Every newly emerged and nationalizing state has to confirm its legitimacy and, more often than not, employs a cultural-historical approach for that. It is even more so, if, under an authoritarian regime, the given society presents itself as a cultural-historical entity rather than a civic one based on political cohesion. The less democratic a society the more it is eager to depict itself as an organic community based on a well-bound culture and deeply rooted in the given soil. In this case the idea of an ancestral heritage is used as a substitute for political legitimacy.

In 1762 and 1763, manifestos were issued by Catherine II, and later were extended further by her son Paul I, inviting foreign artisans and others to settle in far-flung rural areas of the Russian Empire in order to help strengthen the economy. Under a policy somewhat similar to the later US Homestead Act, under the manifestos German and other foreign-national settlers and their descendants were offered Russian citizenship, land ownership after three years, religious tolerance (including, in the case of Germans, German clergy and German-language churches), and exemption from the military draft—although by the end of the nineteenth century the last of these had been rescinded. The call was not restricted to Germans, but Germans comprised the largest group to take advantage of it, settling for the most part in Ukraine, Bessarabia, and the mid-Volga region. Those who participated in the migration, known as the Auswanderung, and their descendants are often referred to in English as “Russian Germans” or “Germans from Russia” (rossiiskie nemtsy). A second wave of German immigration occurred in 1894, when some Germans who had settled in Prussia moved across the border into Russia. By 1897, there were over 2 million German immigrants and descendants in the Russian Empire.

Serbia's ethnic Hungarian minority, concentrated in the northern province of Vojvodina, is little known compared to other ethnic minorities in the Balkans. Unlike Kosovo Albanians, Bosnian Muslims, Bosnian Serbs, and Croatian Serbs, the Vojvodina Hungarians were not involved in violent conflict during Yugoslavia's disintegration of the 1990s. The Hungarian minority is not without its grievances or its political demands, however. Over the past two decades, Vojvodina Hungarians have organized a campaign for greater cultural accommodation and political autonomy for their community. They argue that the province as a whole has lost most of its meaningful autonomous powers, that the Hungarian minority does not have adequate political representation and cultural institutions, and that the state does not fully protect the minority from growing threats of ethnic violence and discrimination. The minority's campaign directs most of its appeals to the Belgrade authorities, but increasingly it looks beyond Serbia's borders for support as well. Especially when the Serbian government appears hostile or indifferent to their appeals, the Vojvodina Hungarians look to make alliances with foreign actors, including the Hungarian government, the US government, EU institutions, and assorted other media outlets and NGOs. The minority leaders expect that by sending these foreign actors accounts of the human rights abuses that Vojvodina Hungarians suffer, they will ally themselves with the campaign and pressure the Serbian authorities to compromise with its demands.

How can one understand the phenomenon known as “ethnic violence?” Does subsuming events under the category “ethnic violence” assist our understanding or does it obscure it? Are there lessons that the form ethnic violence takes can teach us? These questions are important not only for anyone interested in the causes and prevention of ethnic violence but also for those who wish to understand group behavior more generally. I explore this question more fully through analysis of the case of the Russian Federation. Russia is a country where in recent times skinhead violence against ethnic minorities has become an important issue. According to Tarasov, Russia contains between 60,000 and 65,000 skinheads active in at least 85 different cities. These skinheads daily commit appalling acts of violence against members of ethnic minorities and human rights activists. Three instances of violence all from the year 2006 help to illustrate some of their activities.

This article uses ideological criticism to examine how and why victimage, identity and nationalism are produced through everyday discursive practices of Serbs and Albanians in Kosovo. Wander contends that the ideological turn in criticism confronts and studies what is professed and obscure, and Greene argues that part of this criticism involves unmasking forms of domination. Examining cultural or rhetorical narratives is part of ideological criticism. The narratives in this study can be regarded as competing vernacular memories representative of Serbs and Albanians in Kosovo. The participants invoke personal and collective memories with official national histories to explain contemporary victimization as a continuance of historical victimage. This use of the past can serve to legitimize their national and political claims, as well as to justify violence against the other group, since historical victimage provides a rationale for hating the other group and perpetuating a vicious cycle of violence.

This article identifies the dynamics which shaped the eruption of civil war in Tajikistan. It argues that the mechanisms of network activation by the elites, together with the establishment of local militias and their involvement in the war through the activation of violence specialists, were important factors in bringing about the eruption of violence. This article is not about the causes of the civil war. Its aim is not to answer the question of why, but the question of how: what mechanisms led Tajikistan into civil war, how networks were activated from the top down, how mobilization was achieved at the micro level in the villages. This article stresses both macro- and micro-level mechanisms, and argues that there is a connection between the two—a look at both is necessary to understand the dynamics of the war.

Annexation into the Russian Empire transformed the cities of Central Asia. The European presence increased steadily from year to year and with it new city neighborhoods were created, often alongside the old quarters in which the autochthonous population lived. With increased immigration during the Soviet era, the majority of the population in the region's principal cities were either Slavs or Russified minorities and the common language used by all the inhabitants, including the autochthonous ones who continued to use their mother tongue, was Russian. The Soviets saw these changes as part of a process of modernization starting in the cities’ European neighborhoods which would spread progressively to the local population.