ABSTRACT
This book is about the national(-istic) imaginations of geographical space – or how a nation describes, imagines, evaluates, and is determined to conquer or regain a particular piece of territory. The book is part of a developing discourse in critical geopolitics focusing on the meaning of collective spatial imaginations. This chapter presents the conceptual framework of the study, its aims and research questions, and the methods applied. As most studies on spatial imaginations in the context of ethnic stereotypes, nationalism, imperialism, and post-colonialism focus on images of ‘other’ or ‘foreign’ lands, states, peoples, and civilisations, this study will be devoted to the ways in which national communities imagine the space perceived as their own. This issue is especially relevant in regions, such as the Balkans, which have had complex ethnic and political histories. More specifically, the study aims to identify contemporary representations of the classic, nineteenth-century-shaped self-imaginations of the Bulgarian national space and their implications for current geopolitics in the Balkan context.
