Writing about the rhetoric of Milorad Dodik, one certainly has to bear in mind his beginnings, especially as a 1998 RS prime minister whom Albright (1998) called a “breath of fresh air” and someone “determined to peacebuilding, reconciliation and connection of democratic alternative” in Bosnia and Herzegovina (henceforth BiH). Dodik's early rhetoric that brought him to power abounded in phrases such as “economic progress,” “debt return,” and “opening to the world,” while some media reports referred to him as the “America-supported man who occasionally attended Ambassador Miller's secret dinners” (Dani, 22 September 2000) (Majstorovic et al. 2010). In 1998, Dodik attended donors’ conferences and was given significant support to pursue the reforms he started, including normalization of relations with the BiH Federation and Croatia. In 1998, his results secured him between $400 million and $600 million in aid money (Beta, 13 May 1998).

This paper is a contribution to the debate about how people in Central Asia recall Soviet ethnic policies and their vision of how these policies have shaped the identities of their peers and contemporaries. In order to do so, this paper utilizes the outcomes of in-depth interviews about everyday Soviet life in Uzbekistan conducted with 75 senior citizens between 2006 and 2009. These narratives demonstrate that people do not explain Soviet ethnic policies simply through the “modernization” or “victimization” dichotomy but place their experiences in between these discourses. Their recollections also highlight the pragmatic flexibility of the public's adaptive strategies to Soviet ethnic policies. This paper also argues that Soviet ethnic policy produced complicated hybrid units of identities and multiple social strata. Among those who succeeded in adapting to the Soviet realities, a new group emerged, known as Russi assimilados (Russian-speaking Sovietophiles). However, in everyday life, relations between the assimilados and their “indigenous” or “nativist” countrymen are reported to have been complicated, with clear divisions between these two groups and separate social spaces of their own for each of these strata.

In Afghanistan, there has been much talk about, and international support for dealing with past injustices by developing transitional justice mechanisms. Reconciliation is being promoted as a nation-building strategy. This article argues that the implementation of transitional justice poses several challenges. First, a significant component of such a strategy is based on reconciliation taking place internally among competing armed groups and ethnic identities with the goal of transforming Afghan society. This assumes the cause of past conflicts to be internal and along ethnic divisions which limits the accountability for war crimes. It also considers violence and crimes of war as a thing of the past, ignoring the present situation. Furthermore, given the ongoing war between the US-led forces and the Taliban, insecurity and escalating levels of violence one has to question whether transitional justice can take place during a war. This article concludes that transitional justice is interconnected to perceptions of security and stability. The analysis of the present situation in Afghanistan poses critical questions as to whether memories of victims can be considered as the past in the midst of war.

This article examines the role of the intergenerational memory of the Second World War (WWII) in identity formation and political mobilization. An existing explanation in the ethnic-conflict literature is that strategic political leaders play a crucial role in constructing and mobilizing ethnic identities. However, based on 114 open-ended interviews with individuals born in Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Croatia, conducted in Serbia during 2008–2011, nearly a third of the respondents make spontaneous references to WWII in their statements, usually drawing parallels between the cycle of violence in the 1990s and that in the 1940s. The question this article asks, then, is why some respondents make references to WWII spontaneously while others do not. It is argued that intergenerational narratives of past cycles of violence also constitute a process of identity formation, in addition to, or apart from, other processes of identity formation. The respondents mention WWII violence in the context of the 1990s events because they “recognize” elements, such as symbols, discourse or patterns of violence, similar to those in the intergenerational narratives and interpret them as warning signs. Hence, individuals who had previously been exposed to intergenerational narratives may be subsequently more susceptible to political mobilization efforts.

The article addresses the representation of gypsies in Russian television news bulletins and popular drama series over a 15-month period. It seeks first to explain the prominence of the media image of the gypsy relative to the size of the Roma population and second to account for the relationship between fictional and non-fictional modes of representation. Situating itself within the broader field of post-Soviet Russian identity studies and applying qualitative tools differentiated according to the arena of analysis, it looks at questions of lexicon, voice and viewpoint in relation to news and issues of characterization, fictional space and plot with respect to drama. The two apparatuses are linked through a shared emphasis on narrative, and in particular on its dual orientation toward the exceptional (what makes a story worth telling and capable of embracing “difference”) and the typical (what enables it to represent and project “identity”). In its central argument it maps this dual “identity/difference” dynamic onto the gypsy's liminal status as both “of the self” and “of the other”, and its mediatory function: the ability to serve as a proxy for ethno-cultural difference more generally, and to negotiate the tensions between the cultural and racial aspects of ethnicity.