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.

A diaspora is a migrant community which crosses borders, retains an ethnic group consciousness and peculiar institutions over extended periods (Cohen, 1997, p. ix). It is an ancient social formation, comprised of people living out of their ancestral homeland, who retain their loyalties toward their co-ethnics and the homeland from which they were forced out (Esman, 1996, p. 317). The Jews were the most ancient and well-known diasporic people. For a long time, “diaspora” meant almost exclusively the Jewish people. Hence diaspora signified a collective trauma, a banishment, where one dreamed of home but lived in exile. However, in recent years other peoples, such as Palestinians, Armenians, Chinese, Tatars, etc., who have settled outside their natal territories but maintain strong collective identities, also have defined themselves as disasporas. As Cohen states, “the description or self-description of such groups as diasporas is now common,” which allows a certain degree of social distance to displace a high degree of psychological alienation. Accordingly, during the last decades, disaspora has been rediscovered and expanded to include refugees, gastarbeiters, migrants, expatriates, expellees, political refugees, and ethnic minorities (Safran, 1991, p. 83).

With the collapse of the Soviet Union and the subsequent independence of Latvia, a minority group became a majority and a majority group became a minority. This has been the situation for Latvians and Russians after August 1991. The Baltic States led the way towards first autonomy and then independence. The nationalist movement in the Latvian SSR was primarily a minority nationalist movement. Why do minorities mobilise? Gurr finds that minorities rebel for two reasons: relative deprivation and group mobilisation. Relative deprivation answers the question of why and it characterizes the status of the Latvian language and culture vis-à-vis that of Russia during the Soviet period. While relative deprivation has come under considerable criticism because of its inability to explain when a group will mobilise, the notion can be found in the nationalist rhetoric before and since the restoration of Latvian independence. Group mobilisation goes further in explaining when minorities may assert political claims. Considered in terms of changes in the political opportunity structure, the changing politics of glasnost allowed the nationalist movements to mobilise in the Baltic States.

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.

This paper has two main goals. First, it illuminates continuities between the ideas of “true Romanian-ness” as held by both the Romanian cultural elite and the Romanian political regimes in the interwar and communist periods. A manufactured definition of a “true” Romanian—as a Romanian Orthodox Christian, natively Romanian-speaking, and ethnically Romanian—formed the core of Romanian nationalism, regardless of the ruling ideology. This definition did not include the Roman and Greek Catholics of Romanian ethnicity on the grounds that they were not Orthodox Christians. It goes without saying that these criteria also excluded Hungarians, Germans and other ethnic minorities on the basis of ethnicity, language and religion. Second, the paper demonstrates that the principal ideas of Romanian nationalism developed in overt contrast to the internationalist ideological movements of both periods. Both the liberals and the Marxists misunderstood nationalism, claimed Ernest Gellner in 1964: liberals assumed that nationalism was a doomed legacy of outmoded irrationalism, superstition and savagery, and Marxists considered it a necessary but temporary stage in the path to global socialism. Gellner's comments are evidently appropriate to Romania, where nationalist responses developed first to the Westernization of the interwar period and second to communist internationalism after 1948.

Why do people go to war? My own interest in this question emerged from the context of my dissolving country and Serbia's increased engagement in a very strident form of ethnonationalism. Although social scientists have sought to understand the roles of ethnonationalism in fostering state-organized violence, few scholars have sought to understand the gendered nature of men's motivations for participating in war. The case of the inter-ethnic wars in Croatia and Bosnia, following the break-up of Yugoslavia, presents an unparalleled opportunity to understand more about how the processes of ethnonationalization and masculinization operate in everyday life, and about how men from Serbia made sense of their decisions about participation in the wars. In the present paper I explore the ways nationalism and masculinity intersect and overlap, influence and are influenced by war participation, by looking closer into the war volunteers from Serbia who joined the Yugoslav wars of secession, 1991–1995.

