Suchergebnisse

Cyprus has been divided for far longer than it has been united. There have been many attempts to reconcile conflicting parties but without remarkable success. The two communities — Greek Cypriots and Turkish Cypriots — see the solution to the "Cyprus problem" in opposite terms. Although recent public opinion surveys have concluded that the most preferred option for the Turkish Cypriots would be "independence of the TRNC" and "reunification of the country", for the Greek Cypriots, there is much less information about the legitimacy of these competing regimes and their respective claims. This paper seeks to fill this gap by identifying different legitimacy sources and their effect on the course of conflict settlement. Somewhat paradoxically it appears that those most strongly identifying themselves with the Republic of Cyprus, and approving the regime legitimacy of the Greek Cypriot government, are actually for status quo and not for the reunification of the country which makes the return to the partnership state mission impossible.

The processes of peace-building and democratization in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) were instituted on 14 December 1995 by the Dayton Accords, which brought an end to the Bosnian War. While claiming their objectives to be reconciliation, democracy, and ethnic pluralism, the accords inscribed in law the ethnic partition between Bosnian Serbs, Croats, and Muslims by granting rights to "people" based on their identification as "ethnic collectivities." This powerful tension at the heart of "democratization" efforts has been central to what has transpired over the past 16 years. My account uses ethnographic methods and anthropological analysis to document how the ethnic emphasis of the local nationalist projects and international integration policies is working in practice to flatten the multilayered discourses of nationhood in BiH. As a result of these processes, long-standing notions of trans-ethnic nationhood in BiH lost their political visibility and potency. In this article I explore how trans-ethnicnarodor nation(hood) — as a space of popular politics, cultural interconnectedness, morality, political critique, and economic victimhood — still lingers in the memories and practices of ordinary Bosnians and Herzegovinians, thus powerfully informing their political subjectivities.

Turkish nationalism became an element of the Ottoman political scene in the late nineteenth century. Although its roots can be traced back to the Hamidian period (1876–1909), Turkish nationalism emerged as one of the most important political ideologies during the Constitutional Regime. Wars that the Ottoman State participated in from 1911 to the end of the empire in 1918 resulted in population and land losses. Especially, following the Balkan Wars, most of the lands that were populated by non-Muslim and non-Turkish subjects were lost. Within this context, Turkish nationalism came to be seen as the most dominant ideological tool intended to save the Empire. This article argues that Turkish nationalism emerged as a reactive ideology that addressed Ottomanism and Islamism, which were the two other dominant state ideologies during the late Ottoman State, due to the changing political context. In this article, Türk Yurdu, a well-known and influential periodical, is used as the primary source of reference to demonstrate the basic features of Turkish nationalism in its infancy.

The theory and practice of referenda played an important role in the break-up of Yugoslavia, especially in Bosnia-Herzegovina (BiH), where two divisive referenda preceded the Bosnian War of 1992-1995. After the failure of constitutional reforms in April 2006, Milorad Dodik, then Republika Srpska's prime minister, suggested that Republika Srpska had the right to hold its own referendum, with separation from Bosnia an unstated (yet soon openly discussed) aspiration. This paper presents an account of the emergence of Republika Srpska referendum discourse and how it was articulated by Milorad Dodik to establish his SNSD party as the dominant force in Republika Srpska. It documents the dialogical context and rhetorical gambits used by Dodik to articulate the discourse, tracing how it evolved in response to regional events and elections. The paper concludes by considering the limits of interpreting Dodik as a demagogue and of a discourse-centered approach to political rhetoric.

Writing about the rhetoric of Milorad Dodik, one certainly has to bear in mind his beginnings, especially as a 1998 RS prime minister whom Albright (1998) called a "breath of fresh air" and someone "determined to peacebuilding, reconciliation and connection of democratic alternative" in Bosnia and Herzegovina (henceforth BiH). Dodik's early rhetoric that brought him to power abounded in phrases such as "economic progress," "debt return," and "opening to the world," while some media reports referred to him as the "America-supported man who occasionally attended Ambassador Miller's secret dinners" (Dani, 22 September 2000) (Majstorovic et al. 2010). In 1998, Dodik attended donors' conferences and was given significant support to pursue the reforms he started, including normalization of relations with the BiH Federation and Croatia. In 1998, his results secured him between $400 million and $600 million in aid money (Beta, 13 May 1998).

Influential scholarship on the Brezhnev era has described the instrumental official support for Russian nationalist themes and pre-socialist imagery in public discourse as a deliberate "politics of inclusion," designed to co-opt certain nationalist intellectuals and the sympathies of the state's core of ethnic Russians for the purpose of popular mobilization. How this policy related to and interacted with the ubiquitous official commemoration and mythologization of the Great Fatherland War during this period, however, has remained unexplored. Based on a number of the most important Russophilic publications in the censored press - the writings of the so-called "Chalmaevists" - this article contends that despite unambiguously russocentric, single-stream readings of history in general, when it came to the war in particular, nationalist intellectuals tended to muffle their russocentrism through opaque language or an avoidance of the war's larger significance, or conformed to the war's official (supra-ethnic, socialist) reading. It was only in samizdat that the essentially Russian, primordial nature of victory in 1945 could be fully articulated. The present study thus probes the limits of the concept of inclusionary politics and underscores the party leadership's apparent commitment to maintaining the war myth's predominantly supranational, socialist significance as a means of fostering all-Soviet, rather than Russian national, solidarity.

This article examines the changing survival strategies of Uzbeks in the aftermath of mass violent conflict in Osh in June 2010. After the conflict, Osh Uzbeks were exposed to many difficulties. The Kyrgyz government used economic and political pressure to isolate minority groups from the titular nationality, and this opened the door to mistreatment of minorities in the form of the seizure of property, job losses, and even verbal and physical abuse. Despite this mistreatment, however, Uzbeks have proved reluctant to leave the Osh area. Uzbeks have a long history of living in the region of Osh; strong emotional and historical sentiments bind them to the region and its graveyards and sacred sites. Uzbeks have thus had to develop alternative ways to cope with the uncertainty and insecurity of their situation. They have adopted strategies which reinforce their vulnerability on the one hand, but provide security for their children during post-conflict reconstruction on the other. These strategies include avoidance of public spaces and public attention, marrying daughters early, and sending male family members to Russia as labor migrants. These strategies are geared to the underlying aims of protecting the honor of the community, maintaining social networks, and preserving Uzbek identity without attracting attention. Uzbeks describe this strategy of patience assabyrdu.