TOL STORE BY COUNTRY "Macedonia"

Award-winning creator of American Splendor and godfather of the autobiographic comic Harvey Pekar emerges with a new graphic novel about his first-ever female protagonist in Macedonia.
For years Heather Roberson—a passionate peace studies major at Berkeley—has argued that war can always be avoided. But she had repeatedly faced counterarguments that fighting is an inescapable consequence of world conflicts. Indeed, Heather finds proving her point to be a little tricky without examples to bolster her case. So she does something a little crazy: she sets out for far-off Macedonia, a landlocked country in the heart of the conflict-laden Balkans, to explore a region that has edged dangerously close to the brink of violence, yet somehow managed to avoid all-out war.
In the process—and as vividly portrayed by the talented duo of Harvey Pekar and Ed Piskor—Heather is tangled in red tape, ripped off by cabdrivers and hotel clerks, hit on by creepy guys, secretly photographed, and mistaken for a spy. She also creates unlikely friendships, learns that getting lost means seeing something new, and makes some startling discoveries. War is hell and peace is difficult—but conflict is always necessary.

"If the Balkans hadn't existed, they would have been invented" was the verdict of Count Hermann Keyserling in his famous 1928 publication, Europe. This book traces the relationship between the reality and the invention. Based on a rich selection of travelogues, diplomatic accounts, academic surveys, journalism, and belles-lettres in many languages, Imagining the Balkans explores the ontology of the Balkans from the eighteenth century to the present day, uncovering the ways in which an insidious intellectual tradition was constructed, became mythologized, and is still being transmitted as discourse.
The author, who was raised in the Balkans, is in a unique position to bring both scholarship and sympathy to her subject. A region geographically inextricable from Europe, yet culturally constructed as "the other," the Balkans have often served as a repository of negative characteristics upon which a positive and self-congratulatory image of the "European" has been built. With this work, Todorova offers a timely, accessible study of how an innocent geographic appellation was transformed into one of the most powerful and widespread pejorative designations in modern history.

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.

The study of dynamics of democratisation in societies is divided along ethnic and religious lines. Challenging the commonly held belief that democratisation necessarily leads to aggressive ethnic nationalism and even violent conflict, this book offers an alternative account of democratisation and interethnic relations, suggesting that democratisation can in fact help to prevent violent conflict in divided societies, as demonstrated by two case studies, Bulgaria and Macedonia. In a time when democracy promotion is increasingly becoming part of international relations and foreign policy, this study offers some poignant lessons for democratisation and conflict resolution in places such as Iraq, Afghanistan and Israel/Palestine to name but a few.