ABSTRACT
The author draws on Maria Todorova's work about the Balkans as a delimited region to unveil religious border-living in the peacebuilding endeavours of Bosnian Franciscans in the 1990s, and the komshuluk living of Orthodox Christians and Muslims in the Rhodope Mountains of Bulgaria. Exploring the collectivistic phenomenology of the Bosnian and Bulgarian local experiences, she seeks to complicate three patterns in the usual approaches to religions and nationalisms: first, the decolonial view of nationalism as inseparable from modern nation-states; second, the assertion that all links between Christianity and nationalisms represent the loss of Christianity's putative essence; and third, the notion that abstract universal religious humanisms are the answer to the exclusion and violence of contemporary religious nationalisms. Arguing that the Balkan's experiences of religious pluralism are the instances of (what William Connolly calls) at the Balkanisms: first, the decolonial view of nationalism as inseparable from modern nation-states; seumbing to the exclusionary and nativist forms of nationalisms, can forcefully counter them.
