The article summarizes the history of the Russian–Ukrainian encounters in memory politics from the 1990s to the start of the 2020s. It compares and contrasts Russia’a and Ukraine’s perceptions of the issues, goals, tasks, and methods of historical policy. Having a shared history and similar challenges in developing identities and tackling the politics of commemoration, the cultural elites and governments of both countries approached the task of identity-building from opposite perspectives. These differences stemmed from different interpretations of one’s nation’s place and role in world history. The article summarizes all critical points of disagreement regarding how the two countries understood their shared past and interpreted it. It observes the history of the joint initiatives between Russia and Ukraine to reconcile confronting narratives. The analysis shows how the shared past perceived and conceived in divergent ways amounted to the mnemonic anxiety and securitization of the collective memory clash of antagonistic versions of the past and triggered the conflict and war.

In 1525, Prussia became the first territory to enact the Reformation when its leaders issued a new church order based on the teachings of Martin Luther. As this article makes clear, these were not native Prussians instituting reforms but rather German clergymen, many of whom had travelled to Prussia because their marriages had provoked persecution in the Holy Roman Empire. To illuminate the intertwined phenomena of marriage, migration, and church reform in Prussia, this article compares the journeys of two German clergymen who travelled to Prussia and led the Reformation there: Paul Speratus, a Swabian preacher, and Albrecht of Brandenburg-Ansbach, the Grandmaster of the Teutonic Order. Although they came from different social strata and their journeys to Prussia were distinct, the leitmotif of marriage animates their embrace of the Reformation and their paths to Prussia.

We outline a framework for comparative analyses of minority education and present four illustrative Central and Eastern European (CEE) cases: Bulgaria, Estonia, the Republic of North Macedonia and Romania. The fourfold typology we develop relies on literature on minority rights and diversity management and proposes a holistic approach, differing from narrower legal analysis. We investigate education as part of larger macro-approaches of minority policies and focus on the interrelation between educational equity and identity reproduction. In our case studies, we employ a diachronic perspective, focusing on historical dynamics and pathways of educational policies, aiming to identify both gradual change and more radical shifts in institutional processes. The concept of de facto discrimination plays an important role as well: next to the historical analysis of legislative and policy changes, we use various statistics to measure educational equity. We rely on the 2022 PISA results, a tool popular in the comparative research of educational systems but underutilized in the fields of minority rights and minority policies. In our comparative inquiry, we argue that the educational systems of CEEs diverge in terms of minority identity reproduction, but few of them can be labelled as integrative, as intercultural elements are rather weak, while education usually fails to provide equity for minority students.

The article investigates perceived and objective inequalities in Bosnia and Herzegovina, focusing on Republika Srpska amid rising societal tensions, bolstering the secession narrative, and political mobilization. Aimed at identifying objective inequalities that might fuel grievances causing societal upheaval, the findings reveal no significant disparities between Republika Srpska and the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Despite the absence of objective economic, social, or political inequalities, a perception of disparity persists among Bosnian Serbs, driven by the nationalist rhetoric of local leaders. Hence, the research underscores the gap between perceived inequalities and objective disparities, challenging conventional beliefs about the causal chain from objective horizontal inequalities to social mobilization by demonstrating how unfounded grievances can still drive tensions and secessionist agendas.

Global challenges such as climate change demand transnational responses, including from legal clinics. Building on earlier community legal clinic and international human rights clinic models, transnational legal clinics combine the objectives of legal clinics with the framework of transnational law to work across domestic and international planes. This article focuses on a Canadian–Peruvian legal clinic collaboration to research and draft an amicus curiae brief for landmark climate litigation in Peru. While the global north–south axis of collaboration raises structural challenges, adopting a transnational approach unites participants around the principle of solidarity and decentres assumptions about expertise. A transnational approach also contributes to the progressive development of law, in this case by offering insights into remedies in climate litigation. Overall, we argue that transnational legal clinic collaboration can spur participants’ reflective learning and make substantive contributions to the growing number of climate cases.

