3 The Croatian historical statehood narrative In his 1998 state of the nation address, the Croatian President Franjo Tuœman noted that with the restoration of the Croatian Danube region including Vukovar ‘to our homeland’, ‘[t]he centuries-old dream of the Croatian people has thereby been completely fulfilled’.1 Similarly, the new constitution promulgated shortly after independence proclaimed ‘the millennial national identity of the Croatian nation and the continuity of its statehood, confirmed by the course of its entire historical experience in various statal
Humanitarian Principles’ , Humanity , 7 : 2 , 255 – 72 . Goffman , E. ( 1978 ), The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life ( Harmondsworth : Penguin Books ). Hagmann , T. and Péclard , D. ( 2010 ), ‘Negotiating Statehood: Dynamics of Power and Domination in Africa’ , Development and Change , 41 : 4 , 539 – 62 . Harrison , E. ( 2013 ), ‘Beyond the Looking Glass? “Aidland” Reconsidered’ , Critique of Anthropology , 33 : 3 , 263 – 79 . Hilhorst , D. and Jansen , B. J. ( 2010 ), ‘Humanitarian Space as Arena: A Perspective on the Everyday
Protección Social) ( 2013 ), Protocolo de atención integral en salud con enfoque psicosocial para las personas víctimas del conflicto armado en Colombia . Mora-Gámez , F . ( 2016 ), Reparation beyond Statehood: Assembling Rights Restitution in Post-Conflict Colombia ( PhD dissertation , University of Leicester ). Moreno , M. and Díaz , M. ( 2016 ), ‘ Posturas en la atención psicosocial a víctimas del conflicto armado en Colombia ’, Revista de Ciencias Sociales , 16 : 1 , 193 – 213 , doi: 10.21500/16578031.2172 . Oslender
toward more-institutionalised statehood; rather, they are on different long-term pathways. Because gaining and maintaining political power depends on the ability to mobilise and control the means of violence and material reward, the core business of elite players in political market systems is to secure discretionary cash (i.e. the ‘political budget’) or the ability to grant or withhold access to material rewards (e.g. bribes, contracts, formal and informal
In the story of post-Cold War conceptual confusion, the war in and over Kosovo stands out as a particularly interesting episode. This book provides new and stimulating perspectives on how Kosovo has shaped the new Europe. It breaks down traditional assumptions in the field of security studies by sidelining the theoretical worldview that underlies mainstream strategic thinking on recent events in Kosovo. The book offers a conceptual overview of the Kosovo debate, placing these events in the context of globalisation, European integration and the discourse of modernity and its aftermath. It then examines Kosovo's impact on the idea of war. One of the great paradoxes of the war in Kosovo was that it was not just one campaign but two: there was the ethnic cleansing campaign in Kosovo and the allied bombing campaign against targets in Kosovo and all over Serbia. Serbia's killing of Kosovo has set the parameters of the Balkanisation-integration nexus, offering 'Europe' (and the West in general) a unique opportunity to suggest itself as the strong centre that keeps the margins from running away. Next, it investigates 'Kosovo' as a product of the decay of modern institutions and discourses like sovereignty, statehood, the warring state or the United Nations system. 'Kosovo' has introduced new overtones into the European Weltanschauung and the ways in which 'Europe' asserts itself as an independent power discourse in a globalising world: increasingly diffident, looking for firm foundations in the conceptual void of the turn of the century.
programme, or – as in the case of the dissident intellectuals – to challenge such accounts. However, they all attempted to give resonance to abstract ideas in the contemporary context. After a discussion of the so-called ‘Franjoist’ narrative offered by President Franjo Tuœman and his party, I will discuss alternative conceptions of identity that were articulated by opposition parties, dissident intellectuals and the Croatian diaspora. I argue that each of these ‘political entrepreneurs’ drew upon, and offered interpretations of, the historical statehood thesis in order
-Karabakh conflict was midwife to the different ways three post-Soviet entities organised their (recognised or unrecognised) statehood. This chapter deals with the interdependence of institutional weakness of states and the organisation of conflict. Institutional weakness of statehood is at the same time both cause and consequence of violent conflict. On the one hand the escalation of conflict into violence is connected with the local exploitation of organisational voids in the official Soviet institutions. On the other hand, reinstitutionalising non-violent conflict after war and forced
statehood (see Chapter 3). During the 1990s competing political parties and intellectuals (the second level) mobilised and reinterpreted narratives of historical statehood (the first level) in order legitimise their political programmes. The ruling party (the HDZ, Hrvatska Demokratska Zajednica – Croatian Democratic Union) made use of the bureaucratic power of the state to enforce its particular understanding of Croatian national identity. Although such ideas enjoyed salience during the wars of 1991–95 there were always sites of resistance to this dominant account of
contained here reveal the nation to be a terrain of political competition in which the state is but one, albeit powerful and well resourced, protagonist. Such disputes take place not only among political and intellectual elites but also within a diverse range of social practices. The focus here then is on how interpretations of the historical statehood narrative are manifested in the identities that inform social practices. These chapters ask how competing ideas about Croatian national identity are manifested in different areas of social activity by considering the
EAST TIMOR WAS forcibly incorporated into Indonesia in 1975 and managed, through a confluence of circumstances that was at once remarkable and yet another example of a suppressed people snapping back like bent but unbroken twigs (to use Isaiah Berlin’s phrase), to become independent almost twenty-five years later. Now the territory, poised on the edge of statehood, is undergoing transition, but also flux and confusion. At the time of writing the United Nations Transitional Authority for East Timor (UNTAET) is effectively the Government of