The outbreak of civil war and the disintegration of the “second Yugoslavia” was caused by many factors; however the impact of the debilitating conflict within the Yugoslav political elite, into which the ordinary citizens also were “drawn,” was crucial. This article will seek to support this hypothesis.

Uncovering the importance of Islam in Chechen national identity is not necessarily difficult. Alexei Malashenko has noted that Chechen identity today cannot be considered outside the context of Islamic tradition. Chechnya today is not an independent Muslim state. Its embracing of Islam came about during a time of colonization, when Chechens were struggling to halt Russian encroachment on their lands. Many works pertaining to Islam in Chechnya suggest that, at the time of Russian advancement in the eighteenth century, most Chechens were “nominally” Muslim. This has been attributed to the geographic isolation of the Caucasus. While the rugged mountainous landscape and thick forests which cover the region provided protection from invaders, it also hindered interaction among the various mountain peoples as well as the strength of outside religious influence. Soon after their defeat to the tsarist Russians, the Bolshevik Revolution occurred and Chechens spent the following 80 years under Soviet rule. After the fall of the Soviet Union, the Republic of Chechnya declared independence alongside the full-fledged Soviet Socialist Republics, though their independence was not recognized by the UN. The Chechen victory over the Russian Federation in the first war in 1994–1996 has been considered a remarkable military defeat. However, a weak economy, high unemployment, and criminality caused the young nation to fall into a state of lawlessness and radicalism, eventually causing it to suffer a defeat to the Russians in the second war, which began in 1999. The present day is characterized by exhaustion and a desire for peace, a desire that ultimately has meant deference to Russian rule.

Die Stadt Lublin war in den letzten Jahren das Objekt umfassenderer Arbeiten. Wenn aber selbst die allgemeine Geschichte Lublins in der Zwischenkriegszeit im Unterschied zur historiographischen Würdigung der Zeit bis zum Eersten Weltkrieg ein “unbeschriebenes Blatt” ist, dann gilt dies umso mehr für die Geschichte der Lubliner Juden und ihr Verhältnis zur nicht-jüdischen Bevölkerung. Regionalbezogene Untersuchungen fehlen völlig. Dies liegt an der Komplexität des Themas, aber auch an der lange Zeit ungenügenden Bereitschaft polnischer amtlicher Stellen, Archivalien frei zugänglich zu machen.

What are the chances for peace and stability in the Transcaucasus—a region that has been plagued by decades of exploitation and colonization and has recently been the setting for a violent conflict between neighboring nationalities? Nadir Mekhtiev, Chairman of the Human Rights Commission of the Azerbaijani Supreme Soviet and Chairman of the Azerbaijani Helsinki Committee, offered some thoughts and impressions on this matter.

This article investigates gendered nationalist ideologies and their attendant myths and narratives in present-day Kyrgyzstan through an investigation of clothing items and practices. Clothes “speak volumes,” revealing tensions between gendered narratives of nationhood and various interpretations of what “proper” Kyrgyz femininities and masculinities should be. Clothing thus becomes both a sign and a site of the politics of identity, inscribing power relations and individual strategies of Kyrgyz men and women onto their bodies. Individual clothing choices and strategies take place within the general context of discursive struggles over what authentic and appropriate representations of Kyrgyzness should be. Thus, such clothing items as ak kalpak (conical felt hats) and the practice of Muslim women covering their head (hijab) acquire social and political meanings that stand for wider processes of identity contestations in the country.

After having published a book, an author must take into account that his text remains unprotected, and becomes an object of new readings which reflect different social and political conditions, and the interests of subsequent generations of readers. Consequently, an author's concepts and opinions are open to various reflections and can be used as arguments or tools of analysis, as inspirations, models, or targets of criticism. These processes occur independently of an author's expectations and original goals. In a broader sense, we can agree with antiquity: “Habent sua fata libelli.” My book on the “Social Preconditions of National Revival” has been no exception, and it is a great pleasure for me to realize that this book has survived so many decades to live its “second life,” and that its original meanings and concepts inspire new interpretations, even if they have sometimes been misunderstood or exploited as arguments in totally different conditions and settings. It is a pleasant surprise to observe that my methods, typologies and generalizations can be (successfully?) discussed and used, naturally in a modified version, as tools to analyze developments and conflicts in very distant countries and times. Alexander Maxwell has given an excellent and well-informed overview of this differentiated and sometimes controversial second life. All other contributions to this issue, analyzing concrete cases, could be understood as indications that my scientific efforts have made sense, and sometimes inspired researchers up to the present day.

On 27 February 1992, almost 47 years after the end of the Second World War, Chancellor Helmut Kohl of a re-united Germany and President Václav Havel of the Czech and Slovak Federal Republic [the ČSFR] signed a Friendship Treaty between their two countries in the Spanish Room of Prague Castle, the residence of the Czechoslovak president. While this treaty could have signalled a new era of Sudeten German-Czech relations, in fact it did not, as some 2,000 protesters who greeted Kohl and Havel with denunciatory placards following the signing made clear. Why not?

In this essay I explore the ways in which the internal Albanian politics of memory in Kosovo rely on a longer, lived history of militant self-organisation than the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) war period alone. On the basis of recent ethnographic research, I argue that the memory of prewar militant activism is symbolically codified, ritually formalized, and put on the public stage in Kosovo today. Not only has this process effectively rehabilitated and consolidated the personal, social, and political status of specific former activists, it also has produced a hegemonic morality against which the actions of those in power are judged internally. On the one hand, this process reproduces shared cultural references which idealise ethnonational solidarity, unity and pride and which have served militant mobilisation already before the 1990s. On the other, it provides the arguments through which rival representatives of the former militant underground groups (known as Ilegalja) compete both socially and politically still today. Although this process demarcates some lines of social and political friction within society, it also suggests that international efforts to introduce an identity which breaks with Kosovo's past and some of its associated values, face a local system of signification that is historically even deeper entrenched than is usually assumed.