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Islamic State says it was behind yesterday’s wave of violence in the Russian republic.
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Islamic State says it was behind yesterday’s wave of violence in the Russian republic.
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Sukob u prethodnoj Jugoslaviji velikim delom je rezultat strahova njenih glavnih etničkih grupa (kako “naroda” tako i “narodnosti”) od toga da će u novim nezavisnim državama postati manjine. Često se tvrdi da su ti strahovi proistekli iz “stare etničke mržnje” i oživljavanja uspomena na užase Drugog svetskog rata među jugoslovenskim etničkim grupama. U ovom tekstu izložiću drukčiji stav. [...]
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Nakon što je u hladnom ratu kapitalizam trijumfovao nad komunizmom, mnogim levičarskim intelektualcima na polju humanističkih disciplina i društvenih nauka u zapadnim nemačkim zemljama učinilo se da su njihove nekadašnje simpatije za nekapitalistički društveni i ekonomski sistem odjednom postale vrlo sumnjive, ako ne i sasvim anahrone, prevaziđene i neprihvatljive. Većina ovih bivših levičarskih intelektualaca ekonomiju navodno slobodnog tržišta danas smatra najboljim mogućim društvenim poretkom, a u dijalogu sa intelektualcima drugog sveta, kao i onima iz ekonomski eksploatisanih zemalja trećeg sveta, hvali je kao jedini mogući oblik vladavine. Zapravo, ovu vrstu ekonomije kontrolišu država i veliki monopoli, ali ovi intelektualci nju uprkos tome promovišu kao demokratiju, to jest, vladavinu naroda. [...]
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Në gusht 2006 një gazetë e përditshme e Tiranës zbulon se në Sharrë, në periferinë e kryeqytetit, një shkollë 9-vjeçare mban emrin e Haxhi Qamilit, njëri prej krerëve të kryengritjes së Shqipërisë së Mesme në vitet 1914-1915. Reagimi është i menjëhershëm: opinionistë të zëshëm dhe intelektualë e denoncojnë këtë “skandal”; ministri i Arsimit i bën thirrje zyrtare komunës që ta riemërtojë shkollën dhe midis të tjerash thotë: Nuk e imagjinoj dot që një shkolle në Shqipërinë e shek. XXI të mund t’i vihej ky emër. Nuk ma rrok mendja, që ndërsa tentojmë të modernizojmë shtetin dhe shoqërinë dhe përgatitemi të anëtarësohemi në Bashkimin Evropian e NATO, dikush synon të përjetësojë në një tempull dijeje, emrin e një zullumqari obskurantist që zhurmoi në një episod historik fatmirësisht të shkurtër (Koha Jonë, 19.08.2006).
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The idea of European integration plays an important role in Ukrainian political discourse. This idea is crucial for a definition of Ukrainian foreign policy preferences and for the construction of Ukrainian national identity. In the Ukrainian context, this idea was found to be primarily constructed in regard to the question of the historical and geopolitical place of Ukraine. Public opinion in general largely reflects the instability in Ukraine-EU relations, as well as the inconsistent European integration policy of the Ukrainian government and the lack of a coherent policy from the side of European Union. This paper focuses on a study of how the European integration was conceptualized and metaphorically presented in the Ukrainian press in the period of 2005 – 2010. Based on the Critical Metaphor Analysis and Conceptual Metaphors approach, we investigate in this paper the main frames and metaphorical representations of Europe and the European integration in Ukrainian media. It can be noticed that the European integration is described in Ukraine with a tension between the two discourses – the discourses of closeness and of openness. The European Neighborhood Policy was created for an opening of the door for Ukraine to Europe and as a ‘road map’ for the Ukrainian way towards the EU. Despite that, for the majority of Ukrainians the EU is still an unrealistic ‘dream’ where doors ‘rather closed’ then opened.
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It is compulsory that complex social concepts should be defined in different ways and approached from the perspective of different science disciplines. Therefore, it is difficult to precisely define them without overlapping of meaning with other similar concepts. This paper has made an attempt towards theoretical classification of the national identity and differentiate that concept in comparison to the other related concepts (race, ethnic group, nation, national background, authoritativeness, patriarchy). Theoretical assessments are classified into two groups: ones that are dealing with nature of national identity and others that are stating one or more dimensions of national identity, crucial for its determination. On the contrary to the primordialistic concept of national identity, describing it as a fundamental, deeply rooted human feature, there are many numerous contemporary theoretical approaches (instrumentalist, constructivist, functionalistic), emphasizing changeable, fluid, instrumentalist function of the national identity. Fundamental determinants of national identity are: language, culture (music, traditional myths), state symbols (territory, citizenship), self-categorization, religion, set of personal characteristics and values.
