Category Archives: ethnic cleansing
Fears and Fantasies about the “Flesh of the Nation”
Yesterday Adis Maksic defended his Ph D dissertation “Mobilizing for Ethnic Violence? Ethno-National Political Parties and the Dynamics of Ethno-Politicization.” Adis is a Sarajevo native who was fortunately able to come to the United States with his family after his family suffered a … Continue reading
The Crimea Precedent & the Post-Soviet De Facto States
The well-known Political Science blog The Monkey Cage, now owned by the Washington Post (now owned by Jeff Bezos; we all work for Amazon now) posted earlier today a concise 3 graph summary of what our De Facto State Research Survey reveals … Continue reading
Global Conflicts. My Online Course Syllabus
I’ve been teaching ‘global conflicts’ at Virginia Tech for over twenty years, initially as an undergraduate course called “Geography of Global Conflicts.” In 1995, I offered the course online for the first time. The course has evolved considerably … Continue reading
The Birth of a Nation: Radovan Karadžić and the Ethnopoliticization of Bosnia in 1990
By the time he strode to the podium in Skenderija Hall, Sarajevo, on 12 July 1990 to speak, the journey of Dr Radovan Karadžić from obscure psychiatrist to politician, wartime leader, and later accused war criminal had begun. Karadžić had been working for months … Continue reading
Internal Legitimacy in De Facto States
The question of legitimacy is, of course, a central one in the study of de facto states. Unrecognized states don’t have it from the international community (or from only a few as in the case of Abkhazia and South Ossetia), … Continue reading
‘Land for Peace’ in Nagorny Karabakh? PUBLISHED
My latest publication, with Dr John O’Loughlin, from the De Facto States Research Project, funded by the US National Science Foundation, is “Land for Peace in Nagorny Karabakh? Political Geographies and Public Attitudes inside a Contested De Facto State” which … Continue reading
Inside South Ossetia article published
The article “Inside South Ossetia: a survey of attitudes in a de facto state” has just been published by Post-Soviet Affairs (now owned by Taylor & Francis). This article is based on a research field trip conducted in 2010 and … Continue reading
The Irish-Japanese Axis
At a session on De Facto state regimes at last month’s ASN, Tom de Waal wittily remarked on how there appears to be an Irish-Japanese axis of researchers studying these oddities of the world political map. Looking at the presenters … Continue reading
The Improvised State
Alex Jeffrey is a lecturer in Geography at Cambridge University in the (maybe not so) United Kingdom (what say you Scotland?). He is the author of a theoretically innovative new book called The Improvised State: Sovereignty, Performance and Agency in … Continue reading
Conference Season
Each year different tribes of academic laborers have their trade shows. This laborer is attending two virtually back to back, the Association of American Geographers meeting in Los Angeles and then the Association for the Study of Nationalities conference in … Continue reading
Critical Geopolitics 