TOL STORE BY COUNTRY "Serbia"

Sacco translates the events in Bosnia into graphic novel format. An indispensable document of the conflict. Sacco spent four months in Bosnia, between 1995-1996, immersing himself in the human side of life during wartime, researching stoires that are rarely found in conventional news coverage. Here he focuses on the Muslim enclave of Gorazde, which was beseiged by Bosnian Serbs during the war. The book is strongly compared to the Pulitzer prize winner Maus, and advance praise rate it as being one of the most important documents to emerge from the conflict as it portrays day to day life at the heart of these events.

Modernism in Serbia : The Elusive Margins of Belgrade Architecture, 1919-1941

Modernism in Serbia is the first comprehensive account of an almost forgotten body of work that once defined regional modernism at its best. The book reconstructs the story of Serbian modernism as a local history within a major movement and views the buildings designed in Belgrade in the 1920s and 1930s as part of a larger cultural phenomenon. Because so many of the buildings discussed are disintegrating or have been destroyed or altered beyond recognition, the book serves not only as a documentary and critical study but also as a preservation resource. Most of the photographs and plans have never been published outside of Serbia, if at all.

"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.

Be Not Afraid, for You Have Sons in America: How a Brooklyn Roofer Helped Lure the U.S. into the Kosovo War

The Kosovo Liberation Army was sparked and sustained by a roof contractor in Brooklyn who personally bought and shipped arms, massively fund-raised and provided ideological and tactical support to the fledgling guerrilla force. Sullivan, who covered the Balkans in the '90s for Newsweek, mixes reportage (sometimes reconstructed) of the insurgent group's battles with Milosevic's Serb forces after Yugoslavia's disintegration with the KLA's improbable U.S.-based, backstory, gleaned after the conflict was messily resolved by a U.N.-led coalition (commanded by Wesley Clark). She is terrific in detailing the life of Florin Krasniqi, a Kosovar Albanian who emigrated illegally to the U.S. via Mexico in 1988, and took it upon himself to get the KLA off the ground once Milosevic's intentions (and the inefficacy of nonviolent resistance) became clear to him. Anecdotes of buying assault weapons at gun shows and taking them to Albania on conventional flights, of shopping for Stinger missiles in Pakistan and of the Muslim Krasniqi getting a great price on uniforms from Brooklyn Hasidim are as funny as they are unsettling. Snappily written with a keen eye for telling personal tics and crushing political ironies, Sullivan's book reveals that this crucial, underreported event of the late '90s was more multilateral than anyone imagined.

The Myth Of Ethnic War: Serbia And Croatia In The 1990s

"The wars in Bosnia-Herzegovina and in neighboring Croatia and Kosovo grabbed the attention of the western world not only because of their ferocity and their geographic location, but also because of their timing. This violence erupted at the exact moment when the cold war confrontation was drawing to a close, when westerners were claiming their liberal values as triumphant, in a country that had only a few years earlier been seen as very well placed to join the west. In trying to account for this outburst, most western journalists, academics, and policymakers have resorted to the language of the premodern: tribalism, ethnic hatreds, cultural inadequacy, irrationality; in short, the Balkans as the antithesis of the modern west. Yet one of the most striking aspects of the wars in Yugoslavia is the extent to which the images purveyed in the western press and in much of the academic literature are so at odds with evidence from on the ground."—from Chapter 1
V. P. Gagnon Jr. believes that the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s were reactionary moves designed to thwart populations that were threatening the existing structures of political and economic power. He begins with facts at odds with the essentialist view of ethnic identity, such as high intermarriage rates and the very high percentage of draft-resisters. These statistics do not comport comfortably with the notion that these wars were the result of ancient blood hatreds or of nationalist leaders using ethnicity to mobilize people into conflict.

Yugoslavia in the late 1980s was, in Gagnon’s view, on the verge of large-scale sociopolitical and economic change. He shows that political and economic elites in Belgrade and Zagreb first created and then manipulated violent conflict along ethnic lines as a way to short-circuit the dynamics of political change. This strategy of violence was thus a means for these threatened elites to demobilize the population. Gagnon’s noteworthy and rather controversial argument provides us with a substantially new way of understanding the politics of ethnicity.