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The paper is a part of the research endeavour in the framework of the project Anti-Liberal Discourses and Propaganda Messages in Bulgarian Media:Dissemination and Social Perception in the period between 2013 and 2016. It is a case study stressing on differences of styles and public discourses with referenceto their audiences in the advancing process of disseminating three major talking points of up-to-date anti-democratic propaganda: 1. ‘Bulgaria’s venalelites’; 2. ‘The decline of the West/Europe’; and 3. ‘The rise of Russia’.The case study focuses of two types of public propaganda speakers – ‘people’s tribunes’ (Alexander Simov, Kevork Kevorkyan), and “thinkers’ targeting a more sophisticated and almost academic audience (dr. Nikolay Mihaylov, prof.Ivo Hristov). The analysis frames their political viewpoints – Simov’s stalinist attitude with discursive formulae coming from the 1950s; Kevorkyan’s thoroughly xenophobic and nationalistic attitude; Mihaylov and Hristov claiming the “artificial” character of the Modern Epoch and liberalism contrary to the “natural” character of the Russian authoritarianism. The paper also pays attention to the different rhetorical devices of propaganda style: the special use of the catachresisas a total trope of the discourse which gathers up all possible talking and focal points, and plots, and themes into one and the same political message, which rhetorical and topical ingredients seem to collapse into a consequent synonymy (Alexander Simov); the use of “manifest” or “slogan-like” short paragraphs andmeaningful artificial capital letters of nouns and verbs in Kevork Kevorkyan’s sentences; the special use of prestigious quotes (most often mistaken and mistreated) in dr. Nikolay Mihaylov’s, and prof. Ivo Hristov’s discourses, etc.
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The article uses the technology of web-scraping and social network analysisto track the use of keywords from the language of primarily East Europeananti-liberalism – tolerast, liberast, and sorosoid. A corpus of about 500 webpages containing at least one of the key words serves as empirical material for the analysis. The three keywords extracted from the net a large corpus of anti-liberal texts including a mixture of political and geopolitical topics intertwined with xenophobic, homophobic and plainly vulgar jargon. Word frequency and correlation analysis of the whole corpus and the construction of a bi-partite networkwith webpages and words revealed several thematic fields. The main sources of anti-liberal rhetoric using hate speech do not seem to quote or directly borrow from each other. Most of them maintain a multitopic profile and their relation to kindred spirit web pages can only be discovered through web search.
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The Arab Spring is one of the main triggers of the contemporary Middle East crisis. Indirectly, it strengthened the radical wing of the Islamist movement, led to the wars in Syria and Yemen, intensified regional competition, and destabilised the region. However, this regional instability is not a recent phenomenon. It has its roots in the aftermath of the First World War when the combination of internal and external factors transformed this previously tranquil region into a high-risk zone. The main ideological force in the Middle East in the 1950s, Arab nationalism, ceased to play an important role in the contemporary interArab relations. Still, it would be a mistake not to consider it at least partially responsible for the present-day situation in the region. The article focusses on the developmental dynamics of Arab nationalism. That entails the analysis of the circumstances under which its liberal, pro-European discourse has been gradually transformed into the authoritarian Pan-Arabism, of its impact on the political arrangement and relations in the region, as well as the analysis of the reasons that caused the idea of Arab political unification to cease functioning as a significant framework of individual and collective action. Lastly, the article discusses the political legacy of Arab nationalism. It withdrew from the political scene of the Middle East but has left behind the autocratic regimes determined to stay in power at all cost. These repressive regimes, permanently at “war” with their own citizens and with hegemonic aspirations towards neighbouring countries, are Arab nationalism’s political legacy that bears a significant responsibility for the violence that engulfed the region after the collapse of the Arab Spring and for the resulting Middle East nightmare.
