Counter-serious and organised crime (SOC) strategies often include an awareness-raising element. Such messaging aims to build support for counter-SOC efforts, and intolerance for organised criminal activity. However, a growing body of research suggests that raising awareness to ‘social bads’ like SOC may risk backfiring by encouraging pessimistic attitudes about whether they can be controlled and could even nudge people to agree with populist narratives which argue that political outsiders represent the only hope for tackling systemic problems. A nationally representative survey experiment in Albania was conducted to test, for the first time, the impact of messages about SOC. Typical of counter-SOC messaging in practice, the first message emphasised the harms SOC causes. The second was more positive, highlighting high levels of social disapproval of SOC, a theme that social norms research suggests may be effective. We find that the first message backfires by reducing confidence in law enforcement and encouraging support for populist ideas. The second message is unexpectedly found to also encourage support for a populist sentiment, while having no positive impact on attitudes about law enforcement. This suggests that even positive messaging about ‘social bads’ can risk triggering unwanted responses.

This article links the study of transnational and imperial fascism in the context of the Italian occupation of Albania by examining how Italian authorities sought to turn Albanians abroad into assets rather than liabilities. Organising and monitoring Albanians occurred through conferences, youth institutions and consular activities. Studying such concrete contacts and negotiations allows us to explore the practical issues latent in expanding fascist political subjectivity in transnational and imperial contexts. On the one hand, Italians hoped to verse Albanians in a fascist identity by using existing organisational strategies while silencing or converting potential anti-Italian critics. On the other, many Albanians expressed and offered support for these Italian efforts, though with reservations and conditions, raising questions as to what it meant to be an Albanian nationalist and/or fascist in the years of occupation. The Albanian case therefore contributes to our understanding of the tensions inherent in ‘universalising’ fascism for colonial subjects.

In this article, I examine early religious literature in the Albanian language in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, which, in combination with ecclesiastical rivalries and a differential opposition to Ottoman rule, must have promoted an inherent cultural process of differentiation, especially between Greek-speaking and Albanian-speaking Orthodox Christians. In particular, I argue that the contradicting motivations of political contradistinction, Enlightenment propagation, Orthodox evangelism, ecclesiastical confrontation, and missionary counteraction lead inadvertently to a boundary work of the social reorganization of linguistic and cultural difference.

How can the growing personalization of power be identified and measured ex ante? Extant measures in the authoritarian literature have traditionally focused on institutional constraints and more recently on individual behaviour – such as purging opposition members from (and packing allies into) government bodies. This article offers a different strategy that examines leaders’ individual rhetoric. It focuses on patterns of pronoun usage for the first person. The author argues that as leaders personalize power, they are less likely to use ‘I’ (a pronoun linked to credit claiming and blame minimizing) and more likely to use ‘we’ (the leader speaks for – or with – the populace). To test this argument, the study focuses on all major, scheduled speeches by all chief executives in the entire Chinese-speaking world – that is, China, Singapore and Taiwan – since independence. It finds a robust pattern between first-person pronouns and political constraints. To ensure the results are not driven by the Chinese sample, the rhetoric of four other political leaders is considered: Albania's Hoxha, North Korea's Kim Il Sung, Hungary's Orbán and Ecuador's Correa. The implications of this project suggest that how leaders talk can provide insights into how they perceive their rule.

Investigations at Bushat in northern Albania during 2017–2019 have brought to light a massive fortification wall dating to the fourth century BC and enclosing approximately 20ha of hilly terrain. The wall is connected to the development of Illyrian settlements and the Hellenisation of the area.

