Literature in many languages (documentary, monographic, memoir-like and periodical) is abundant on the sovietization of Czechoslovakia, as are the reasons advanced for it. Some observers have argued that the Soviet takeover of the country stemmed from an excessive preoccupation with Panslavism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries by a few Czech and Slovak intellectuals, politicians, writers and poets and their uncritical affection and fascination for everything Russian and Soviet. Others have attributed the drawing of Czechoslovakia into the Soviet orbit to Franco-British appeasement of Hitler's imperial ambitions during the September 1938, Munich crisis. At Munich, Czechoslovakia lost its sovereignty and territory, France its honor, England its respect and trust; and the Soviet Union, by its abstract offer to aid Czechoslovakia (without detailing how or in what form the assistance would come) gained admiration. Still others have pinned the blame for the sovietization of Czechoslovakia on machinations by top leaders of the Czechoslovak Communist Party, who, as obedient tools of Moscow, supported Soviet geopolitical designs on Czechoslovakia, who sought and received political asylum in the USSR during World War II, and who returned to Czechoslovakia with the victorious Soviet armed forces at the end of World War II as high-ranking members of the Soviet establishment. Finally, there are some who maintain that the sovietization of Czechoslovakia commenced with the 25 February 1948, Communist coup, followed by the tragic death of Foreign Minister Jan Masaryk on 10 March 1948, and the replacement, on 7 June 1948, of President Eduard Beneš by the Moscow-trained, loyal Kremlin servant Klement Gottwald.

The aim of this article is to inquire how recent and more consolidated historiographical trends consider the impact of nationalism in the late Ottoman Balkans. I focus on historical accounts of Albanian–Slav interaction in the late Ottoman Macedonian context, although the inquiry also includes texts that do not only engage with this epistemological field. I confront research efforts that have been published from the early 1960s to the present in order to understand the continuities and the discontinuities that characterize the work of historians. A preliminary investigation has allowed me to outline two main historiographical approaches: the national historiographies and the postnationalist approach. Such a distinction has become tangible especially after the end of the Cold War when a new generation of historians started to question the validity of the studies conducted by their colleagues in the past decades by pointing at the methodological and ideological issues that limited their work. In this article I evaluate to what extent the work of postnationalist historians is different from that of traditional historiographies and finally reflect on the possibility and benefits that might come from a dialogue between the two approaches.

State violence against Belarusian women involved in protest activities after the fraudulent presidential election in 2020 and onward has been unprecedented in the country’s history. Women’s activism has challenged the patriarchal authoritarian regime, which was ill-prepared to deal with women. However, after a short period of adaptation by the repressive institutions, women became their “special clients.” With reference to gender-sensitive academic research, we investigate diverse forms of state violence against women and analyze how they perceive their experiences of incarceration for political reasons. This article is based on available datasets, a series of nine semi-structured interviews, and insights from participant observation. The research reveals that Belarusian women incarcerated for political reasons fall under the “demanding clients” category: they comprehensively challenge the state-sponsored brutal patriarchy and expect the repressive apparatus to meet their specific needs. These women experience multidimensional physical discomfort and psychological pressure, including targeted offensive and dehumanizing elements. At the same time, incarcerated women do not feel ostracized by society; they share the feeling that their “crimes” are supported by civil society, and they endure the pains of punishment as targeted violence from a state fighting cynically for its own survival.

This essay focuses on analyzing the history of the evolution of the nationalist memory narrative in recent memory politics in Ukraine. It observes the political rehabilitation of the radical nationalist movement and its leaders and organizations, followed by public recognition and glorification, and the evolution of this memory narrative since the beginning of the 1990s from local memory to the centerpiece of the state politics of memory. This article examines the memorialization and commemoration of the nationalist movement at regional and national levels (sites of memory, memorial dates, renaming of topographical objects, movies, TV series, etc.), policies aimed at the promotion of the nationalist historical myth, political controversies, roles of major actors, public debates on these issues, societal responses, and international disputes.

