Books about Central Eastern Europe and the Balkans

This volume collects the results of a three-year research project (2011-2014) sponsored by the Regional Agency for the Development and Innovation of Agriculture of the Italian Molise region (ARSIAM). The project is entitled: “A Study of Mountain Landscape for Transborder Cooperation: Integrated Planning between Molise-Montenegro”.

Recent generations have experienced dramatic improvements in the quality of human life across the globe. Wars between states are fought less frequently and are less lethal. Food is more plentiful and more easily accessed.

This is the first comprehensive treatment in any language of the history of customary law in Hungary, from the thirteenth to the twentieth centuries. Hungary's customary law was described by Stephen Werboczy in 1517 in the extensive law code known as the Tripartitum. As Werboczy explained, Hungarian law derived from the interplay of Romano-canonical law, statute, written instruments, and court judgments.

Russian Literature since 1991 is the first comprehensive, single-volume compendium of modern scholarship on post-Soviet Russian literature.

On June 11, 1937, a closed military court ordered the execution of a group of the Soviet Union's most talented and experienced army officers, including Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevskii; all were charged with participating in a Nazi plot to overthrow the regime of Joseph Stalin.

In the middle of the seventeenth century, Bohdan Khmelnytsky was the legendary Cossack general who organized a rebellion that liberated the Eastern Ukraine from Polish rule.

This book examines the crisis in Ukraine, tracing its development and analysing the factors which lie behind it. It discusses above all how the two sides have engaged in political posturing, accusations, escalating sanctions and further escalating threats, arguing that the ease with which both sides have reverted to a Cold War mentality demonstrates that the Cold War belief systems never really disappeared, and that the hopes raised in the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union for a new era in East-West relations were misplaced.

Planning is particularly important in Eastern Europe since most spatial change and economic planning are the products of centralised decision-making, which in turn is the product of a systematic socio-political ideology...

Often neglected in the study of far right organisations, post-communist Europe recently witnessed the rise and fall of a number of populist radical right parties....

The post-Yugoslav states have developed very differently since Yugoslavia dissolved in the early 1990s. This collection analyzes the foreign policies of the post-Yugoslav states focusing on the main goals, actors, decision-making processes and influences on the foreign policies of these countries.

This book proposes a new way of understanding events throughout the world that are usually interpreted as democratization, rising authoritarianism, or revolution...

Why are independent courts rarely found in emerging democracies? This book moves beyond familiar obstacles, such as an inhospitable legal legacy and formal institutions that expose judges to political pressure...

This work attempts to clarify the major problems facing Russia's armed forces in the present and immediate future. It covers threats from terrorists, break away republics and threats from outside Russia's borders. The book also includes political and economic problems facing the military...

Southern Europe has been hit hard by the global economic crisis and, as such, their welfare states have come under acute strain...

his book is concerned with a large question in one small, but highly problematic case: how can a prime minister establish control and coordination across his or her government?...

Prior to 1989, the communist countries of Eastern Europe and the USSR lacked genuine employer and industry associations. After the collapse of communism, industry associations mushroomed throughout the region....

This book explores the interaction of the EU in Greece, Slovenia, Croatia, and Macedonia in three key policy sectors – cohesion, border managements and the environment – and assesses the degree to which the European Union’s engagement with the democracies of South East Europe has promoted Europeanization and Multi-Level Governance.

This book examines the role of Russian and Serbian nationalism in different modes of dissolution of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia in 1991...

This book takes stock of arguments about the historical legacies of communism that have become common within the study of Russia and East Europe more than two decades after communism's demise and elaborates an empirical approach to the study of historical legacies revolving around relationships and mechanisms rather than correlation and outward similarities...

In societies divided on ethnic and religious lines, problems of democracy are magnified – particularly where groups are mobilized into parties.

Before the USSR collapsed, ethnic identities were imposed by the state. This book analyzes how and why Jews decided what being Jewish meant to them after the state dissolved and describes the historical evolution of Jewish identities...

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This book examines how membership of the European Union has affected life in the ten former communist countries of Central and Eastern Europe that are now members of the European Union.

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This book provides an up-to-date assessment of the main processes and dilemmas of regional development and regional policy in the newer European Union Member States in Central and Eastern Europe and neighbouring countries.

In a time of national introspection regarding the country’s involvement in the persecution of Jews, Poland has begun to reimagine spaces of and for Jewishness in the Polish landscape, not as a form of nostalgia but as a way to encourage the pluralization of contemporary society.

Bastards of Utopia, the companion to a feature documentary film of the same name, explores the experiences and political imagination of young radical activists in the former Yugoslavia, participants in what they call alterglobalization or "globalization from below."

