This article explores the relationship between ethnic diversity and intermarriage in Vojvodina, Serbia, a highly diverse region with a history of shifting political landscapes. Unlike many studies focusing on migration, this research examines autochthonous settings from a quantitative perspective, offering insights into how diversity and intermarriage intersect locally. Findings indicate that greater ethnic diversity is generally associated with higher interethnic marriage rates within sub-regions. However, these rates have not always paralleled changes in diversity, especially during disruptions like the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s. The study reveals that declining diversity tends to reduce intermarriage by creating more homogeneous marriage markets, while intermarriages may also―albeit intermittently, under specific political circumstances, and indirectly―influence diversity trends. Results highlight small social distances and permeable ethnic boundaries among Vojvodina’s ethnic groups, though significant ethnic asymmetries remain. This study contributes to understanding the dynamics of diversity and interethnic relations, specifically through marriage, within national minority contexts.

The article is concerned with contemporary changes in the spatialization of the Russian-Finnish borderland as an example of re-bordering politics. The main material is a long-term ethnographic study in the territory of former Finnish Karelia, ceded by Finland to the Soviet Union following World War II. By extending the historical context of bilateral relations between the USSR (later Russia) and Finland, the article questions the implications of changing international relations regimes for situational forms of borderwork. The article contributes to the debate on contemporary border practices and the contradictory effects of foreign diplomacy by combining institutional and situational approaches to border territoriality and by focusing on border memory and heritage as resources of local identity and instruments of soft power. Examining the successive shifts of de- and re-bordering regimes in the Russian-Finnish borderlands from the late Soviet period to the present, the article demonstrates the unforeseen impact of foreign relations on local life and memory.

As Poland began to expand towards the east in the 1340s, a large-scale settlement initiative commenced on the former Polish-Ruthenian borderland in the Carpathians. This initiative, along with integration of German and Polish colonists, resulted over time in the emergence of a Polish cultural group known as Forest Germans (in Polish Głuchoniemcy). In 1871-1989 Polish-German conflict led to the relevant ethnonym and choronym being removed from both Polish academic and popular discourse. As a result, no systematic geographical research into the location and borders of their settlement region was carried out. All we have are its dispersed, imprecise geographical descriptions from the period between the second half of the 17th century and the first half of the 20th century. Despite the erasure of this term from discourses and obstruction of the process of self-determination by the local population as Forest Germans at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries primarily for political reasons, the existence of a community which can potentially be identified today as Forest Germans at the former Polish-Ruthenian border is a fact. This article outlines the problems, challenges as well as the very process of delimiting Forest Germany, along with a general outline of its boundaries.

The article summarizes the history of the Russian–Ukrainian encounters in memory politics from the 1990s to the start of the 2020s. It compares and contrasts Russia’a and Ukraine’s perceptions of the issues, goals, tasks, and methods of historical policy. Having a shared history and similar challenges in developing identities and tackling the politics of commemoration, the cultural elites and governments of both countries approached the task of identity-building from opposite perspectives. These differences stemmed from different interpretations of one’s nation’s place and role in world history. The article summarizes all critical points of disagreement regarding how the two countries understood their shared past and interpreted it. It observes the history of the joint initiatives between Russia and Ukraine to reconcile confronting narratives. The analysis shows how the shared past perceived and conceived in divergent ways amounted to the mnemonic anxiety and securitization of the collective memory clash of antagonistic versions of the past and triggered the conflict and war.

How do autocracies use nationalism to normalize and contain unsettled times? The full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 marked a decisive point in Russia’s politics from which there could be no return to an antebellum normality. Rather than attempt to mobilize the Russian public to war, state-run television sought to normalize the war as a banal reality for domestic audiences. Drawing on a content analysis of 1,575 reports from the state-run First Channel [Pervyi Kanal] from 2022 to 2024, this article argues that the Ukrainian regions occupied by Russia — the so-called “new regions” — are crucial to this strategy through their incorporation into banal nationalist depictions of Russia. In turn, televised depictions of residents in the “new regions” confer emotional weight and moral examples for ordinary Russians through their everyday practices: their fortitude in voting for Putin despite ongoing attacks; through their shared excitement in acquiring routine aspects of daily life from passports to pensions; and through their embodiment of Russia’s future. In the process, media depictions normalize imperial nationalist justifications for Russia’s occupation of Ukrainian territory in terms of the distinctiveness of the Russian people, Russia’s civilizing mission, and presentation of its war as defensive.