How do autocracies use nationalism to normalize and contain unsettled times? The full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 marked a decisive point in Russia’s politics from which there could be no return to an antebellum normality. Rather than attempt to mobilize the Russian public to war, state-run television sought to normalize the war as a banal reality for domestic audiences. Drawing on a content analysis of 1,575 reports from the state-run First Channel [Pervyi Kanal] from 2022 to 2024, this article argues that the Ukrainian regions occupied by Russia — the so-called “new regions” — are crucial to this strategy through their incorporation into banal nationalist depictions of Russia. In turn, televised depictions of residents in the “new regions” confer emotional weight and moral examples for ordinary Russians through their everyday practices: their fortitude in voting for Putin despite ongoing attacks; through their shared excitement in acquiring routine aspects of daily life from passports to pensions; and through their embodiment of Russia’s future. In the process, media depictions normalize imperial nationalist justifications for Russia’s occupation of Ukrainian territory in terms of the distinctiveness of the Russian people, Russia’s civilizing mission, and presentation of its war as defensive.

Councils of National Minorities (NMCs), connected with the concept of non-territorial autonomy, have been recognized in research as a safeguard of minority rights, offering potential solutions to ethnic tensions. NMCs could be important actors in countries such as Serbia where tensions over the Kosovo issue are still present. Despite various studies on NMCs in Serbia, the specific role of women in these councils and their contribution to peace-making has not been a primary focus. This 2024 research in Serbia examines the involvement of women from NMCs in challenging male/state-centric discourses on women as peacemakers through inductive thematic analysis of interviews with female NMCs’ representatives. The focus of the analysis is on intersections of nation and gender, the impact of women in NMCs on reducing tensions and fostering peace, and the gendered nature of these processes. This study contributes to understanding the role of women from NMCs in peacebuilding using non-territorial frameworks.

This article critically analyzes new cultural production in relation to reality shows to determine not only the major forces behind this new trend but also the future directions of Hallyu production. After discussing the recent surge of reality programs as a major part of broadcasting Hallyu, it uses Jinny’s Kitchen as a case study to discuss the ways in which reality shows develop (g)localization. It analyzes how Jinny’s Kitchen advances (g)localization in the process of production for global OTT platforms. Finally, it maps out whether Korea has become a new global force in utilizing (g)localization strategies to create a new form of cultural production by analyzing the form of relationships between global and local forces in the digital platform era.

Recent scholarship on the democratization and Europeanization of the Western Balkans as well as the field of media studies have not amply dealt with the concept of political clientelism in the media in this region, which has been a major feature of the post-Milošević democratic transition in Serbia. This article examines the gradual political instrumentalization of the media landscape in Serbia under the ruling party since 2012. It will argue that despite the adoption of the new media laws first in 2014 and their amendments in 2023, government influence of the media outlets vis-à-vis more subtle mechanisms of control, has served to undermine media freedom rather than fostering democratic changes through genuine domestic reforms. This type of more subtle mechanism of indirect control is visible through the captured regulatory authority, state subsidies in the media vis-à-vis project co-financing, advertising contracts where the government serves as an intermediary, and the recent amendments to the new media laws adopted in October 2023 that practically “legalized” government interference in the Serbian media.

This article offers the first gendered history of African radio audiences. It uses a comparative approach to demonstrate that colonial development projects in Ghana and Zambia successfully created mass African audiences for radio between the 1930s and 1950s, at a time when most radio sets on the continent were owned by white settlers. However the gendered impact of the projects was uneven. In Zambia the promotion of battery-operated wirelesses inadvertently created a male-dominated audience, while the construction of a wired rediffusion system in Ghana attracted equal numbers of male and female listeners. Ghana’s radio project offers new perspectives on the history of colonial development as a very rare example of a scheme that benefitted women as much as men. Differences in the voice of Ghanaian and Zambian radio also reveal that these early radio schemes had a lasting influence on broadcast content and listening culture in both countries beyond the 1950s.

In Croatia, due to local histories of violence, purist language ideologies, and the essentialist belief that nations and languages form an inseparable nexus, the ability to speak pure “Croatian” (čisti hrvatski) is perceived as a sign of morality while the use of “Serbian” indexes immorality. Through repetition over time and institutional support – through ethno-linguistic enregisterment – linguistic practises are able to map ethnicity and morality onto the bodies of speakers, making the use of language in Croatia a delicate and politicized performance. Based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork, this article explores the ways in which linguistic performances of čisti hrvatski by the newly minoritized Serbs in Vukovar become an integral part of performing political subjectivity. The eagerness of some of my interlocutors to perform čisti hrvatski in the public sphere becomes a way to embody exemplary minority subjectivity and to negotiate their stigmatized ethnic difference by demonstrating a sense of belonging to the Croatian nation-state.