Popular protest, which repeatedly occurred in Communist regimes, turned into massive mobilizational waves in the late Communist period. Why did some protests result in state cooptation and particularist nationalism (Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union), and others in state-society polarization (Poland) and protest containment (China), when these states shared important historical, political, and institutional legacies? Political regimes with origins in indigenous popularly-based revolutionary movements are more resilient to popular protests and other major crises than other authoritarian regimes. Protracted ideological armed struggle largely overlaps with broader patriotic causes, such as liberation wars or struggles against foreign intervention. The revolutionary regimes thus acquire patriotic credentials, while boundaries between partisan and patriotic identities become blurred, which strengthens their elite unity and popular base. Popular protests thus facilitate a complex political game of old and new actors that may result in regime survival or transformation. In other regimes, popular unrest tends to produce state-society polarization and, ultimately, regime delegitimation and breakdown. Popular contention in complex multinational institutional settings, if there is no major external threat, highlights old and triggers new conflicts along these structural and institutional divides and, where dual political identities prevail, facilitates identity shifts in particularist direction.

This article examines the divide between national and local collective memory in Poland and investigates the role of “memory activists” in mediating and exploiting this divide. It narrows its focus to the ethnic cleansing of Poles by the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) from 1943 to 1944 and the forced relocation of Ukrainians in Poland, Operation Vistula, in 1947. It surveys local and national newspapers to understand competing interpretations and analyzes what incidents (e.g. protests, disputes, commemorations, reenactments, etc.) related to these events take place in local communities. It highlights the many actors, “memory activists,” and associations involved in pushing specific, often ahistorical, interpretations of these events – motivated by political gain, careerism, or personal conviction. It uses the theoretical works of Maurice Halbwachs and Karl Mannheim to effectively distinguish between local and national phenomenon and to elucidate the various nuances of collective memory.

Why do Igbo nationalists subscribe to the view that Igbos are one of the Lost Tribes of Israel and thus descend from Jewish people despite evidence against such genealogical and cultural ties? This problematic is largely underexplored in the copious literature on ethnonationalist agitations in Nigeria. Drawing on ontological security theory, I contend that Igbo nationalists employ the analogy of Jewishness to posit the Igbo as a unique ethnoreligious and ethnoracial group whose identity is under existential threat in postcolonial Nigeria and to draw global attention to their separatist cause. Further, I argue that although belief in the similarities between Jews and Igbos predates postcolonial Igbo nationalism – there are scores of racialist writings advanced by European colonizers in precolonial times to undermine African cultures (the so-called Hamitic hypothesis) – it was particularly invoked by Igbo nationalists during the gory Nigerian Civil War (1967–1970), a defining moment in the social construction of Igbo identity. Igbo nationalists appropriated the Jewish experience of persecution in Central and Eastern Europe to make their case for the ontological security of Igbos. Whilst this political strategy was partially successful, it did not halt the Nigerian state from extirpating Biafra. Despite the reincorporation of Biafran territory into Nigeria, Igbo nationalists still see themselves as Jews and Jewishness has mutated into something of a pristine Igbo identity in postcolonial Nigeria.

Discrimination against minority ethnic groups has often been analyzed through the lenses of institutional action, antiminority rhetoric, and media framing in the countries of residence. However, we know little about how ethnic discrimination is approached in the home countries of these minorities. To address this gap in the literature, our article seeks to explain how Romanian parliamentarians address discrimination against coethnics abroad. We use inductive thematic analysis conducted on all of the parliamentary speeches about the discrimination of coethnics abroad in the Chamber of Deputies between 2008 and 2020. Our results indicate a relatively high degree of descriptive representation and an extensive concern about discrimination of coethnics abroad from parliamentarians across the political spectrum. The speeches about discrimination differ in content relative to the coethnic community of reference.

How does a newly formed state and its newly created nation present itself at world’s fairs? This article focuses on the interwar period and the impact of the political restructuring of Central Europe in order to examine the strategies and motivations of Czechoslovakia for participation in exhibitions around the globe. It takes Czechoslovakia as an example of a country, created in 1918, that constructed and displayed its image in a comprehensible and uncomplicated way to international audiences. World’s fairs that were primarily organized to promote trade relationships thus gave the opportunity to countries like Czechoslovakia to validate its existence, internal composition, and domestic politics through carefully crafted narratives that were showcased. The article primarily addresses the question of who creates these narratives and why, while scrutinizing the transfer of domestic politics into international displays.