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Paper draws on 13 semi-structured interviews with journalists from printmedia and information websites to outline their perceptions of their professional world. The interviews were conducted between March and June, 2016, in the frames of the research on the anti-democratic propaganda in Bulgaria. Without exaggeration, both the analysis of media and the interviews with journalists have shown the disintegration of the field of journalism as a dif- ferentiated field in Bulgaria. What is this due to? Our interviewees explained it with the commercialization and shift in focus from winning trust to secur- ing higher ratings – the media have come to be understood as entertainment and journalism is trying to adjust to this “commercial” requirement. But this is not the main (or at least not the sufficient) reason. The market, in turn, is changing under pressure from free online media, the reorientation of television towards new formats (of entertainment), and the subsequent fragmentation of audiences. What differentiates print media and news websites however is the drastic merge of entertainment and direct politics through omerta on certain topics and names, through advertorials that are not properly (if at all) marked as such and all this – in the lack of information who the owner of the media is. Our interviewees share a common practical dilemma: you either do journalism, or work for a media corporation. If one wants to do proper journalism, one has to withdraw from the topics of the day to the safer territories of marginal topics.
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The article deals with important events in the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina at the end of the 20th century, especially 1991-1995 and above all, in this regard from the historical science and relevant scientific knowledge point of view, including the results of their own scientific research, the causes of the breakdown of the common Yugoslav state; causes and aims of the attack on the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina; Serbian and Croatian genocidal ideology, intent and politics; planning, preparing and carrying out aggression on the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina and the execution of genocide against Bosniaks.
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The old dilemma continues to incite the academic world and not only. Once with the Islamic movements’ revival, more than ever, it is speaking, with fear, about the avalanche of the Islamic civilization with all its aspects over the Western-European civilizations. Is this the true or it is, again, about a new witch hunting?
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Fenomen izgradnje nacije na području Dubrovnika i Dalmacije zasigurno predstavlja vrlo zanimljivo povijesno ali i političko-pravno pitanje XIX stoljeća. Malo je onih koji su o pitanju izgradnje nacije pisali odričući se vlastitog nacionalno-ideološkog prtljaga. Koliko je moguće trezveno, objektivno i kroz prizmu tadašnjeg vremena ponuditi odgovore na pitanja o izgradnji nacionalne svijesti? Kako u današnjem kontekstu, zanemarujući ne tako davne sukobe – rat, kulturocid i krvništvo – govoriti o izgradnji nacije? Kako u današnjem kontekstu nekome pojasniti da su u XIX stoljeću postojali Hrvati pravoslavci ili Srbi katolici – istinski borci protiv klerikalizma i kleronacionalizma? Kako govoriti o duboko ukorijenjenoj vjerskoj toleranciji na našim područjima i njezinu krahu tijekom XX stoljeća? […]
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In the European (Christian/secular) imaginary, what are the integral – though sometimes contradictory and hidden – ties that connect Jews and Muslims or Arabs? To account for the constitution of any identity or community we must go beyond the standard analysis that focuses on how identity is formed in relation to what is other. Bobako argues that in the case of European (Christian/secular) communities and identities, a key element in the relation to ‘otherness’ is a conceptual and political juggling of various categories of ‘others,’ such as the figures of the ‘Jew’ and the ‘Muslim’ or ‘Arab’. She reconstructs the shifting configurations in which these figures have appeared throughout European history. These configurations have evolved, from the stage when ideas about Jews and Muslims or Arabs often contained different notions of their kinship and closeness, until the stage marked by a radical symbolic and political break between what is seen as Jewish and what is seen as Muslim or Arab. Bobako thus contributes to laying the groundwork for a better understanding of the mechanisms of anti-Semitism and Islamophobia as well as their mutual correlations.
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This article explores legal and ethical empowerment in the context of the unearthed remains of victims of the genocide in Bosnia and Herzegovina in the 1990s. Triangulating the premises of the politics of hope, the politics of memory and bio- and necropolitics with research on gender, Arsenijević analyses forms of cooperation between science (international medical services), bureaucracy (the state’s management of multiculturalism) as well as religion (funerary rites). He also problematizes the dilemmas of identifying human remains. The article poses several difficult questions about the sex and the national and ethnic identity of the individuals whose remains are exhumed, as well as current and past practices of their reification as ethnic victims. Arsenijević considers the perspective of the politics of hope that followed the genocide and in the period of the transformation after 1995. Drawing on literary works by women writers (poetry by Adisa Bašić and Ferida Duraković, prose by Šejla Šehabović), the article shows that in Bosnia and Herzegovina it is women who confront themselves most profoundly with the trauma of the recent past.
