The transformation of Ottoman Cisr-i Mustafa Paşa to Bulgarian Svilengrad was the outcome of a combination of both local violence and state-policy that took place throughout the Balkan Wars (1912-13) and within the framework of state-building efforts in both Ottoman imperial and Bulgarian post-imperial contexts. This sequence of mass violence stands at the core of this article. Based on Ottoman, Jewish, international, and translated Bulgarian sources, this article discusses the everyday dynamics and events that took place in the town by placing them in the contexts of the macro-historical transformations generated by the Balkan Wars. It likewise turns to micro-historical analysis to study the violence perpetrated by locals. While it is evident that much of the violence was state-sponsored or, at least, tacitly accepted by the state, and reflected top-down planning, non-state players also took part in the retribution against those they deemed alien to the national cause.

The phenomenon of “political Islam” has been explored in several social theories. These accounts have mainly concentrated on the forms of violence that Islamists have instigated, but the racist drive that is often embedded within political Islam has remined overlooked and unexplored, that is, at least until recently when the brutal crimes by ISIS against Yazidis and Christians in northern Iraq were widely documented and broadcasted. Even so, this tendency has only been attributed to ISIS and extreme Jihadi groups, while states infused with Islamist ideology have remained relatively untouched by such critical analyses.

This article argues that most extant theoretical frameworks on political Islam do not adequately explain the often-latent racist trend in Islamist political ideology. By building off of Foucault's theory of biopolitics and genealogy of racism, it takes the Islamic Republic of Iran's policy against the Kurds as a case study to demonstrate how power shifts in favor of Islamist factions in early-1980s Iran legitimized a racist policy toward minorities in general and the Kurds in particular.

This article examines the social and political effects produced by the most recent wave of emigration in postwar Bosnia, widely understood to be the result of continued political instability and economic decline that followed the 1992–95 war. Drawing on ethnographic research in a deindustrialized Bosnian town and analysis of popular discourses seeking to make sense of this new wave of departures, I show how the phenomenon of postwar exit impacts those staying behind and inspires new forms of reflection that link past histories of violence to more recent forms of dispossession. The emergence of such forms of historical consciousness reveals that postwar migration is haunted both by the memory of wartime expulsions and ethnic cleansing, as well as by the often-unacknowledged violence of postwar economic restructuring glossed as the postsocialist transition. In asking what happens to nationalist regimes, as well as scholarship on nationalist politics, when the “people” leave, I demonstrate the need to analyze the ongoing out-migration both in terms of Bosnia’s historical specificity and global political-economic dynamics. In so doing, I show how absences created by these departures create new vantage points that bring to light and expose unsettling political configurations left behind by the Bosnian war.

Since the end of the Georgian-Abkhaz war, the often-precarious status of the Georgians displaced from Abkhazia has received significant academic attention. In contrast, the consequences of displacement from the reverse perspective—how it has affected the people who stayed behind—remains underanalyzed. Drawing on narratives collected during several months of ethnographic fieldwork, this article argues that although ethnic Abkhazians see themselves as victims of ethnic violence rather than perpetrators, the re-distribution of Georgian property nevertheless caused significant distress. Many condemned the practice of appropriation, suggesting that taking what is not one’s own is not only a violation of the property of the original owner, but also of the Abkhaz moral code and therefore shameful. To them, the trophy houses were a curse, both literally—as spaces haunted by former occupants—and metaphorically, as a source and reminder of a certain “moral corruption” within Abkhazian society. However, while the stories around the trophy houses reflect substantial intra-communal divisions, I suggest that they are also an expression of a shared postwar experience. Like the horror stories of Georgian violence, and the tales of Abkhaz heroism, they have become part of an intimate national repertoire constitutive of Abkhazia’s postwar community.

This article draws on my book Bosnia and the Destruction of Cultural Heritage,1 which incorporates ground-breaking fieldwork in Bosnia-Herzegovina and extensive research, and on my subsequent research and fieldwork in the post-conflict country. In the article, I explore the meaning that restoration and reconstruction of cultural heritage intentionally destroyed during conflict can have, particularly to the forcibly displaced. With the protection of cultural heritage increasingly being treated as an important human right and with the impact that forcible displacement during armed conflict has on cultural identity now in the spotlight, the importance of cultural heritage for those ethnically cleansed in Bosnia-Herzegovina during the 1992–95 war (both those who returned and those who did not) has relevance for considerations of contemporary post-conflict populations.

This article examines the first novel about the Karabakh crisis and ethnic cleansing of the Armenian population in the city of Baku. Maiden Dreams (Devich’i Sny), published in 1995, was written by Evgeniy Voyskunskiy, an author born in Baku and generally known for science fiction novels. The novel explores the tragic fate of the city, and it includes stories of persecution and pogroms against the Armenian population in Azerbaijan in the late 1980s and early 1990s in light of the Karabakh conflict. Maiden Dreams is the story of Baku from the beginning of the 20th century to the turbulent period late in the century when violence and ethnic cleansing had transformed the cosmopolitan, multi-ethnic capital into a homogeneous city with no space for “others.” This article examines the novel from both literary and historical perspectives.

This review article outlines the progress that the literature on the causes of ethnic cleansing has made in the last 10–15 years. The article specifically focuses on two lines of research that have expanded our understanding of ethnic cleansing: (a) the studies that focus on the role of wars (this literature can in turn be divided into those works that treat “wars as strategic environments” and those that treat “wars as transformational forces”); (b) the studies that focus on the pre-war domestic or international conditions that hinder or promote ethnic cleansing. The last section of the article suggests several future avenues of research that could further refine the study of ethnic cleansing and its relationship to other types of mass violence.

Ethnic cleansing is now a reality rooted in international relations. Confronted with this phenomenon in recent years, the international community has attempted to capture it in positive law. However, various efforts to prohibit and punish the practice under international law have taken shortcuts, further confusing an already complex topic. The aim of this critical reflection is to contribute to a legal understanding of ethnic cleansing by adopting a comprehensible and teleological approach that addresses the true objects and purposes of the practice. The goal of such an approach is to encourage international legal scholars to open a new chapter in the study of international crimes, one in which the autonomous status of ethnic cleansing is firmly established in positive international law.

This article critically examines the concept of ethnic cleansing in light of the ruling of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in Croatia v. Serbia. It suggests that the lack of overt reference to it in the Genocide Convention constitutes a significant lacuna in judicial recognition and protection of atrocities committed in both the Former Yugoslavia and more generally, which the ICJ categorically refused to address. Having examined how the ICJ attempted to conceptualize ethnic cleansing as evidence of both the actus reus of genocide (particularly in relation to Article II(c) of the Convention) and its mens rea, the article then critically assesses the Court's reasoning in its refusal to rule that a violation of the Convention had taken place in relation to deportation and forcible transfer. The article then concludes by contending that the Court simply failed to provide a much-needed and workable precedent to properly include ethnic cleansing within the legal and factual matrix of genocide.