Balkanization (territorial fragmentation) is becoming a significant urban and geopolitical pursuit in contemporary times. Countries, cities and regions are ever increasingly voicing the desire for independence and balkanization from the nation or union they are a part of. This monograph generally maps the historical and theoretical emergence of balkanization, as well its more recent spread into fields as far ranging as law, medicine, data and security studies, sociology, architecture and the urban. The spatialization of balkanization is particularly addressed in terms of destruction and renewal through a detailed sociopolitical interrogation of architecture and the urban, including their changing symbolic, ideological and functional forms. The spatial connections between balkanization, violent remaking (destruction and renewal) and global politics have predominantly been analyzed via the former Yugoslav context and the Balkans, however, spotlight has also been directed to the current political climate of the UK, Australia and the Anglo-Saxon geopolitics. The analysis helps in understanding broader emergent patterns of sociospatial polarization across various scales, and in respect to global geoeconomic and geopolitical restructuring. This is particularly important because drawing connections between balkanization, economics, law, media and technology is to gain an awareness of - and engagement with - the emerging implications of spatial remaking and global politics. This monograph is a valuable resource and will be relevant to academics and students interested in spatial politics; including architecture, urbanism, geography, sociology, politics, international development, conflict, and cultural studies.

Don’t Mourn, Balkanize! is the first book written from the radical left perspective on the topic of Yugoslav space after the dismantling of the country. In this collection of essays, commentaries, and interviews, written between 2002 and 2010, Andrej Grubačić speaks about the politics of balkanization—about the trial of Slobodan Milosevic, the assassination of Prime Minister Zoran Djindjic, neoliberal structural adjustment, humanitarian intervention, supervised independence of Kosovo, occupation of Bosnia, and other episodes of Power which he situates in the long historical context of colonialism, conquest, and intervention. But he also tells the story of the balkanization of politics, of the Balkans seen from below. A space of bogumils—those medieval heretics who fought against Crusades and churches—and a place of anti-Ottoman resistance; a home to hajduks and klefti, pirates and rebels; a refuge of feminists and socialists, of antifascists and partisans; of new social movements of occupied and recovered factories; a place of dreamers of all sorts struggling both against provincial “peninsularity” as well as against occupations, foreign interventions and that process which is now, in a strange inversion of history, often described by that fashionable term, “balkanization.” For Grubačić, political activist and radical sociologist, Yugoslavia was never just a country—it was an idea. Like the Balkans itself, it was a project of inter-ethnic co-existence, a trans-ethnic and pluricultural space of many diverse worlds. Political ideas of inter-ethnic cooperation and mutual aid as we had known them in Yugoslavia were destroyed by the beginning of the 1990s—disappeared in the combined madness of ethno-nationalist hysteria and humanitarian imperialism. This remarkable collection chronicles political experiences of the author who is himself a Yugoslav, a man without a country; but also, as an anarchist, a man without a state. This book is an important reading for those on the Left who are struggling to understand the intertwined legacy of inter-ethnic conflict and inter-ethnic solidarity in contemporary, post-Yugoslav history.

Well-written, eye-opening likely future for America, June 29, 2000.

"Balkanization" is a modern term describing the fragmentation and re-division of countries and nations in the Balkan Peninsula, as well as a dynamic meaning "the Balkan way of doing things." The Roots of Balkanization describes the historical changes that took place in the Balkan Peninsula after the collapse of the Roman Empire and their impact in Eastern lands. It develops conclusions reached in the author's previous book, Dacia: Land of Transylvania, Cornerstone of Ancient Eastern Europe, covering 500 B.C.-A.D. 500. Balkan multi-ethnicity was formed after the fifth century, when barbarian invaders settled and violently mixed with the native ancient nations. By the use of sword and terror, warlords became kings and their confederations of tribes became state nations. New societies emerged under the blessing of the Orthodox Church, only to fight against each other over disputed land that eventually came to be occupied by other invaders. The involvement of western powers and the Ottoman expansion triggered more grievances and violence, culminating with the fall of Constantinople in 1453 and the end of the Byzantine Empire. The medieval culture of the Balkans survived and continues to play a major role in how business and political life is conducted today in Eastern Europe. Book jacket.

This dissertation examines the overlapping set of economic, political and cultural legacies of West Africa and Yugoslavia in the 20th century through the lens of the 19th century territorial partitions enacted in imperial Europe. As a result of the Berlin Congress of 1878, which capriciously partitioned the Balkan territories into various states and imperial holdings, and the Berlin Conference of 1884, which incited the bloodthirsty "Scramble for Africa" and the colonial occupation required to sustain it, the culturally and geographically disparate entities of West Africa and the Balkans confront an expansionist and imperially aggressive Europe at nearly the same time. Seeking to properly provincialize Europe in this discussion by focusing on the spaces of partition themselves, compared on the basis of this historical encounter, this dissertation theorizes a multi-disciplinary concept of balkanization: a system of techniques of imperial control that precipitated a cultural response of resistance in the spaces of partition in the mid-twentieth century. Drawing on postcolonial, African and Slavic studies, world literature, political science and history, the theory of balkanization responds to the global remapping of two annihilative world wars and explains the subsequent ethnic and nationalist violence that characterized the waning years of the century in these disparate places. The literary extension of balkanization is explored through comparisons of two narrative genres, the travelogue and the chronicle novel, that encode the spatial and temporal dimensions of partition before and after WWII. Rebecca West's travelogue Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (1941) is analyzed next to Ivo Andrić's chronicle-novel Bridge on the Drina (1945) to discuss the pre-WWII cultural and political dynamics of balkanization in Yugoslavia. Next, an investigation of In Black and White (1962), a travelogue by Oskar Davičo written at the birth of the Non-Aligned Movement, is juxtaposed with with Ayi Kwei Armah's apocalyptic chronicle Two Thousand Seasons (1973). These texts elaborate the limits of unity in a balkanized world in terms of culture, economics, race, and ultimately history, whose nearly monolithic violence beckons the end of time and the need for renewal or regeneration, such that balkanization forms the basis of historical inquiry into the very conditions of the present.

This text argues that the media have reduced the world to a collective voyeur passively watching, monitoring, and observing crimes against humanity in former Yugoslavia. The Balkan war has produced the Balkanization of the West with the Western powers seemingly paralyzed by internecine warfare.