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The article studies quantitative and spatial dynamics of the Russian speaking population of the post soviet Ukraine. The factors accelerating the demographic shrinkage of the Russians of the country by 3 million people during 1989–2001 are analyzed. On the basis of a comparative analysis of the results of the 2001 Ukrainian census and the data of the ethnic and linguistic surveys of the Ukrainian population the conclusion is drawn that the core role in a prompt reduction of the number of the Russians belong to the assimilation. The analysis of the dynamic trends of the last several years allows affirming that within the borders of the modern Ukraine without the Crimea and the Donbas which is politically independent from Kyiv there may live about 4.1–4.5 million Russians. The study of eventual middle term prospects prove that by 2030 the given number may reduce to 3.3–3.7 million people. The important role in this process will play all three factors of the number dynamics: natural decline, outward migration flow, assimilation. But the core role in the demographic shrinkage of the Russian community belongs to the assimilation or the transition from the Russian to the Ukrainian self identity of a part of the biological and ethnic community of Ukraine. However the number of the Russians in the country recorded by all ensuing censuses of the population was lower than the real ethnic and cultural presence of the “Russian world” in Ukraine as the above mentioned identity transfer was not accompanied by an acculturation. The Russian language and culture not only dominate in the Russian environment but also keep a weighty role within the dominant country group. Only by prolongation of several decades of tough of a severe anti Russian course Ukraine is capable of undermining the social and cultural potential of the Russian world.
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The main aim of the article is to show complicated processes of self-identification of Croats living in Bosnia and Herzegovina and to analyze the definition of national and cultural identity of Croats from Bosnia and Herzegovina. This question interests me especially in the context of recent political changes in Croatia but also deepening economic crisis, which has caused a major social unrest in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Changing the course of Croatian offi cial policy in 2015 brought to the public the need of redefining the concept of being Croatian. Also in the case of the Bosnian Croats – consistently influenced by strong Croatian national policy approaching them since the 90s of the twentieth century by the Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ). In such turbulent times one may again come up with very up-to-date questions about whether the true homeland of Bosnian Croats could be only Croatia, or Bosnian Croats can be Bosniaks too, because it is still possible for Bosnia to be „Croatian, Serbian, Muslim” at the same time. National identity is the example of the Bosnian Croats tool used in everyday political clashes. As the researcher of culture I am the most of all interested in how it is defi ned and manifested in the public space. An important point of reference for my research is Ivan Lovrenovic’s publications, he fi rst described the situation of Croatians in Bosnia in such a comprehensive way.
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Food is an essential part of our everyday lives and it is significantly important for international politics as for national identities. The future of food is widely discussed in political and social sciences in the contexts of food security, health, international marketing cultural identities, and migratory issues. Despite the growing importance of food studies, the enduring power of nationalism and the apparent relationship between food culture and national identity, writers on nationalism have made little reference to food in their research. This article aims to explore the connection between food and nationalism and I argue that food plays a central role in performing the nation's culture and expresses the idea of the nation through portraying spiritual, material and commercial aspects of the national identity. Here, the discussion will proceed through a well – known Middle Eastern food, Hummus.
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In order to focus on the issue of everyday life in Serbia, I compare two books on the anthropology of future and time based on ethnographic fieldworks on “normal lives” after 2000 among people in Serbia (Žikić 2013) and Bosnia and Herzegovina (Jansen 2015). The main aims of this paper are to draw attention to these ethnographic studies and to induce repeated studies of “normality” in post-Yugoslav societies, especially in the context of the on-going Europeanization. The similarities in narratives of authors’ interlocutors and consequently in their research results reveal similar responses to current living conditions in these two states. On the one hand, informants see the current everyday life as “abnormal” in comparison to the high quality of life they consider to have lead in the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, i.e. in the state that had functioned. On the other hand, Jansen’s and especially Žikić’s interlocutors have high hopes of the EU-integrations and the future lives within the EU in which they expect normal lives to be re-established. However, both authors notice that their interlocutors do not see themselves as agents of civic and political activism and are embedded in social practices of “waiting”, yearning for hope or expecting normality instead of their active engagement for a change.
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