Symbolic Nation-building and Collective Identities in Post-Yugoslav States
Symbolic Nation-building and Collective Identities in Post-Yugoslav States

Summary/Abstract: The bulk of the articles presented in this special issue were presented at the international conference “Strategies of Symbolic Nation-building in South Eastern Europe”, held at the University of Rijeka 8-10 May 2014. This event concluded the three-year project led by Pål Kolstø from the University of Oslo and funded by the Norwegian Research Council, and featured over fifty participants from across Europe. One of the goals of the conference was to present the results of the project (http://www.hf.uio.no/ilos/english/research/projects/nation-w-balkan/) and the accompanying volume of the same name published by Ashgate in 2014, which focused on nation-building in seven countries defined as the Western Balkans – Albania, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia, Kosovo, Macedonia, Montenegro, and Serbia. The other goal of the conference was to encourage younger scholars to draw upon the quantitative results and explore topics beyond what the researchers on the project were able to cover in a single edited volume. The large number of responses to the conference call yielded a final program featuring such diverse subjects as sports and nationalism, social cleavages and nation-building, the role of war crimes trials in shaping national narratives, and even the relationship between food and national identity. For this issue of Croatian Political Science Review, I selected those papers which focused on how collective remembrance, cultural landscapes, public space, and sites of memory function in the service of symbolic nation-building not only during socialist Yugoslavia, but especially in the new post-Yugoslav states.

• Details
• Contents