Balkan Ghosts : A Journey Through History

From the assassination that triggered World War I to the ethnic warfare now sweeping Serbia, Bosnia, and Croatia, the Balkans have been the crucible of the twentieth century, the place where terrorism and genocide first became tools of policy. This enthralling and often chilling political travelogue fully deciphers the Balkans' ancient passions and intractable hatreds for outsiders. For as Kaplan travels among the vibrantly-adorned churches and soul-destroying slums of the former Yugoslavia, Albania, Romania, Bulgaria, and Greece, he allows us to see the region's history as a time warp in which Slobodan Milosevic becomes the reincarnation of a fourteenth-century Serbian martyr; Nicolae Ceaucescu is called "Drac," or "the Devil"; and the one-time Soviet Union turns out to be a continuation of the Ottoman Empire.

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.

Security Sector Reform in Transforming Societies: Croatia, Serbia and Montenegro

This book is about the relationship between societies and their security forces in the aftermath of conflict and authoritarianism. It uses the experiences of Croatia and Serbia-Montenegro to examine the control, management and reform of armed forces, police and intelligence agencies in the aftermath of conflict and authoritarianism. In this context, the book assesses the theory and practice of security sector reform programmes in the context of Europe and the Western Balkans, the relationship between security sector reform and normative international policy more generally, and the broader dynamics of post-authoritarian and post-conflict transformation. In so doing it addresses two underlying and interrelated questions. Firs, how and in what ways does reform in the security sector inter-relate with processes of political and societal transformation, particularly democratization efforts. Second, how and in what ways do these processes relate and respond to internationally driven efforts to promote a particular type of security sector reform as part of their wider peace-building and democratization strategies.

Timothy Edmunds is Senior Lecture in the Department of Politics and the University of Bristol.

Ethnic Bargaining: The Paradox of Minority Empowerment

Ethnic Bargaining introduces a theory of minority politics that blends comparative analysis and field research in the postcommunist countries of East Central Europe with insights from rational choice. Erin K. Jenne finds that claims by ethnic minorities have become more frequent since 1945 even though nation-states have been on the whole more responsive to groups than in earlier periods. Minorities that perceive an increase in their bargaining power will tend to radicalize their demands, she argues, from affirmative action to regional autonomy to secession, in an effort to attract ever greater concessions from the central government.

The language of self-determination and minority rights originally adopted by the Great Powers to redraw boundaries after World War I was later used to facilitate the process of decolonization. Jenne believes that in the 1960s various ethnic minorities began to use the same discourse to pressure national governments into transfer payments and power-sharing arrangements. Violence against minorities was actually in some cases fueled by this politicization of ethnic difference.

Jenne uses a rationalist theory of bargaining to examine the dynamics of ethnic cleavage in the cases of the Sudeten Germans in interwar Czechoslovakia; Slovaks and Moravians in postcommunist Czechoslovakia; the Hungarians in Romania, Slovakia, and Vojvodina; and the Albanians in Kosovo. Throughout, she challenges the conventional wisdom that partisan intervention is an effective mechanism for protecting minorities and preventing or resolving internal conflict.

The Body of War: Media, Ethnicity, and Gender in the Break-up of Yugoslavia

In The Body of War, Dubravka Žarkov analyzes representations of female and male bodies in the Croatian and Serbian press in the late 1980s and in the early 1990s, during the war in which Yugoslavia disintegrated. Žarkov proposes that the Balkan war was not a war between ethnic groups; rather, ethnicity was produced by the war itself. Žarkov explores the process through which ethnicity was generated, showing how lived and symbolic female and male bodies became central to it. She does not posit a direct causal relationship between hate speech published in the press during the mid-1980s and the acts of violence in the war. Instead, she argues that both the representational practices of the “media war” and the violent practices of the “ethnic war” depended on specific, shared notions of femininity and masculinity, norms of (hetero)sexuality, and definitions of ethnicity.

Tracing the links between the war and press representations of ethnicity, gender, and sexuality, Žarkov examines the media’s coverage of two major protests by women who explicitly identified themselves as mothers, of sexual violence against women and men during the war, and of women as militants. She draws on contemporary feminist analyses of violence to scrutinize international and local feminist writings on the war in former Yugoslavia. Demonstrating that some of the same essentialist ideas of gender and sexuality used to produce and reinforce the significance of ethnic differences during the war often have been invoked by feminists, she points out the political and theoretical drawbacks to grounding feminist strategies against violence in ideas of female victimhood.

