs” is one of semah rituals which are performed together with dem service within cem ritual on different locations. In the study, “Dem Geldi Semahs” which we recorded during our fieldwork on the various locations in Turkey, and the forms of semahs performance, its place in the ritual, musical works with notes will be presented comparatively. In the analyses, without just focusing on the semah basic aspect, it will be also presented the view of the belief community on the cult of drink by referring, when it is necessary, to other belief activities related to drink.

"Words and Phrases, Unchanged for Centuries.

Containing a rich glossary and in excess of 300 words and phrases, the texts demonstrate the strength of the Macedonian language through preservation.

Following is a comparison of sentences between the texts and the Macedonian
dialect of Bitola as spoken today.

16th cent., Kostur dialect
21st cent., Bitola dialect

Gospodine, brate, da si zdrav, da si prost, ostavi ni da spime, ela da jame, i da pieme, dol da pojdime, da rabotime.
Gospodine, brate, da si zdrav, da si prost, ostai ne da spiame, ela da jaime, i da piame, dolu da pojdime, da rabotime.

Imate hljap-o da kupime, imate vino da kupime, ot koja strana da pojdime vo
Bogasko.
Imate lep da kupime, imate vino da kupime, od koja strana da pojdime vo
Bogatsko.

As can be clearly noticed, most of the vocabulary and grammar is identical.
All of the elements that would later be required to rejuvinate the Macedonian people as they were shaking off centuries of subjugation, were present during this period. The language of the people had solidified, a tradition of heraldry and symbolism had developed which incorporated the emblem of a rapant lion and historical figures from Macedonia's past, and the churches continued preserve the local customs and serve as cultural centres for the population. The significance of all these elements together cannot be overstated, the language of medieval Macedonia is the same as the language of the Macedonians today. Unfortunately, only a small portion of the larger amount of Macedonian literature from the Middle Ages has survived, much of it being looted and destroyed by Greek-speaking officials, clerics and teachers. Nevertheless, Macedonian as a language reached its current form centuries before the creation of the Balkan states in the 19th and 20th centuries. "

The most unusual part of Byron’s European travels in 1809–10 was probably his visit to Albania, where he roughed it for a bit and then lived and travelled luxuriously as the guest of Ali Pasha. He wrote about his Albanian travels in his letters and more famously in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, whose few stanzas on Albania along with their elaborate footnotes have had an extraordinary fall-out. Historians, travellers and at least one army
officer have used Byron’s letters, poems and footnotes to understand the land and its people. Though Byron made Albania seem Romantic, remote, wild and exciting, few followed him into Albania. Those who did, however, tended to write about it with a verve reminiscent of Byron. This essay is about three Byron-inflected British travellers of the earlier twentieth century, Peter Quennell (1905–93), who visited Albania in the 1920s, Patrick Leigh Fermor (1915–), who walked through the Balkans in the 1930s, and the mountaineer Harold W. Tilman (1898–1977), who volunteered for duty in Albania during World War II because it was reputed to be a mountainous country.

Τhe EU has attempted to push forward essential reforms for the stabilisation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, presenting them as conditions for progress towards EU accession. However, this Europeanisation approach has not produced the expected results. Nikolaos Tzifakis investigates the causes of EU policy failure in Bosnia and claims that the EU has not managed to deal successfully with three main challenges: adjusting the process to the needs of an ethnically divided state; preserving the credibility of accession conditionality; and conveying the proper message on how to comply with EU rules.

This article, which introduces a Special Issue of the JCES on the challenges of EU enlargement policy towards the Western Balkans, critically examines the geopolitical turn of the EU’s institutional thinking on enlargement since 2017. After several high-ranked EU officials and leaders of member states more or less explicitly voiced their concerns about the declining influence of the EU in the Western Balkans, the European Commission – which has traditionally been responsible for carrying out administrative-technical aspects of the accession process – adopted a more geopolitical approach to enlargement policy in February 2018, and has since sought to advance Western Balkan accession more decisively. However, this geopolitical turn to the EU’s institutional thinking on enlargement has so far failed to translate discourse into concrete results. The article argues that the main reasons for this failure can be found in a lack of support by EU members, which either do not share the Commission’s sense of urgency, or are eager to use enlargement policy and the accession process to advance their national interests. The article concludes with a brief presentation of the structure of the special issue and introduces the contributing articles.

