The book deals with some syntactic and semantic aspects of the shared Balkan Sprachbund properties. In a comprehensive introductory chapter, Tomic offers an overview of the Balkan Sprachbund properties. Sobolev, displaying the areal distribution of 65 properties, argues for dialect cartography. Friedman, on the example of the evidentials, argues for typologically informed areal explanation of the Balkan properties. The other contributions analyze specific phenomena: polidefinite DPs in Greek and Aromanian (Campos and Stavrou), Balkan constructions in which datives combine with impersonal clitics or non-active morphology (Rivero), Balkan optatives (Ammann and Auwera), imperative force in the Balkan languages (Isac and Jakab), clitic placement in Greek imperatives (Boškovic), focused constituents in Romanian and Bulgarian (Hill), synthetic and analytic tenses in Romanian (D'Hulst, Coene and Avram), "purpose-like" modification in a number of Balkan languages (Bužarovska), Balkan modal existential “wh”-constructions (Grosu), child and adult strategies in interpreting empty subjects in Serbian/Croatian (Stojanovic and Marelj), conditional sentences in Judeo-Spanish (Montoliu and Auwera).

For decades, we have come to accept that nationalism formed the basis of the modern history of the Balkans. In this bold and controversial study, Pavlos Hatzopoulos turns this assumption on its head. Through a ground-breaking examination of the non-nationalist ideologies in the Balkans during the interwar period, Hatzopoulos calls into question the supposedly inherent connection between the Balkans and nationalism and argues that nationalism does not form the sole ordering principle of the modern history of the Balkan region. Focusing on the ideologies of communism, liberal internationalism and agrarianism, Hatzopoulos examines how these interact with nationalist ideology. He demonstrates how non-nationalist theories challenge the nationalist view of the Balkans as the sum of several national spaces. He even questions the nationalist understanding of the very term 'the Balkans'. "The Balkans Beyond Nationalism and Identity" revisits contemporary debates on a region that is still a European crisis point and challenges the nation-centric understanding that permeates it. In proposing a description of 'the Balkans' as a contested political concept, the book argues for a completely fresh interpretation of the region's composition.

Ethnic Cleansing in the Balkans looks at the phenomenon of ethnic cleansing in the Balkans over the last two hundred years. It argues that the events that occurred during this time can be demystified, that the South East of Europe was not destined to become violent and that constructions of the Balkans as endemically violent misses a important political point and historical point. Carmichael provides an account of ethnic cleansing in the Balkans as a single historical phenomenon and brings together a vast array of primary and secondary sources to produce a concise and accessible argument. This book will be of interest to students and researchers of European studies, history and comparative politics.

Maps and borders notwithstanding, some places are best described as "gaps"--places with repeatedly contested boundaries that are wedged in between other places that have clear boundaries. This book explores an iconic example of this in the contemporary Western imagination: the Balkans. Drawing on richly detailed ethnographic research around the Greek-Albanian border, Sarah Green focuses her groundbreaking analysis on the ambiguities of never quite resolving where or what places are. One consequence for some Greek peoples in this border area is a seeming lack of distinction--but in a distinctly "Balkan" way. In gaps (which are never empty), marginality is, in contrast with conventional understandings, not a matter of difference and separation--it is a lack thereof. Notes from the Balkans represents the first ethnographic approach to exploring "the Balkans" as an ideological concept. Green argues that, rather than representing a tension between "West" and "East," the Balkans makes such oppositions ambiguous. This kind of marginality means that such places and peoples can hardly engage with "multiculturalism." Moreover, the region's ambiguity threatens clear, modernist distinctions. The violence so closely associated with the region can therefore be seen as part of continual attempts to resolve the ambiguities by imposing fixed separations. And every time this fails, the region is once again defined as a place that will continually proliferate such dangerous ambiguity, and could spread it somewhere else.