BHA Webinar “Beyond the state: Nation-building and violence from the ground up in 20th century South-Eastern Europe”
BHA Webinar Series (Zoom)
Spyros Tsoutsoumpis, PhD (University of Manchester)
Date & Hour: November 26th (Wednesday), 18:00 BST / 20:00 EET
Moderator: Ana-Maria Lepăr, PhD (BHA)
Technical assistance: Timothy French
Contact: timothymfrench@yahoo.com
Webinar ID: 871 6140 9479
https://us06web.zoom.us/j/87161409479
The presentation explores the intersection between paramilitary violence and nation-building in 20th century South-Eastern Europe, with a focus on the borderlands of Macedonia that were shared by Greece, Yugoslavia and Bulgaria, and the region of Epirus that was divided between Greece and Albania. The story of the development and activities of local paramilitaries is used as a vantage point to reassess central assumptions about the relationship between violence, the state and nation–building. Studies of nation-building in twentieth-century South-Eastern Europe have discussed these processes in terms of the state imposing its will to the periphery. The presentation goes beyond such narratives to demonstrate how the intertwinement between non-state actors and the national authorities facilitated the reconfiguration of center-periphery relations both through violence and through the formation of novel political networks. Concurrently, it shows how these processes allowed the gradual integration of previously marginal local communities into the national body politic. This approach provides a more accurate understanding of the historical reality of state formation, with its pervasive accommodations between, and interlacing of, state and non-state violence’ and facilitates a more nuanced understanding of the role of non-state armed groups in the making of the nation state in the Balkans.