Bu çalışmada turizm tesisi yatırımlarında ön fizibilite raporunun SWOT analizin önemi örnek bir ön fizibilite raporu ile anlatılacaktır. Ön fizibilite raporu, yatırımcının bir yatırım kararı vermek için yaptırmış/yapmış olduğu fizibilite etüdünün ilk aşama rapordur. Yatırımcı, fizibilite araştırmalarının sonraki aşamalarına (ekonomik, teknik, mali ve hukuki) geçilip geçilmeyeceğine ve yatırım fikri kararının devam edip etmeyeceğine ön fizibilite araştırmaları sırasında elde edilen verileri dikkate alarak karar verir. Fizibilite raporlarının olumlu çıkması yatırımın yapılacağı yer, tesisin yatırım maliyeti, bürokrasi, pazar ile ilgili verilerin yatırımcının amaç ve imkânları ile örtüşmesine bağlıdır. Ön fizibilite raporu elde edilen bu verilerin analiz edilmesi ve yorumlanması ile yatırımcının yatırım kararına etki eder. Bu araştırmada örnek verilen Bolu Göynük Doğa Oteli için gerçekleştirilmiş ön fizibilite raporu, ön fizibilite raporunun önemini ortaya koyacaktır.

The Balkans have become an important region
with historical and geopolitical factors. Both the
ethnic and religion-based problems inherited
in the region, and the strategies of global and
regional actors in the area have always made the
Balkans remarkable in terms of security issues. The
Balkans were the actual area of two major wars in
the 20th Century, and a region that experienced
the effects of inter-block competitions in the
Cold War period. After the Cold War, although
the international community dreamed of “global
security” and “global peace” because of the end of
the long-lasting bipolarity, the disintegration of
Yugoslavia brought the Balkans back to war. The
international community was sometimes silent
and sometimes had to intervene in these conflicts,
which dated back to the genocide, sometimes with
controversial legitimacy, in the Balkans towards the
end of 20th Century.
The Balkans has a sociological structure
with a very strong social and historical memory
and formed by different ethnic and religious
communities. Therefore, countries have uniquely
different security problems and interests. In today’s
globalization process where inter-communal
interactions and interdependence are increasing,
there is no institutional mechanism by which
Balkan countries can ensure their common
security interests. However, even in times when
globalization and mutual interactions were not as
intense as today, institutional cooperation among
Balkan countries was possible. The 1934 Balkan
Pact, established in line with the security interests
of the countries in the region, and the 1954
Balkan Alliance, which was established under the
containment policy of the USA (The United States
of America), are historical examples of institutional
mechanisms

In the Western Balkans, as elsewhere around the world, governments took extraordinary measures to effectively contain the spread of COVID-19, measures that entailed serious restrictions to individual freedoms. They also introduced extra powers that upset the ordinary division and balance of governmental power. In this context, several analysts have expressed concern that the authoritarian trend observed in the region during the last decade will become further entrenched. The worst fear, that some of the Western Balkan leaderships may retain extraordinary powers indefinitely, has not been confirmed. However, constitutionally prescribed procedures were disregarded and the operation of formal and informal mechanisms of checks and balances ignored. The article argues that the ease with which the Western Balkan leaders removed any checks and controls over their rule raises the valid question of how they may deal with future circumstances which may endanger their power.

This article presents the current state of research on the Early Neolithic settlement enclosures in the Eastern Balkans (ca. 6200/6000-5500 cal. BC), with a focus set on the ditch-digging practices. A large database was accumulated in the last decade during surface surveys, large-scale excavations, and geomagnetic prospection, demonstrating conclusively that ditch enclosures were indeed a tradition rather than an exception. In the Eastern Balkans, enclosures consist mostly of single or multiple ditches and rarely a combination of ditch and wooden, emplectum, or a stone wall. Moreover, some sites existed long enough that the development of the settlement pattern demanded also changes in the enclosures' layout and/or design. Most of the settlements were enclosed as early as their initial stages. However, no enclosure features have been identified at the earliest Neolithic sites in the area even though this might reflect biased research strategies.

“Gazeta Narodowa” and the uprising in the Bay of Kotor in 1869

The aim of this article is to describe the uprising in the Bay of Kotor in 1869 as seen from the perspective of the Lviv daily newspaper “Gazeta Narodowa” (“National Newspaper”) and to present the views of the editorial staff and the manner in which they relayed the events.
Out of all Galician newspapers, “Gazeta Narodowa” devoted the most space to the uprising. From October 1869 to February 1870, it published almost daily extensive reports on the progress of the upheaval, frequently adding a political commentary. The newspaper’s editor-in-chief, Platon Kostecki, even ended up in court because of his text on the uprising, in which he criticised the Austrian authorities. “Gazeta Narodowa” mainly tried, on the basis of press accounts from
other corners of the monarchy and correspondents’ reports, to recreate the military activities and to show repressions carried out by Austrian soldiers. Searching for the reasons behind the uprising, journalists frequently pointed out Austrian bureaucracy and German domination of the Slavic population in Cisleithania. They raised objections especially about supporters of centralism in the Austrian parliament (National Council). Moreover, they attempted to show the international context of the uprising, and presented hypotheses about a possible Serbian or
Russian inspiration. There were also texts describing the history of the region, its social structure and the natural features of the Bay of Kotor, where fighting the insurgents was proving to be a considerable challenge for the Austrian army. The army’s failure to control the situation in the Bay of Kotor was to “Gazeta Narodowa” another reason to criticise the state which could not suppress a local rebellion for months on end. This gave rise to an important question about the monarchy’s defensibility in the face of a possible external threat.

