Chapter 4 describes developments in the nineteenth century when the Ottoman empire initiated military and administrative reforms in response to military defeats, particularly against Russia. In the southwestern Balkans, Albanian Sunnis resisted any change in their privileged position vis-à-vis the Christian population. Sunni Albanians were among the conservative and anti-reform forces in the Ottoman empire. When Christian nation-states emerged in the Balkans following the uprisings in Greece and Serbia, major European powers intervened ever more arressively in the Ottoman Balkans. In that context, Christians and Bektashi Muslims began to design an Albanian national program. These national activists struggled to overcome both religious differences and distinct regional special identities. The loss of territory by the Ottomans in the Balkans after the Berlin Congress (1878) also mobilized the Sunnis, who increasingly feared the collapse of the empire. The Albanian Balkan provinces of the Ottoman empire developed into a laboratory for competing identity politics by local actors and the major European powers.

The final chapter summarizes the results and main findings of the book and draws out the theoretical and policy implications. First, the cases in this work have shown that expansion depends on variation in weaker states as well as the more powerful. This means that international order is not just a product of the choices of the powerful but also of the weak. Second, state-building and increased nationalism can often result in the surrender of sovereignty. This finding is somewhat counterintuitive; normally state and nation-building is associated with the assertion of sovereignty. However, if attempts to centralize the state and assert national identities exacerbate domestic contestation, they can create conditions that result in reduced sovereignty. Third, resistance to hierarchy often results in less, not more, sovereignty, unless the dominant state is constrained from further expansion. Fourth, international orders in the form of hierarchy can depend heavily on domestic disorder, or at least highly dysfunctional domestic order.