High cost of nutritious foods and eating out of home (OH) might be barriers to healthy and sustainable diets. We examined adherence to Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension (DASH), EAT–Lancet reference diet (EAT) and Mediterranean diet score (MDS) and the associations with dietary cost and eating OH. We evaluated cross-sectional data from single multiple-pass 24-h diet recalls from 289 young adults (18–24 years) in Tirana, Albania. Dietary cost (in Albanian Lek (ALL)) was estimated by matching food consumption data with retail prices from local fast-food chains, supermarkets, restaurants and food vendors. Poisson regression was fitted to models that included DASH, EAT and MDS as dependent variables to assess associations between healthy sustainable diet indicators and dietary cost and eating OH. Adjusted models were controlled for BMI, sex and total energy intake (kJ) using the residual method. Our findings indicate relatively poor adherence to healthy and sustainable dietary patterns among young men and women in Albania. Furthermore, better adherence to DASH, EAT or MDS was not associated with dietary cost (per 100 ALL; range incidence rate ratios (IRR): 0·97–1·00; all (un-)adjusted P > 0·05). Nonetheless, eating OH was related to lower adherence to DASH (IRR: 0·79; P = 0·003) and MDS (IRR: 0·69; P < 0·001). In conclusion, adherence to health and sustainable dietary patterns was poor and not differentiated by cost, but rather source of foods (i.e. OH or at home). Further research on the potential public and environmental health effects of these findings is warranted in Albania.

Much light has been shed on the history of the manuscripts of Berat (now kept in Tirana) by Didier Lafleur in his recent catalogue of the NT manuscripts of Albania. However, an aspect of the story was left in the shadow: what is the source of von Soden's information about these manuscripts? The sparse data furnished by von Soden himself and an unpublished report by Harnack show that the German scholar made use of information collected in Albania by one of his collaborators, Alfred Schmidtke. Furthermore, the value of this information for the history of the Berat manuscripts is confirmed by the fact that it is somehow linked to a process of inventory done in September 1901 by a priest of the city.

This article discusses recent trends in archaeological and historic preservation practices in Albania that are leading to new and innovative approaches to what is often termed “mitigation.” To understand this in an Albanian context, it is necessary to review the historical, political, and social context that has shaped the stand of this postcommunist society toward its past as well as the role that this context plays in heritage practices today. I argue that the nationalistic approach toward heritage as a key component of “nation building” in the twentieth century still resonates strongly in the current discourse. This review leads to the conclusion that standard mitigation based on avoidance, recovery/excavation, and documentation phases is the most dominant practice. Experience has shown that this is not always effective in the harmonization of conflicting interests. Public-private benefits, definition of values and significance associated with historic properties, and costs of requested mitigations have all made it clear in the last decade that alternative solutions must be found, even within the rigid boundaries of the existing legal framework. The concept of “creative mitigation” is emerging as a logical need in the practice of historic preservation.

This paper analyzes the transformation of the signifier “corruption” in the Albanian public sphere during the period 1991–2005 from a discourse analysis approach. The aim is not to trace corruption in its presence and consequences, but to show how different articulations of corruption supported different agendas. More specifically, this paper aims to show how the corruption discourse that dominated Albanian public discussion during the period 1998–2005 served to legitimize a neoliberal order by articulating corruption as inherent to the public sector and to state intervention in the economy. This meant that corruption could be eliminated through neoliberal policies such as privatization and deregulation. Through a discourse analysis of corruption it is possible to politicize the concept of corruption instead of reducing it to a static and inherent feature of Albanian culture and society.

Reactions to the brutal Syrian War from European governments and Europe's Muslims have been diverse and subject to many shifts over the past few years. This paper focuses on how Albanian political and Islamic religious figures living in the Balkans have come to interpret the war. I focus on discourse, the ways in which these different agents communicate with their audience, and the wider contexts they evoke. Government sources and religiously themed lectures delivered by prominent imams on the social networking site YouTube are used to assess these trends. The most obvious aspect of these debates is the ways in which these agents use the war to press their own agendas, the government to affirm their commitment to the “West” and an ethnicized view of Islam, while Islamic religious leaders use it to reconnect their audiences to a more cosmopolitan vision of their past. War thus becomes a catalyst for a resurgent contestation between different groups vying for control over what it means to be “Albanian” and “Muslim” in the twenty-first century.