This book forms part of a multi-volume publication examining the historiographical wars waged by nationally minded historians in the Balkans from the emergence of modern nation-states to the present. By historiographical wars , the editors refer metaphorically to protracted disputes between scholars and public figures from different national backgrounds over specific historical issues, disputes that transcend ordinary scholarly disagreements and divergent interpretations. This second volume addresses conflicts over the interpretation of more recent history, focusing on symbolically significant events, historical figures, movements, and organisations from the late Ottoman and Imperial Russian periods to the present day.
The work delves into paramilitary movements and military conflicts, occupations and territorial annexations as well as acts of genocide, collaboration and resistance. In the post-communist Balkan historiographies, many of these thorny issues were subjected to revisionist reinterpretations, including relativization or even negation of past crimes, rehabilitation of controversial historical figures, and bigoted rewriting of the past. By undertaking critical assessment of conflicting arguments, the volume demonstrates the critical value of the history of historiography. To this end, it employs comparative and transnational entangled- and connected-history approaches that transcend one-sided national perspectives and enables the authors to explore the ways master national narratives crisscrossed and intertwined in the process of confrontation. The book also integrates approaches and concepts from memory studies.
The first volume in this series of publications entitled, Balkan Historiographical Wars: The Middle Ages, is edited by Diana Mishkova and Roumen Daskalov. It contains six studies of historiographical wars which concern interpretations of the medieval era. By analyzing the ways nineteenth- and twentieth-century Balkan historians dealt with the distant past, these studies examine the formation of national claims to an often shared historical heritage and/or disputed territories.
