Today's Yugoslav policy toward a score of national minorities, officially called nationalities, essentially amounts to what the ruling League of Communists of Yugoslavia publicly says and what is actually done by the appropriate organs at the federal, republic, provincial, and commune levels with respect to ethnically non-Yugoslav citizens. Although the Yugoslav national minorities (nationalities) make up only twelve percent of the entire population, their real impact on the Yugoslav multinational society is much stronger. This is due to the uneven economic and cultural development of various geographical regions in the past and to the compact settlement of national minorities in the sensitive border regions, where in some cases, they de facto enjoy the status of majority.

Is Turkish nationality one singular identity that does not permit ethnic modifiers? Or can it be understood as pluralistic, with identities nested — “hyphenated” — with Turkishness? Then, are Turkish and Kurdish identities necessarily mutually exclusive? Such questions over the boundaries of Turkishness have long been framed in the civic versus ethnic dichotomy — an approach that does not ask whether Turkish nationhood is monolithic or pluralistic. In response, this article aims to advance the public and scholarly debates over nationhood in Turkey by turning to the question of ways in which Turkishness can be hyphenated with other identity categories in Turkey, most particularly Kurdishness. First, we reframe the debate over identity by using the combinatorial approach to ethnicity to outline how Turkishness and Kurdishness can be overlapping and nested, or a hyphenated identity. Second, we draw on public opinion data to show that such a hyphenated identity is both theoretically possible and potentially salient in Turkey today. Together, these steps deconstruct the primordialist understandings of Turkishness and Kurdishness, on the one hand, and the taken-for-granted civic claims of Turkishness, on the other.

For more than a decade, the five Central Asian republics have been “readjusting” their academic institutions in response to the new borders created by the fall of the USSR and subsequent independence in 1991. Both the university system and the Academy of Sciences have been called on to rethink their research policy in order to meet the new national stakes and current political demands. Thus, the elaboration of a national discourse is a particularly relevant object of study in order to observe the different modes of legitimization of the new Central Asian states and the scholarly tools they deem necessary for their political ratification. Consequently, in retracing the genealogy of the contemporary historical analyses we must pose a question regarding the development of the academic disciplines and the data concerning their political environment. Does Tajik independence in 1991 involve rethinking the genesis of the nation and the scholarly fields linked to the elaboration of the national narrative? Why have the political authorities declared 2006 the “year of the Aryan civilization”?

This article surveys the history of Kyiv Rus within the realm of nation building, identity and historical myths. It argues that Ukraine's elites believe that Western, Russian and Soviet schools of history on Kyiv Rus (and Ukraine) are incompatible with nation and state building.

Two schools—Ukrainophile and East Slavic—compete within Ukraine. Nevertheless, the former has been promoted as the dominant school by ruling elites, many of whom date from the Soviet Ukrainian SSR and might personally favour the East Slavic framework. As Stepanenko states, Hrushevsky “is factually theorizing the most convincing version of Ukrainian history.”

This article endeavors to open a new critical space for Soviet studies and for nationalities studies more generally. Through analyses of recent trends in Soviet studies, the article dismantles the frequently used opposition between subjective and objective approaches to Soviet empire and suggests instead that truths and categories, whether considered “subjective” or “objective,” are constructed discursively, through legitimizing certain interpretive models over the others. The article also argues against disciplinary avoidance of “what is” questions (e.g. “what is a nation?”) and claims that an excessive concern for (re)producing essentialism should not hinder scholarly inquiry. Several new lines of inquiry for the study of the Soviet empire are suggested and also applicable in nationalities studies more generally: research on the role of symbolic violence in manufacturing consent and research concerning the role of affect in producing linkages between the performative life of a singular human being and the pedagogical discourse of a nation or empire. The article also offers an analysis of the Soviet Union as an empire in becoming and it advocates for postcolonial approaches within Soviet studies. The practical dimensions of Soviet rule are exemplified with data from the Baltic borderlands in the postwar years.

In the course of trying to establish functional and harmonious relations among Yugoslav nations, the League of Communists of Yugoslavia (hereafter the Communist Party) asked two key questions: (1) did the common interests that united Yugoslav nations and nationalities after the Second World War change over time? And (2) was nationalism a manifestation of the failure to resolve the national question? The Communist Party answered “no” to both questions. We may deepen our understanding of why multinational socialist Yugoslavia resisted disintegration for almost 50 years, if we get a better grasp of the Communist Party's responses and arguments to these questions. Equally important, since the Kosovo question is, so to speak, an unresolved legacy of the socialist (communist) system, reviewing the arguments that dominated the political life of socialist Yugoslavia may also give us some insights into future developments in Kosovo. By putting the above-mentioned questions into the Kosovo context, the article does not, however, attempt to offer the “right” answer to them. Rather, the purpose of this article is to provide some important background considerations about challenges, such as decentralization, that multinational Yugoslavia faced and to explore lessons learned from the past.

There are three constitutionally recognized national/ethnic minorities in Slovenia: the Italians, the Hungarians and the Roma. In addition, there are other ethnic groups that could perhaps be considered as “autochthonous” national minorities in line with Slovenia's understanding of this concept. Among them is a small community of “Serbs” – the successors of the Uskoks living in Bela krajina, a border region of Slovenia. In this article we present results of a field research that focused on the following question: Can the “Serb” community in Bela krajina be considered a national minority? On the basis of the objective facts, it could be said that the “Serbs” in four Bela krajina villages are a potential national minority, but with regard to their modest social vitality and the fact that they do not express their desire for minority status, the realization of special minority protection is questionable.

This paper examines the adoption of a multiethnic liberal-democratic model of governance in post-independence Kosovo and the dual task of state-building to secure unity and manage diversity. This article explains why in post-conflict and post-independence Kosovo, its domestic sovereignty and legitimization have become conditioned by the integration, accommodation, and protection of its minorities. While the existing literature has mainly focused on the shortcomings deriving from the exogenous character of state-building in Kosovo, this paper aims to challenge and complement this view by drawing on the “state-in-society” approach developed by Joel Migdal, which highlights that the actual states have less coherence than their theoretical counterparts. Analysis of post-independence Kosovo reveals the legislation-implementation gap and the unintended consequences arising under the impact of endogenous factors. Overall, this article shows that multiethnic state-building in Kosovo has been crucially transformed and “limited” by local idiosyncrasies.

This article is a review of the development of the Bukharan Jewish community organization. It describes the transformations it has undergone in the twentieth century and examines the changes that Bukharan Jews underwent from demographic, social, and organizational perspectives, and the far-reaching processes that have occurred later in community organizations, particularly in light of the establishment of the World Congress of Bukharan Jewry in 2000. Traditionally, when dealing with Jewish communities the term “diaspora” refers to different Jewish communities scattered away from the “promised land” (Diatlov 1999). Thus, the terminology of: “Jewish immigration” traditionally is considered as their return. In this article, which focuses on Bukharan Jews, I use “diaspora” to describe different Bukharan communities created due to immigration to the land of Israel and to other destinations from the cradle of Central Asia.