Loyalties and disloyalties in the Balkans during and after the fall of theOttoman order

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Christian Voß
• Subject Area: Modern and Contemporary History ; European and American Literary and Cultural Studies
• Term: from 2013 to 2019
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 243722707

This project explores the fundamental change in the dynamics of societal patterns that took place in the Balkans after the fall of the Ottoman order and the establishment of national states, through an analysis of two case studies that remain controversial until today. The decades from the 1870s until the 1950s were a period in which key events were registered in the different national historical memories of the Balkans and that until now continue to attract the attention of historians, as well as being a period linked to highly contested historiographical debates.At the same time, this project will analyze the ottomanicité of the Balkans in the post-Ottoman period and will integrate this into the historical understanding of this region, which was for almost half a millennium under Ottoman rule. Questions will also be raised about whether (and in which form over long periods of time) perceptions and practices that permeate the patterns of social relations of everyday life could also be conceptualised as a form of "Ottoman Legacy" that remains significant.In order to achieve this, the project will systematically explore the continuities and discontinuities in patterns of loyalty through an explicit actor-oriented approach with particular interest in concrete local and regional problems (and how these problems changed over time). The project will allocate particular importance to the research of the multi-faceted dynamics of local societal relations (which will be evaluated from the changing "insider" socio-political perspective) with specific interest into the development of two very important aspects that have characterized local relations in the region: a) the recurrence of organised violence (also originating from outside these societies) and b) the importance of transnational migration in the economic patterns that emerged locally (above all in the Turkish case).The current continued negotiation and ambiguity of new national loyalties and predispositions in the selected case studies can only be made coherent through a deeper understanding of pre-existing cooperation patterns in these societies. (Sub-project I explores the case of Novi Pazar in Serbia in which Serbian, Bosniak and Turkish national orientations are in open competition and the Struga region in Macedonia, where a strong nationalist confrontation has taken place for years particularly (but not exclusively) between Macedonian and Albanian opposing antagonistic positions).

• DFG Programme: Research Grants