This paper presents an initial assessment of the results of a four month research project studying the Ultras 1 groups in BiH. This research contributed to the Bosnia & Herzegovina Resilience Initiative (BHRI) Programme (implemented by the International Organization for Migration-United Nations , funded and closely coordinated with the U.S. Agency for International Development-USAID) aiming to reduce the threat of violent extremism in BiH and to counter extremist efforts to deepen or exploit community tensions.

Most of the critical peace literature has put 'a local turn' as an important aspect of a paradigm shift in liberal peacebuilding, both in academic and practice-oriented terms. Although most of the made criticism is valid, it is still being disputed by Western academics with their epistemologies, ontologies and methodologies. The voice of researchers who live in post-conflict or conflict-affected societies is still very much restricted by structural, institutional or personal constraints. Consequently, by drawing mostly from the experience of local researchers in the Balkans, the paper analyses the main causes for the limited impact of local researchers in the liberal peace debates, and proposes several steps that could lead to their stronger involvement in this discussion. We are doing something we don't understand fully, and the best we can do is admit we don't understand it, and that we also don't have time to understand it. 1

The short brief analyses the new dynamics in the new EU legislature on EU enlargement to the Western Balkans, its impact on the EU’s perspective to North Macedonia, and the role of the Assembly of North Macedonia in pushing for the country’s European perspective.

This chapter was written as part of the Srebrenica Report by the Dutch institute for War Documentation (NIOD) that was published in 2002. This article deals with the complexities of the analysis why the communist Yugoslavia disintegrate and why it happened so violently. There is no consensus among experts about the causes and even the course of the conflict, and the factual details of this conflict and their interpretation are still under discussion. The British Yugoslavia expert James Gow pointed out in his review of the relevant literature entitled “After the Flood: Literature on the Context, Causes and Course of the Yugoslav War - Reflections and Refractions” that the publications devoted to the former Yugoslavia often reveal a situation in which each fact, claim or interpretation given by one author is refuted by another: “It is clear that not only was the Yugoslav war hideously complex in its detail and in the variety of issues raised, but comprehension of it was made more difficult by the welter of competing narratives seeking to explain it.”

De par sa localisation, son histoire, et du fait de la répartition
transfrontalière du peuple serbe, la Serbie joue un rôle central dans
l’espace ex-yougoslave. Encore aujourd’hui, ses choix politiques
influent plus ou moins directement sur les États voisins, en particulier
sur la Croatie, la Bosnie-Herzégovine, le Monténégro ou le Kosovo.

In the article, the author analyzes in detail the historical development of Balkan cooperation, outlining the main factors influencing it. Important prerequisites for deepening Balkan cooperation are the historical past of the countries and their relations, traditions, culture, language, which are the basis for the development of relations between the states. On this basis, economic cooperation could be built, covering large-scale joint projects in the fields of energy, transport and other types of common infrastructure. On this basis, trade relations between the Balkan countries could be deepened and intensified, which is an opportunity for the development of a Balkan union.

One significant aspect of military interventions is that violence in binary geographies, which have an implied colonial discourse (such as Serbia), often involve the dialectics of construction and erasure, meaning that absence and presence of destruction and violence run side by side. 1 This paper investigates the ways that technology and media were instrumentalised in miniaturising evidence and reducing the visibility of destruction during NATO's Operation Allied Force in Serbia and Kosovo. While the dominant NATO rhetoric behind the intervention was "humanitarian" with the Operation being deployed in the name of Western values and civilisation, this text puts forward an alternative argument. The 1999 intervention was a war machine where the military-industrial-media-entertainment network restricted the public gaze and the control of information as well as made it nearly impossible to distinguish information from disinformation, and fact from fiction. Its value was predicated on expressing and showing less of the violence in order to set up a clear representation of a perpetrator and a victim. Thus, the reconceptualisation of borders in relation to 1999 was contingent on the deployment of the infrastructure of satellites and unmanned drones in an attempt to, firstly, miniaturise the weapon and, secondly, de-familiarise the military frame with spectacular speed.