This article examines determinants of persistent regional political cleavages in post-Communist Ukraine. The question is how significant the role of culture is compared to ethnic, economic, and religious factors in the regional divisions. This study employs correlation, factor, and regression analyses of regional support for the Communist/pro-Russian parties and presidential candidates and pro-nationalist/pro-independence parties and candidates in all national elections held from 1991 to 2006, the vote for the preservation of the Soviet Union in the March 1991 referendum, and the vote for the independence of Ukraine in the December 1991 referendum. This study shows that the pattern of these regional differences remained relatively stable from 1991 to 2006. Historical experience has a major effect on regional electoral behavior in post-Communist Ukraine. The legacy of Austro-Hungarian, Polish, Romanian, and Czechoslovak rule is positively associated with the pro-nationalist and pro-independence vote; the same historical legacy has a negative effect on support for pro-Communist and pro-Russian parties and presidential candidates and on the vote for the preservation of the Soviet Union.

The writing of history has a direct influence upon national identities. This is especially the case when historical writing and interpretation are contested, as they are among the three Eastern Slavic peoples (Russians, Ukrainians, and Belarusians). Where contestation is high, as in the Ukrainian- Russian relationship since the disintegration of the USSR, the writing and interpretation of history also impact upon their domestic and foreign policies and, most notably, their inter-state relations. Russian elites and the majority of Russians do not look upon Ukraine and Belarus as “foreign” countries.

Much has been made in the social sciences of the ambiguity of nationalism in Central Asia, where not only the boundaries between republics but between nations, languages, and peoples were drawn by the Soviet state. The similar ambiguity of Central Asian religiosity, however, has remained largely ignored. Perhaps religiosity, unlike the more recent idea of nationalism, is considered too fixed a construct for the modern and artificially created states of Central Asia. The division of religions into specific sects, each with its own explicit doctrine and precepts, would seem to preclude definitional necessity. Yet in the 1980s it was religiosity, malleable and stubborn, which proved as essential to the decline of the Soviet Union as did nationalism. As a vital component of identity, religion can exist without any clergy, place of worship, or understanding of sacred text, much as a nation can exist without a state or a government. The illusory aspects of religion, the comforts and mystery of rite and ritual, are as difficult for a state to control as national sentiment, and often prove the impetus behind the latter.

The results of the 2004 Ukrainian presidential elections highlighted the continued existence of regional diversity across Ukraine and the huge task the Ukrainian state faces in reconciling divisions and creating an all-encompassing modern Ukrainian identity. This article seeks to examine perceptions and understandings of identity change in Ukraine from three cities, namely Luhans'k, Kharkiv and Sumy, all adjacent to the Russian-Ukrainian state border, in an effort to deconstruct the mega-region of ‘eastern Ukraine’ and in doing so, argue for the need for further academic scrutiny of inherent nuances within ‘east’ and ‘west’ Ukraine, differences, which more large-scale quantitative research fails to uncover. Data generated from in-depth interviews in schools with school directors, history teachers and schoolchildren are analysed to demonstrate how individuals reflect on the importance of the ‘region’ in Ukraine and secondly the role of Russia in Ukraine's identity politics. The impact of these results on Ukrainian politics and society as well as our understandings of regional diversity across Ukraine is outlined in the conclusions.

‘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?

In 2005, years after an enforced peace was constructed between Serbia and its Albanian-majority province Kosovo, the outcome of a better life for ordinary citizens seemed yet to be fulfilled. However, this was not the most important change in the lives of Kosovars. I will argue that the lives of Kosovars are characterised by a lack of economic growth and the increased importance of the normative concept of the hegemonic man. Kosovars, like many “traditionally” patriarchal societies, have constructed identities of the patriotic man and the exalted childbearing woman as icons of national survival. These designated identities often negate the realities of war-affected communities. The gendered places of man and woman in political reality are marred by the traumatic events of life. Within this framework, I analyze interviews with people who have developed “alternative” identities or, as phrased by Carver, “bonded” senses of self-esteem as a result of viewing themselves as somewhat unable to live up to the iconic emblem. In the context of a continued occupation of the province by both the international bodies assigned to the province and the Serbian state (Kosovo is not yet independent from Serbia), one of the main questions asked by many Kosovars today remains: “What was the war about if not independence and where are the spoils of victory?”