During the early 2000s the market liberalization reforms to the Russian economy, begun in the 1990s, were consolidated, but since the mid 2000s economic policy has moved into a new phase, characterized by more state intervention with less efficiency and more structural problems.

This book draws a subtle picture of Warsaw Pact economic and military cooperation by presenting a complete branch—the military industry—from the perspective of a smaller member-state, Hungary.

The unexpected end of the protracted conflict has been a sobering experience for scholars. No theory had anticipated how the Cold War would be terminated, and none should also be relied upon to explicate its legacy.

As Eurasia and the adjacent territories become more important to the world, there is increasing interest from international powers, accompanied by attempts to give institutional form to traditional economic and security links within the region. This book includes a range of substantive work from scholars based in the region, offering contrasting perspectives on the process of Eurasian integration and its place in the world. Chapters consider economic, political, social and security developments, with notable studies of the major countries involved in the development of the Eurasian Economic Union. The work also examines the connections between the region and China, greater Asia and the European Union. It outlines the varying dynamics, with populations growing in Central Asia while at best stagnant elsewhere. The book discusses the increasing strategic significance of the region and explores how the new post-Soviet states are growing in national cohesion and political self-confidence. Above all, the book examines the concept of ’Eurasia’, outlining the debates about the concept and how various aspects of the legacy of ‘Eurasianism’ contribute to contemporary plans for integration. The book argues that although regional integration is very much a popular idea in our age, with the potential for economic benefits and increased international influence, in practice contemporary projects for Eurasian integration have been highly ambiguous and contested. Nevertheless, significant steps have been taken towards the creation of the Eurasian Economic Union. The book analyses developments to date, noting the achievements as well as the challenges.

In a new and engaging study, Halemba explores the religion and world outlook of the Telengits of Altai. The book provides an account of the Altai, its peoples, clans and political structures, focusing particularly on on the Telengits, whilst also considering the different elements of religious belief exhibited among these native people.

Contemporary Violence: Postmodern War in Kosovo and Chechnya draws on several years of field research, as well as interpretive IR theory and analysis of empirical source material so as to shed light on contemporary violence.

In The Left Side of History Kristen Ghodsee tells the stories of partisans fighting behind the lines in Nazi-allied Bulgaria during World War II: British officer Frank Thompson, brother of the great historian E.P. Thompson, and fourteen-year-old Elena Lagadinova, the youngest female member of the armed anti-fascist resistance. But these people were not merely anti-fascist; they were pro-communist, idealists moved by their socialist principles to fight and sometimes die for a cause they believed to be right. Victory brought forty years of communist dictatorship followed by unbridled capitalism after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Today in democratic Eastern Europe there is ever-increasing despair, disenchantment with the post-communist present, and growing nostalgia for the communist past. These phenomena are difficult to understand in the West, where “communism” is a dirty word that is quickly equated with Stalin and Soviet labor camps. By starting with the stories of people like Thompson and Lagadinova, Ghodsee provides a more nuanced understanding of how communist ideals could inspire ordinary people to make extraordinary sacrifices.

For the Soviet bloc the struggle against foreign radio was a principal front in the Cold War. Poland's War on Radio Free Europe, 1950-1989, tells how Poland conducted this fight, a key part of the wider effort to control the flow of information and ideas.

The Russia-Chechen wars have had an extraordinarily destructive impact on the communities and on the trajectories of personal lives in the North Caucasus Republic of Chechnya.

More than just a bloody internal conflict, the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) was an international struggle between the proponents of democracy, fascism, and communism on the eve of the Second World War.

In The Left Side of History Kristen Ghodsee tells the stories of partisans fighting behind the lines in Nazi-allied Bulgaria during World War II....

This book provides a clear, comprehensive introduction to the Caucasus: it covers the geography; the historical development of the region; economics; politics and government; population; religion and society; culture and traditions; alongside its conflicts and international relations...

Il libro presenta i risultati di un'ampia ricerca svolta tra Italia e Ucraina sulle pratiche migratorie e i legami transnazionali delle migranti, occupate nel lavoro domestico e di cura presso famiglie italiane....

Drawing on interpretive approaches to International Relations, the book argues that founding events and multiple contexts informed the narratives deployed by different members of each movement, illustrating why elements within the Kosovo Liberation Army and the armed forces of the Chechen republic of Ichkeria favoured regional and local strategies of war in the Balkans and the North Caucasus...

This study analyses enterprise development and entrepreneurship and their relationship with the state and market building in Russia. It focuses on continuities and changes in the factory regime, drawing on existing literature and the author's own research and evaluation...