Councils of National Minorities (NMCs), connected with the concept of non-territorial autonomy, have been recognized in research as a safeguard of minority rights, offering potential solutions to ethnic tensions. NMCs could be important actors in countries such as Serbia where tensions over the Kosovo issue are still present. Despite various studies on NMCs in Serbia, the specific role of women in these councils and their contribution to peace-making has not been a primary focus. This 2024 research in Serbia examines the involvement of women from NMCs in challenging male/state-centric discourses on women as peacemakers through inductive thematic analysis of interviews with female NMCs’ representatives. The focus of the analysis is on intersections of nation and gender, the impact of women in NMCs on reducing tensions and fostering peace, and the gendered nature of these processes. This study contributes to understanding the role of women from NMCs in peacebuilding using non-territorial frameworks.

We outline a framework for comparative analyses of minority education and present four illustrative Central and Eastern European (CEE) cases: Bulgaria, Estonia, the Republic of North Macedonia and Romania. The fourfold typology we develop relies on literature on minority rights and diversity management and proposes a holistic approach, differing from narrower legal analysis. We investigate education as part of larger macro-approaches of minority policies and focus on the interrelation between educational equity and identity reproduction. In our case studies, we employ a diachronic perspective, focusing on historical dynamics and pathways of educational policies, aiming to identify both gradual change and more radical shifts in institutional processes. The concept of de facto discrimination plays an important role as well: next to the historical analysis of legislative and policy changes, we use various statistics to measure educational equity. We rely on the 2022 PISA results, a tool popular in the comparative research of educational systems but underutilized in the fields of minority rights and minority policies. In our comparative inquiry, we argue that the educational systems of CEEs diverge in terms of minority identity reproduction, but few of them can be labelled as integrative, as intercultural elements are rather weak, while education usually fails to provide equity for minority students.

The article investigates perceived and objective inequalities in Bosnia and Herzegovina, focusing on Republika Srpska amid rising societal tensions, bolstering the secession narrative, and political mobilization. Aimed at identifying objective inequalities that might fuel grievances causing societal upheaval, the findings reveal no significant disparities between Republika Srpska and the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Despite the absence of objective economic, social, or political inequalities, a perception of disparity persists among Bosnian Serbs, driven by the nationalist rhetoric of local leaders. Hence, the research underscores the gap between perceived inequalities and objective disparities, challenging conventional beliefs about the causal chain from objective horizontal inequalities to social mobilization by demonstrating how unfounded grievances can still drive tensions and secessionist agendas.

The article looks at two electoral cases from the European Court of Human Rights that raise long-disputed doctrinal issues. Bakirdzi and E.C. v. Hungary deals with the preferential representation of national minorities in parliament, while Zsófia Vámos v. Hungary concerns the rights of Hungarians living beyond the borders to vote in general elections. The author argues that the Court would need to critically examine the social and political system when deciding on electoral rules in order not to miss the forest for the trees, i.e., the way authoritarian regimes manipulate elections. If this is not done, even if decisions condemn Hungary, they may have a legitimising function for the regime. Using a feminist approach that introduces critical perspectives by rewriting problematic court decisions, the article will show how these cases should have been decided and argued in light of the real facts and political context. The article highlights the future potential external constraints of an authoritarian regime and empowers the supporters of constitutional democracy in Hungary.

In settler colonies such as the United States, Canada, Australia, and Aotearoa New Zealand, “memory wars” have, driven by conflicting narratives about colonial history, intensified in recent years. Indigenous counter-narratives challenge Euro-centric master narratives, particularly in public spaces such as museums and monuments. This article explores the impact of such conflicts on national identity, focusing on Aotearoa New Zealand, where the history of colonization has long been framed as a relatively benign process, underpinned by the Treaty of Waitangi. Through application of a comprehensive narratological framework, the article reveals how the Waitangi Treaty Grounds’ permanent exhibition, Ko Waitangi Tēnei: This is Waitangi, employs the quest masterplot to weave Māori memories of the mid-1800s New Zealand Wars into the national master narrative. The analysis highlights that this narrative emplotment – by “naturalizing” the events of the New Zealand Wars – serves to elide difficult questions about colonial violence, thus protecting the image of a tolerant and respectful nation. More generally, the article contributes to our understanding of national identity construction in the context of difficult histories, while also advancing theoretical approaches to narratology in museum storytelling.

Recent scholarship on the democratization and Europeanization of the Western Balkans as well as the field of media studies have not amply dealt with the concept of political clientelism in the media in this region, which has been a major feature of the post-Milošević democratic transition in Serbia. This article examines the gradual political instrumentalization of the media landscape in Serbia under the ruling party since 2012. It will argue that despite the adoption of the new media laws first in 2014 and their amendments in 2023, government influence of the media outlets vis-à-vis more subtle mechanisms of control, has served to undermine media freedom rather than fostering democratic changes through genuine domestic reforms. This type of more subtle mechanism of indirect control is visible through the captured regulatory authority, state subsidies in the media vis-à-vis project co-financing, advertising contracts where the government serves as an intermediary, and the recent amendments to the new media laws adopted in October 2023 that practically “legalized” government interference in the Serbian media.

