ABSTRACT

The Yugoslav succession wars of the 1990s once again made "the Balkans" a powerful symbolic concept. The veritable boom of publications searching for the roots of the Yugoslav wars in the 1990s reanimated conceptions of a Balkan Sonderweg and the region's "otherness" to the European project due to endemic violence, rancid "ancient hatreds," and inherent conflictuality. The publication of Edward Said's Orientalism had the broader implication of putting establishment-area studies on the defensive and opening the path to postcolonial theory. Although Said's critique impacted international Balkan studies with considerable delay, by the early 2000s it had succeeded in "making it somewhat suspicious, more explicitly in academic circles, to answer the type of question 'what are the Balkans' in a straightforward manner." The dynamics in conceptualizing regional studies during the last 20-odd years has been such that it is hard to do justice to the variety of ways in which it has impacted on the understanding of the Balkan region.