Literature in many languages (documentary, monographic, memoir-like and periodical) is abundant on the sovietization of Czechoslovakia, as are the reasons advanced for it. Some observers have argued that the Soviet takeover of the country stemmed from an excessive preoccupation with Panslavism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries by a few Czech and Slovak intellectuals, politicians, writers and poets and their uncritical affection and fascination for everything Russian and Soviet. Others have attributed the drawing of Czechoslovakia into the Soviet orbit to Franco-British appeasement of Hitler's imperial ambitions during the September 1938, Munich crisis. At Munich, Czechoslovakia lost its sovereignty and territory, France its honor, England its respect and trust; and the Soviet Union, by its abstract offer to aid Czechoslovakia (without detailing how or in what form the assistance would come) gained admiration. Still others have pinned the blame for the sovietization of Czechoslovakia on machinations by top leaders of the Czechoslovak Communist Party, who, as obedient tools of Moscow, supported Soviet geopolitical designs on Czechoslovakia, who sought and received political asylum in the USSR during World War II, and who returned to Czechoslovakia with the victorious Soviet armed forces at the end of World War II as high-ranking members of the Soviet establishment. Finally, there are some who maintain that the sovietization of Czechoslovakia commenced with the 25 February 1948, Communist coup, followed by the tragic death of Foreign Minister Jan Masaryk on 10 March 1948, and the replacement, on 7 June 1948, of President Eduard Beneš by the Moscow-trained, loyal Kremlin servant Klement Gottwald.

This study analyzes transformations of historiography and identity discourses by focusing on the Memory House of Ali Rıza Efendi (the father of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk) as a “site of historical consciousness” which was reconstructed in the western part of the Republic of Macedonia. The House, referred to by the villagers as the “Memory House of Atatürk,” was opened in 2014 in a Muslim village, Kocacık, with the support of the Turkish state. Through material and textual representations of Atatürk's life, the House speaks to the Turkishness and Turkish presence in the Balkans. The Turkishness, however, is imagined through the neo-Ottoman and Islamic prisms. The House thus becomes the locus of alternative interpretations of the past, and, consequently, narratives of Muslims’ identity and origin in the region. Moreover, as it is reconstructed at the nexus of the local and the transnational, the House is also called a symbol of the “politics of brotherhood” between Macedonia and Turkey. In this way, the institution embodies the reconstruction of the past not only at the local and national levels, but also at the international level.

Walker Connor (1926–2017) was one of the finest twentieth-century thinkers in political science and a pioneer in the study of nationalism, having helped to identify some of the key issues and problems in his area of study. First and foremost, he finely diagnosed the misuse of the predominant terminology at the time; this was pervaded by the simplistic “modernization paradigm” with its unilinear vision of progress and unshakable faith in state-led “nation building” – which Connor elegantly dismantled (Connor 1969, 1972, 1978). Some of his most influential articles were collected in the book Ethnonationalism: The Quest for Understanding (Connor 1994).

Latvia is not a large country and, therefore, does not usually attract much attention. In addition, for several postwar decades, it did not exist as an independent country.

This paper compares the escalation of civil war in South Ossetia and Kosovo and shows how different modes of transition deeply influenced the timing and type of conflict in these two cases. It argues that regimes resulting from a transition from above – when the elite in power leads the process of regime change and imposes its political agenda on other social actors – are more likely to ensure political stability in the short term, since governments are more cohesive internally, enjoy the support of the military, and can rely on a loyal bureaucracy. In contrast, regimes that emerge from transitions from below are more likely to experience civil war with an ethnic minority in the short term because of an intrinsic weakness of the elite in power. Under these circumstances, the newcomers need to win the loyalty of the military and of the bureaucracy, and separatist groups can take advantage of the incumbents’ weaknesses and try to build resources to militarily challenge the state.

For the Russians, Siberia has always been “Other” and, as a result, it has often been imagined as something other than what it is. As Mark Bassin argues in this richly detailed book, this habit of the Russian imaginaire was on full display during the mid-1800s when hopeful Russian observers and statesmen envisioned the Russian Empire's latest territorial acquisition—the Amur river in far eastern Siberia—as a new Mississippi and the region around it as a potential second America. Ultimately, of course, these geographical analogies proved well off the mark. The region of the Amur never went on to experience the prosperity of the United States and the Amur river never even remotely rivaled the importance of the Mississippi as an artery of trade and settlement. And what is so interesting about all this is that the Russians themselves began to have their doubts about the Amur within just a few years of annexing it. Bassin's work, in fact, concentrates on explaining this strange shift. It is a study of why the Russian vision of the Amur that began so hot ended up turning so cold so quickly and what the vision itself seems to reveal about the content of Russian national identity.

Despite considerable scholarly work on ethnic mobilization, less attention has been paid to explicitly examining how differing notions of the state undergird our analysis and normative approaches. As the title of Ted Gurr's Peoples versus States reminds us, the state is central to these processes. Similarly, there seems to be widespread, yet little discussed, disagreement on the proper role of politics in ethno-politics. In other words, at what point do we shrug our shoulders and say, “minority X lost this political fight and that's the way democratic politics functions”? The three books here focus on vastly different topics (international minority rights norms, Native American struggles, and the Holy Roman Empire's decline), but in reading them together it is striking how their notions of the state and politics lead us to varying conclusions about the possibilities for minorities.

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.