In 1950, in the aftermath of the Second World War and after flight and expulsion had come to an end, there were about four million Germans still living in East, East Central and Southeast Europe. Between 1950 and 1975, a total of about 800,000 Aussiedler (immigrants who are recognised by the German authorities as being of German descent) passed through the West German border transit camps, and 616,000 more arrived between 1976 and 1987. Then, with the opening of the Iron Curtain, mass immigration of Aussiedler began. Against the background of glasnost and perestroika in the USSR, their numbers increased rapidly from 1987 onwards. During the next nearly two decades, three million Aussiedler entered the Federal Republic of Germany. In all, more than four million migrants of officially recognised German descent migrated into Germany during the second half of the twentieth century.

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.

On 5 December 2004 the citizens of Hungary were called to decide through referendum on two issues: (1) that the health system remained under full state control, and (2) that ethnic Hungarians living in the neighboring countries were granted citizenship preferentially. Sixty-five percent of the Hungarians who went to vote gave a favorable answer to the first question, and a little more than 51% gave a yes answer to the second question. Despite this, however, the referendum failed because of the low voter turnout of only 37.49% of the electorate. According to Hungarian law, for a referendum result to be valid it is required that at least 25% of the electorate endorses it. In this referendum a little less than 19% of all franchised citizens voted for granting double citizenship to ethnic Hungarians living in the neighboring countries.

In 2000, when conducting a household survey as part of my research on consumption and ethnicity in the small western Macedonian town of Kumanovo, I received explicit proof of how important education has become for ethnic Albanians. It was a Friday afternoon on a hot summer day. I was in my top-floor apartment, working with my research assistant, Adnan, a 28-year-old ethnic Albanian man who had been helping me for the past year. We had grown to be a well-synchronized team. It was his turn to dictate while I entered data from the survey into the computer. The questionnaire concerned interior decorations, but it began with several general questions about the ages, education, and number of family members. After we finished entering around thirty of the questionnaires completed in Albanian, Adnan suddenly stood up without a word. He went into the kitchen, and started drinking water from the first thing he saw, which was an empty olive jar drying on the dish rack. Then he came back, clearly upset. He wiped the sweat from his forehead with the upper part of his hand, and exclaimed,

From the estimated ten million refugees in interwar Europe, more than 250,000 were ethnic Bulgarians who found their way in the Bulgarian Kingdom following Bulgarian defeats in the Second Balkan War and World War One. For a country with a population of five and a half million in the mid-1920s, this refugee flow constituted a significant challenge from economic, political, social, and cultural viewpoints. Similarly to Germany, Hungary, and Austria, the refugee presence served as a constant reminder of national failure because Bulgaria lost territories, perceived as a part of the national homeland, to all of its neighbors. The Bulgarian state received refugees from the Ottoman Empire, Greece, Yugoslavia, and Romania, and the interwar governments were compelled to deal with a large and diverse population that suffered harsh socioeconomic problems and psychological traumas. Due to the Convention for Emigration of Minorities between Greece and Bulgaria of 1919 as well as the Greek-Turkish War of 1921–1922 and the obligatory population exchange it initiated in the period 1922–1924, refugee flows in the Balkans lasted well into the mid-1920s. Hence Bulgarians were on the move throughout 1924 and 1925. Despite these strenuous circumstances, interwar politicians boasted the successful integration of the refugees. Immediately after World War One, the government provided temporary assistance to the newcomers. In 1926, an international loan allowed the agricultural settlement of the most destitute new arrivals, and all refugees were granted the rights of Bulgarian citizens. A second loan in 1928 guaranteed the continuation of vital infrastructure projects. By the end of the 1930s, both domestic and international agencies involved in the refugee accommodation viewed the process as a successfully completed mission.