Imposing Particular Identities: The Balkans as a Meeting Place of Ethnicities and Religions
Year: 2018
Type: article
Abstract: Since Balkan ethnicities are primarily organized along locally-practiced religious lines, regional monotheistic religions are seen as the source of the conflicts there.However, even a brief historical examination shows different patterns, where the people of the region lived in long periods of peace and solidarity while practicing their separate religious traditions.Significantly, the conflicts occurred when the Balkan people followed non-religious political processes and ideas which originated outside of the region.Hence, this paper attempts to observe the extant representations of the Balkans, examine the brief history of the region to reveal patterns of amity and enmity, and bring forth a different historical -and possible future-reality. Balkans: Representations and Possibilities 1T his paper will argue that monotheistic religions, which have coexisted for many centuries and, in fact, mark the most important axis of the human conception of history and individual self, are not the source of the exclusivism and particularism in the Balkans which so often led to war.Rather, the conflicts are the products of political processes that originated outside of the Balkans and which are anti-religious in essence.This becomes obvious when we consider that the Balkans, throughout their history, have experienced both periods of war and long periods of peace, characterized by cross-regional solidarity among the local peoples.Multiple religions have been present in the Balkans during all its modern history; therefore, something else must have disturbed the cross-regional solidarities and caused those conflicts.Thus, religious coexistence should be considered as a natural state of being, and viewed as such by all who are looking for solutions to the Balkan issues, with the peaceful and continuous complementary existence of the people in the Balkans as the final teleology.Since the opposite position has been well advertised and emphasized among the general public through various hegemonic Imposing Particular Identities: The Balkans as a Meeting Place of Ethnicities and Religions MIRSAD KRIJEŠTORAC *
Source: Insight Turkey
Author: Mirsad Krijestorac
Language: English
Subfield: Cultural Studies
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W2802194416