In Croatia, due to local histories of violence, purist language ideologies, and the essentialist belief that nations and languages form an inseparable nexus, the ability to speak pure “Croatian” (čisti hrvatski) is perceived as a sign of morality while the use of “Serbian” indexes immorality. Through repetition over time and institutional support – through ethno-linguistic enregisterment – linguistic practises are able to map ethnicity and morality onto the bodies of speakers, making the use of language in Croatia a delicate and politicized performance. Based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork, this article explores the ways in which linguistic performances of čisti hrvatski by the newly minoritized Serbs in Vukovar become an integral part of performing political subjectivity. The eagerness of some of my interlocutors to perform čisti hrvatski in the public sphere becomes a way to embody exemplary minority subjectivity and to negotiate their stigmatized ethnic difference by demonstrating a sense of belonging to the Croatian nation-state.

In response to the Hamidian massacres of 1894–1897, Armenian immigrants held commemorative events in the US that concurred with their activism for the Armenian Question. Although largely overlooked in scholarship, these commemorative practices offer insights into the early history of this community and the memory of the late Ottoman state violence. We explore how American Armenians commemorated the Hamidian massacres, addressing this gap in scholarship. Specifically, we delve into the socio-political and cultural sphere, analyzing the agencies and narratives involved in these commemorative practices. Through a close examination of various commemorative forms, we find that the incentives of American Armenians went beyond simply honoring the victims. We argue that the motives of mourning loss and striving to prevent violence from recurring were intricately intertwined in the commemoration. Despite the unsuccessful outcome, the search for prevention remained an important driving force behind commemorating Ottoman violence in the following years. By integrating its memory into their public life, communal leadership aimed not only to foster social cohesion among Armenian immigrants but also to garner public empathy and sympathy within the host society, ultimately translating it into political support for the Armenian Question, which was believed could prevent future atrocities.

“Oriental confectioners” were a separate administrative category of craftsmen in early socialist Slovenia. The group of mainly Albanian-speaking seasonal craftsmen came from the rural Polog basin in North Macedonia during the interwar period and continued migrating to Slovenia in the profoundly changed postwar context. The emerging socialist authorities cast private craft businesses as potentially antisocialist. Employing a textual analysis of craft-related archival documents from the period (1945–1955), the article explores the treatment of Albanian migrants by the nascent bureaucracy in the People’s Republic of Slovenia. The key argument posited is two-fold. Firstly, the economic exclusion of Albanian migrant craftsmen extended beyond socialist distrust towards private enterprise. Exclusion was deeply intertwined with Slovenia’s orientalist, balkanist, and possibly racist perceptions, which culturally diminished craftsmen’s origins and products, and placed Albanian migrants in a conflicting position with socialist modernization. Secondly, and in contrast to the first point, the state’s treatment was not uniformly discriminatory. Albanian migrants were often able to negotiate their inclusion into the urban economy by appealing to socialist morality, to which socialist authorities at the republican level were particularly receptive.

This article links two borderlands: the Italo-Slovene and the Slovene-Hungarian in the aftermath of the First World War. It focuses on the wartime refugees from the hinterlands of Trieste who, in accordance with agrarian reform, which the Yugoslav state began in 1919, were settled as colonists on the new Hungarian-South Slav border in the early 1920s. By using memoir literature and “ego documents,” the article tackles several aspects, including the refugee experience and social assistance during the First World War, the political motivation of the land reform, and the lived experiences of the colonists. In Yugoslavia, the agrarian problem was considered to be one of the most important issues facing the new state. The land reform aimed to solve social and national problems more than to improve the agricultural production of the state. In the example of the Prekmurje region, this article aims to show that interwar colonization succeeded in impacting the Hungarian–Slovene language border but failed miserably to ensure social transformation and security for the impoverished population.

In 2018, David Laitin and Pål Kolstø engaged in a discussion at the Annual Meeting of the Association for the Study of Nationalities held at Columbia University, New York. The panel was a 20-year retrospective on Identity in Formation: the Russian-speaking populations in the Near Abroad (Laitin 1998).

State repression of ethno-religious minorities is a widespread practice among dictatorships. Nevertheless, political science literature on the topic presents inconsistent findings regarding the causes and consequences of this phenomenon, largely due to the challenges associated with researching human rights violations in non-democratic regimes. The present systematic literature review covers theme-related articles indexed in the Web of Science database and published in English, Spanish, Japanese, Korean, or Chinese from January 1990 to December 2022 (n=169). By reviewing a wide array of theoretical frameworks, methodologies, and data collection strategies, this article identifies causes, consequences, and endogenous relationships, as well as key gaps in the literature on ethno-religious repression in non-democratic settings, providing a solid starting point for further research.