ABSTRACT

What shapes the cultural, political and ideological values of young people living in Southeastern Europe? Which identities matter to them? How are their values changing, and how can they be changed? Who is changing them? Europe’s periphery is the testing ground for the success of European values and identities. The future stability and political coherence of the Union will be determined in large measure by identity issues in this region.

This book examines the ways in which ethnic and national values and identities have been surpassed as the overriding focus in the lives of the region’s youth. Employing bottom-up, ethnographic, and interview-based approaches, it explores when and where ethnic and national identification processes become salient. Using intra-national and international comparisons of youth populations of Albania, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia, Macedonia, Montenegro, and Serbia, contributors uncover the mechanisms by which ethnic identities are evoked, reproduced and challenged. In addition to exploring political, regional cultural generational and class identities, the contributors examine wider questions of European unity.

This volume offers a corrective to previous thinking about youth ethnic identities and will prove useful to scholars in political science and sociology studying issues of ethnic and national identities and nationalism, as well as youth cultures and identities.

chapter |15 pages

Introduction

Beyond ethnicity in research on youth in Southeast Europe

part I|77 pages

New ethnic mosaics

chapter 1|20 pages

Negotiating identities in post-conflict Bosnia and Herzegovina

Self, ethnicity, and nationhood in adolescents born of wartime rape

chapter 3|19 pages

Complexity of inner belonging

Notions of belonging and alienation among adolescents with a migrant background in Croatia

chapter 4|19 pages

Constructing and destructing the ethnic

Discourses of ethnicity among Hungarian youth in Vojvodina

part II|53 pages

Political participation and youth identities

chapter 6|17 pages

From foreign mercenaries to civic activists

A comparison of youth identity in post-conflict Bosnia and Herzegovina and Macedonia

chapter 7|21 pages

Forging civic bonds ‘from below’

Montenegrin activist youth between ethnonational disidentification and political subjectivation

part III|80 pages

Transcending ethnic identities

chapter 8|26 pages

Taming conflicted identities

Searching for new youth values in the Western Balkans

chapter 9|27 pages

Beyond ethnic identity

History, pride, and nationhood across socio-economic lines in Serbian and Croatian youth

chapter 10|25 pages

Out with the old

Youth solidarity and nationalism among young Kosovars and Serbs

chapter |5 pages

Conclusion