Realm of the Black Mountain: A History of Montenegro

Comparatively little is well known about Europe's newest and one of its smallest independent states: the small mountain fastness Montenegro. In a book written for specialists and general readers alike, Elizabeth Roberts traces its history from pre-Slavic times, including its part in the 1389 battle of Kosovo and its prominent role in resisting the Ottomans. She recounts Montenegro's development under its Prince-Bishops toward the independence achieved at the Congress of Berlin and lost after the Versailles Conference when the Podgorica Assembly voted to join the new Kingdom of Yugoslavia. When Slobodan Milosevic spoke of Montenegro and Serbia as "two eyes in the same head," he encapsulated a view that has deep roots in both nations. But not all Montenegrins agreed, and many chafed at being forced to play the role of Serbia's junior partner. Indeed, Montenegro's complex and shifting cultural and political identity is the main theme of Roberts's witty and dispassionate book, which culminates in Montenegro's defining referendum and subsequent international recognition in the summer of 2006.

The history of Montenegro is at once a colorful, often bloodily violent story and instructive about how land, religion, and politics (both domestic and international) have intersected over centuries to shape and reshape cultural identities in Southeastern Europe. Students of national identity have much to learn from the Montenegrin case, and general readers will be enthralled by the dramatic tale that unfolds in Realm of the Black Mountain.

Aspects of Balkan Culture: Social, Political, and Literary Perceptions

The selected essays present a palimpsest of sorts aiming to elucidate the multifaceted responses to major historical events facing the ethnically diverse population of the Balkan Peninsula. The essays dealing with the Eastern Question were written at the time when the recent civil war in Bosnia-Herzegovina was replicating the Eastern Question in its current phase. The juxtaposition of everyday public discourse, literary renderings, ordinances, petitions, so called 'preventive censorship' of the press, denials, and appeals provide new points of view enhancing the under- standing of social and political circumstances in the occupied provinces. Several essays examine the assessments of the Eastern Question by outstanding historians and writers. The essays devoted to the ideological, literary, and fine-arts issues trace the cultural scene during the twentieth century. "The latest book by Jelena Milojkoviæ-Djuriæ covers her familiar domain, the Balkans and the fate of the Slavic people, especially the Serbs. Her span of topics will satisfy both the connoisseurs of the area and more general readers. Professor Djuriæ moves with ease from one historical era to another, from the fateful events of the 19th and 20th centuries to con- temporary writers, from evils of occupation to the struggle for freedom. In a word, a remarkably pertinent study for those interested in under- standing the Balkan powder keg, even today." - Vasa Mihailovich, Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. "Jelena Milojkoviæ-Djuriæ, noted scholar of the Balkans, has assembled in one impressive volume a number of critically important, well crafted essays on Balkan history, culture, literature, and religion. Her treatment of the Eastern Question is particularly valuable in a volume which pro- vides scholars, students, and others interested in this fascinating and turbulent area of the world, with a wealth of information to digest and consider." - Donald L. Dyer, Professor of Russian and Linguistics, University of Mississippi. Editor of Balkanistica.

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.

Denial and Repression of Antisemitism: Post-communist Rememberance of the Serbian Bishop Nikolaj Velimirovic

Examines the rehabilitation over the past two decades of Bishop Nikolaj Velimirović (1881–1956), the controversial Serbian Orthodox Christian philosopher. Having been vilified by the former Yugoslav Communist authorities as a traitor, antisemite and a fascist, Velimirović has come to be regarded in Serbian society as a saintly figure and the most important religious person since medieval times.

Byford charts the posthumous passage of Velimirović from ‘traitor’ to ‘saint’ and examines the complementary dynamics of repression and denial that were used to divert public attention from the controversies surrounding his life. Presents the first detailed examination of the way in which an Eastern Orthodox Church manages controversy surrounding the presence of anti-Semitism within its ranks and considers the implications of the continuing reverence of Nikolaj Velimirović for the persistence of antisemitism in Serbian Orthodox culture and Serbian society as a whole. The study is based on a detailed examination of the changing representations of Velimirović in the Serbian media and in commemorative discourse, as well as interviews with a number of prominent public figures who have been actively involved in the bishop’s rehabilitation over the past two decades.