TOL STORE BY COUNTRY "Albania"

"A comprehensive, complex, and coherent narrative history of the Albanian-inhabited lands of today's Kosovo and Albania from ancient times until today."
—Stephanie Schwandner-Sievers, University of London
When Kosovar Albanians came to Albania after the fall of Communism, they were surprised to find an impoverished motherland whose people were consumed with questions of basic survival. Albania's citizens, for their part, were dumbstruck by the relatively opulent lifestyles of the Kosovars. Yet despite their profound differences, the myth of a "Greater Albania" persists.

In this timely book, Paulin Kola challenges this myth, arguing that there is not widespread support for a "Greater Albania" among the Albanian-speaking peoples. He shows that Albanians do not wish to join a single, politically recognized entity and demonstrates how the Albanians are marked by ideological, religious, and other divisions.

While a "Greater Kosovo" remains a remote possibility, there is little chance of the Albanians of either Albania or the diaspora supporting moves to dissolve the present international borders in pursuit of an "Albanian homeland." Albanians appear content to retain their discrete political entities, while traveling and trading freely. Accessible and urgent, this book effectively puts to rest the cherished myths of Albanian nationalism.

Throughout the 1990s, pictures of Albanian youngsters studying in makeshift classrooms became a symbol of Serbian state repression in Kosovo. The establishment of so-called parallel education in private houses and businesses in Kosovo became part of Albanian resistance to Serbian rule and an important gesture towards the existence of the self-declared Albanian shadow state in Kosovo.

This book explores the construction of the nation identity of Kosovo Albanians after Slobodan Milosevic's rise to power and the abolition of Kosovo's autonomy through the lends of the province's educational system. The text is woven around the story of ethnic segregation in Kosovo's education system and its impact on the emergence of exclusive notions of nation and homeland among the Albanian and Serbian youth in segregated schools in the province during the 1990s. While focusing on the issue of education in post-autonomy Kosovo, this monograph critically explores the wider contest of the Albanian resistance, including the emergence of the parallel state as an integral component of non-violent resistance. Ultimately, this book provides an insight not only into events that led to the bloodshed in Kosovo in the late 1990s, but also show that the legacy of segregation is one of the most major challenges the international community faces in its efforts to establish an integrated multiethnic society in the province.

Of interest to academics and students of Albanian culture and Balkan history, this book is an important advance in research on one of the most tragic European conflicts of recent times.

The Albanian Question: Reshaping the Balkans

In 1997 the previously little-known and isolated Balkan country of Albania exploded as the first armed uprising in mainland Europe since the 1920s brought the country to the brink of civil war. As the violence spread first to neighbouring Kosovo, then to south-east Serbia and finally to former Yugoslav Macedonia, the Albanian question increasingly took center stage in world affairs. This book examines Albania's place in the Balkans, a region which had been forced simultaneously to come to terms with the realities of a post-Communist world and the threat of Slobodan Milosevic's "Greater Serbia" project.

Albania and the European Union: The Tumultuous Journey Towards Integration and Accession

When will Albania join the EU? Will accession help Albania to achieve prosperity, stability and prosperity? What factors are helping it towards this end and what factors are holding it back? An original study of Albania and its relations with the EU, this is the first book to identify and analyse the problems of the country as it moves towards membership of the Union. It explores the political, economic and social transformations needed to make Albanian membership possible. The authors highlight the enormous democratic changes that have occurred in post-communist Albania as well as the many obstacles that still remain. This balanced and objective assessment will be an essential resource for everyone interested in the history and future of the Balkans and the EU.

Politics of Ethnic Cleansing: Nation-State Building and Provision of In/Security in Twentieth-Century Balkans

This book sheds light on the causes and consequences of ethnic cleansing in twentieth-century Balkans with particular reference to the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s. Providing a thorough and consistent analysis of large-scale episodes of ethnic cleansing in modern Balkan history, Politics of Ethnic Cleansing fills an important gap in existing conflict and peace studies literature. Offering a top-down interpretation of the expulsion of ethno-national minorities as a means of state-building, the analysis rests on a fresh, multidimensional approach, which provides an eclectic discussion of nationalism, politics, and security. This book establishes an agenda for policymaking and future research by making specific proposals for clearing up the present ambiguities in international humanitarian law related to ethnic cleansing, rethinking humanitarian intervention with a view to restoring the long-term viability of the target states, and repudiating the argument for forced homogenization as a conflict resolution strategy.

Lightning from the Depths: An Anthology of Albanian Poetry


If a people

Have no poets

And no poetry of their own

For a National Anthology

Then treachery and barking

Will do the trick

With these words, a challenge is laid down in this new volume of Albanian poetry. Albania, however, has a dynamic tradition of literature. Lightning from the Depths is the first English collection to present the full range of Albanian verse.

Albanian literature has had many lives. The early Christian traditions disappeared as Islam and the Ottoman Empire took over. Muslim literature, too, withered when the nation strove to become an independent European country. The beginnings of a modern tradition were quashed by the Stalinists. All along this rocky path, poets have turned the political strife, poverty, and isolation their nation has often experienced into culture, both celebrating and questioning the society in which they live. Lightning from the Depths opens readers' eyes to a new political and cultural world populated artists who can spin despair into poetry.

How do Albanian asylum seekers live in the United Kingdom? Some people in Britain would claim that asylum seekers and refugees live comfortably on the social services extended to them. If Only the Dead Could Listen, a shocking and politically incorrect new play by Dr Gëzim Alpion, disturbs that vision. The drama follows the saga of Leka, an asylum-seeker who finds himself entangled in the British legal system one day during a trip to Harrods.

Alpion’s second play If Only the Dead Could Listen has already disturbed British audiences with its black humor and tragedy. The public finds itself succumbing to emotional twists and turns as the main character’s emotions
metamorphose through states of anger, patriotism, bereavement, aggression, and alienation. The play depicts experiences universally faced by refugees as they reluctantly uproot themselves from their homeland and find
themselves taxed by personal and social trials in a foreign place.

“My intention is for the spectators to leave the theatre at the end of the show with questions whose answers they have to find for themselves,” says Alpion. “The play is about the sacredness of human life and dignity, and if
spectators are disturbed, I take it to be a good sign. Art is at its best when it is therapeutic and therapy is not always a pleasant thing to go through.”

Sponsored by Arts Council England, the dramatic interpretation of If Only the Dead Could Listen premiered in February 2006 at the MAC Theatre in Birmingham, UK. The March 2008 performances at the MAC Theatre and the Arena Theatre in Wolverhampton were sponsored by r:evolve, a Consortium of the Arena Theatre, the Midlands Arts Centre (MAC), and Black Country Touring.

Media Discourse and the Yugoslav Conflicts: Representations of Self and Other

In spite of the growing literature on discourse analysis, some of which focuses on representations of self and other, the analysis of the relationship of discourse to violent/non-violent outcomes of conflicts is an under researched area. This book combines theories on ethnic conflict, theories on identity construction and discourse analysis with a comprehensive and inclusive survey of the countries of the former Yugoslavia, embracing film, radio, television and newspapers. As such, it presents an understanding of the interrelationship between 'words' and 'deeds', grounded in close reading and extensive analysis of specific media texts of the period, an understanding which permits broad comparisons with other similar conflicts. Combining ground-breaking applications of theory with detailed empirical case studies, "Media Discourse and the Yugoslav Conflicts" will be of interest not only to those concerned with ethnopolitical conflict, but to scholars across a range of social sciences including sociology, discourse analysis and media, conflict and peace studies.