Balkans

This special issue builds on empirical research to provide new insights into the interrelations between collective memory and legacies of political violence in the Balkans. The contributions pay particular attention to two major issues: First, they explore the ways in which individuals and groups respond to and cope with violent pasts by investigating commemorative practices including public performances, narratives, and negotiations of counter-memories. Second, they make explicit how people select and reassemble collective memories through remembering violent pasts to create and disseminate novel forms of identity. Through interdisciplinary lenses, the studies reveal how the legacies of political violence and their lived experience become important means for people to create and mobilize collective memories that are influential enough to shape nationalistic and political realities on the ground. On a theoretical level, the articles demonstrate various ways in which collective memories enable critical discussions around a wider set of issues including national identity, nationalism, making of history, and local power games. By engaging with these concepts, the contributions question dominant framings of past events as they investigate how counter-memories and counter-powers emerge in the process of negotiating established versions of history, official narratives, and hierarchies of power. This special issue builds on rich, original empirical research to provide new insights into the interrelations between collective memory and legacies of political violence in the Balkans. The authors pay particular attention to two major issues: First, they explore the ways in which individuals and groups respond to and cope with violent pasts by investigating commemorative practices including public performances, narratives, negotiations of counter-memories, as well as private recollections, imaginaries, and bodily expressions. Second, they make explicit how people select and reassemble collective memories of violent pasts in order to create and disseminate novel forms of identity. On an empirical level, the studies reveal how the legacies of political violence and their lived experience become important means for individuals and groups to create and mobilize collective memories that are influential enough to shape nationalistic and political realities on the ground. In particular, they demonstrate how such memories are differentially fragmented along the lines of gender, age, class, as well as ethnic, political, and religious affiliation, and how they are negotiated, selected, and presented by people to order their past, to shape their present, and to show responsibility for what they imagine their future to be. On a theoretical level, the collection of articles powerfully demonstrates how collective memories are "paradigmatic" (Agamben 2002; Foucault 1969) in that they allow for opening a critical discussion around a wider set of issues such as national identity, nationalism, the making of history, and local power games. By engaging with these concepts, the contributions go beyond theorizing them as nationalist efforts to © Association for the Study of Nationalities 2019.

Call for Papers. 5th International Balkan Studies Conference  "Balkan Express 2019. Living together - Tolerance, Coexistence, Reconciliation", Prague, November 8-9, 2019. Organized by the Faculty of Humanities, Charles University, Institute of Ethnology of the Czech Academy of Sciences and Institute of History of the Czech Academy of Sciences with the support of the Institute of International Relations, Faculty of Social Sciences, Charles University in Prague. Deadline for applications: May 31, 2019.