Islam is by far the dominant religious faith in Tajikistan. At the end of the seventh century and the beginning of the eighth century Arab armies led by Qutayba Ibn Muslim conquered the region of Sogdiana, which included the northern part of present-day Tajikistan. The Arab invaders converted the local population to Islam and since then the Muslim faith has become an integral part of the Tajik culture. According to Tajikistan's State Committee on Religious Affairs, 97% of the Tajik population is currently Muslim and is served by 3224 mosques, 19 medresses (Muslim theological schools) and an Islamic university. An estimated 30–40% of the rural population and 5–10% of the urban population regularly follow Muslim practices or attend mosques.

Ethnic cleansing, with its severe repercussions of millions of refugees and internally displaced people in addition to the deaths of hundreds of thousands and the massive destruction of property, has necessitated the study of this phenomenon with a view to understanding its causes in order to find ways to prevent its recurrence or alleviate its consequences. “Ethnic cleansing” is not what lawyers call “a term of art,” i.e. it lacks legal definition and also a body of case law. For the purposes of this paper “ethnic cleansing” is taken to mean a systematic policy designed by and pursued under the leadership of a nation or ethnic community or with its consent, with a view to removing—by means of force and/or intimidation—a population deemed “undesirable” because of its ethnic, national or religious origin. Although ethnic cleansing can be a gradual, low-intensity process, carried out incrementally over a long period of time, the following analysis concentrates mainly on large-scale cases of ethnic cleansing, that is, cases in which the number of uprooted people is upwards of tens of thousands.

‘Only unity saves the Serbs’ is the famous call for unity in the Serb nationalist doctrine, but even though this doctrine enjoyed widespread ideological adherence, disunity has been a dominant characteristic of Bosnian Serb politics since the first multiparty elections in 1990. In this context of intra-Serb rivalry, the dominance of the Serb Democratic Party (Sprska demokratska stranka, SDS) has nevertheless been an almost constant feature. The SDS was founded in July 1990, under the leadership of Radovan Karadžić, and in a nationalist landslide in the elections four months later, the party secured around 85% of the Serb vote. Following the marginalisation of the competing non-ethnic parties the SDS enjoyed a largely monolithic status in the Serb community, but after the outbreak of war, and an initial closing of ranks, Serb opposition parties soon emerged. Such competition intensified after the signing of the Dayton Agreement, when the SDS's ability to use repressive powers against competitors was significantly reduced. Despite this persistent competition, the SDS has remained the dominant political force among the Serbs in Bosnia and until 1997 its control was close to being absolute. This dominance was decisive for the development of conflict and war in Bosnia, but analysis of the conditions that allowed the SDS to achieve and maintain its dominance is nevertheless lacking. In this article, the dynamics of intra-Serb party competition in Bosnia will be analysed and the following questions will be sought answered: What was the basis of the SDS's continued dominance? What resources were decisive in the party competition? How did the ethnification of politics affect these dynamics? How did the existence of intra-ethnic challengers affect the SDS's position?

The main objective of the research project “Self-Identification of Meglen Vlachs” was to compare the contemporary state of Meglen Vlach culture and identity in their different settlement areas. Fieldwork sponsored by the German Research Foundation (DFG) in Meglen Vlach communities in Romania, Greece, Turkey and the Republic of Macedonia was able to identify the settlement areas of the Meglen Vlachs in Turkey. The paper represents a summary of the most important findings in Turkey.

A series of time-honoured regular folk fairs take place in the Carpathian Mountains that are mainly economic but also socio-cultural events. The participants come from all the three Romanian principalities—Moldavia, Wallachia, and Transylvania, that is, from all the historical provinces of the Romanian state as constituted after the First World War. These folk fairs are “two-land fairs” in the Eastern and Southern Carpathians and “three-land fairs” where all three provinces converge, as in the district of Vrancea. Over the centuries, such fairs advanced the perception that participants spoke the same language, shared the same religious belief, and belonged to the same neam, that is, implicitly to the same territory (the word neam being a vernacular term for “kin group,” but extensible to the notion of “people” and “nation”). In short, the folk fairs contributed to awakening Romanian national consciousness. Such evidence challenges modernist theory, according to which national consciousness should have arisen with the bourgeoise elite, who should have inculcated it into the public mind.