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The Balkans. Revolution, War and Political Violence since 1878 MARK BIONDICH: The Balkans. Revolution, War and Political Violence since 1878. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. XV, 384 S., 5 Ktn., 8 Tab. = Zones of Violence. ISBN: 978-0-19-929905-8.
This collection of publications on the history of the Balkan Peninsula, which is both unmanageably large and divergent in quantity as well as quality, has been supplemented with a further work by Mark Biondich - which at a first glance may appear redundant, but indeed upon closer inspection proves to be a thoroughly interesting attempt at a new interpretation of southeast European history.
That surprisingly concise, but at the same time quite eloquent and readable work - 267 pages are allocated to the analysis proper - is structured into five chronologically ordered large chapters, which deal in comparative fashion with the Balkans from the Congress of Berlin in 1878 to the fall of the socialist systems, the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s and the present problems of these countries that still find themselves in a period of transition. The actual analysis emphasizes a grounded theoretical introduction to concepts and phenomena like nationalism, nation-states, and...