Drawing on the recollections of key figures among the last Serbian generation to grow up Yugoslav, this explores the transition from socialism to capitalism, from the dream of pan-Slavic working class identity to the contentious capitalist reality that gave us the word Balkanisation. It paints a portrait of the ruling generation and its ambivalent attitudes toward both the socialist past and the capitalist, Western-oriented present. In so doing, it also explores the emerging phenomenon of Yugo-nostalgia.

While exploring events that led to the bloodshed in Kosovo in 1999. Denisa Kostovicova shows that the legacy of ethnic segregation is one of the major obstacles the international community faces in its efforts to establish an integrated multi-ethnic society in this territory." "Of interest to academics and students of nationalism and politics as well as practitioners and journalists, this book is an important advance in research on one of the most tragic European conflicts of recent times."--Jacket.

While rivalry is embedded in any sporting event or performance, soccer, the world’s most popular mass spectator sport, has been an emblem of such rivalries since its inception as an organized sport. Some of these rivalries grow to become long-term and perennial by their nature, extent, impact and legacy, from the local to the global level. They represent identities based on widely diverse affiliations of human life—locality, region, nation, continent, community, class, culture, religion, ethnicity, and so on. Yet, at times, such rivalries transcend barriers of space and time, where soccer-clubs, -nations, -personalities, -organizations, -styles and -fans float and compete with intriguing identities. The present volume brings into focus some of the most fascinating and enduring rivalries in the world of soccer. It attempts to encapsulate, analyse and reconstruct those rivalries—between nations, between clubs, between personalities, between styles of play, between fandoms, and between organizations—in a historical perspective in relation to diverse identities, competing ideologies, contestations of power, psychologies of attachment, bonds of loyalty, notions of enmity, articulations of violence, and affinities of fan culture—some of the core manifestations of sporting rivalry. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Soccer & Society.

The life stories of Roma Pentecostals in Croatia and Serbia reveal both significant hardship and resilience, which notably impacts how they incorporate a Pentecostal identity and the ways in which they transform their daily lives in accordance with Pentecostal theology.

The dissolution of the communist system led to the creation of new states and the formation of new concepts of citizenship in the post-Soviet states of Central and Eastern Europe. The formation of national identity also occurred in the context of the process of increasing economic and political globalisation, particularly the widening of the European Union to include the central European post-socialist and Baltic States. Internationally, Russia sought to establish a new identity either as a European or as a Eurasian society and had to accommodate the interests of a wider Russian Diaspora in the ‘near abroad’. This book addresses how domestic elites (regional, political and economic) influenced the formation of national identities and the ways in which citizenship has been defined. A second component considers the external dimensions: the ways in which foreign elites influenced either directly or indirectly the concept of identity and the interaction with internal elites. The essays consider the role of the European Union in attempting to form a European identity. Moreover, the growing internationalisation of economies (privatisation, monetary harmonisation, dependence on trade) also had effects on the kind of ‘national identity’ sought by the new nation states as well as the defining by them of ‘the other’. The collection focuses on the interrelations between social identity, state and citizenship formation, and the role of elites in defining the content of concepts in different post-communist societies. This book was originally published as a special issue of Europe-Asia Studies.

The Routledge Handbook of Popular Music and Politics of the Balkans is a comprehensive overview of major topics, established debates and new directions in the study of popular music and politics in this region. The vibrant growth of this subject area since the 1990s has been intertwined with the region’s political and socio-economic transformations, including the collapse of state socialism in much of the region, the break-up of Yugoslavia, the advent of neoliberal capitalism, the rise of Romani activism, the complex politics of ‘Europeanization’ before and after the global financial crisis, and the region’s relationship to the European Union border regime. The handbook illustrates the wide range of disciplines and methods that contribute to this field’s interdisciplinary dialogue and highlights emerging approaches such as the study of Black diasporas in the region, popular music’s links with LGBTQ+ communities, and the impact of digital technologies on musical cultures. This volume will benefit specialist researchers, tutors creating or refreshing courses on popular music in the region, and students interested in these topics, especially those who are at the point of developing their own independent research projects.

After the conflagration of Tito’s Yugoslavia a medley of new and not-so-new states rose from the ashes. Some of the Yugoslav successor states have joined, or are about to enter, the European Union, while others are still struggling to define their national borders, symbols, and relationships with neighbouring states. Strategies of Symbolic Nation-building in South Eastern Europe expands upon the existing body of nationalism studies and explores how successful these nation-building strategies have been in the last two decades. Relying on new quantitative research results, the contributors offer interdisciplinary analyses of symbolic nation-building in Albania, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia, Kosovo, Macedonia, Montenegro, and Serbia to show that whereas the citizens of some states have reached a consensus about the nation-building project other states remain fragmented and uncertain of when the process will end. A must-read not only for scholars of the region but policy makers and others interested in understanding the complex interplay of history, symbolic politics, and post-conflict transition.