Author: Valentin Mihaylov
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1040008690
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 288
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Book Description
This book is about the geographic space as an inseparable component of a nation’s historical memory, territorial awareness, geopolitical visions, and obsessions. The empirical part of the book focuses on the critical analysis of first-hand sources containing representations of the imagined spaces and places of Bulgaria and Bulgarians from a long-term perspective. The research results are structured in accordance with the author’s model of an imagined national space. It contains three general domains: possessed national space, the ethnogeopolitical neighbourhood, and ancient and legendary spaces. The book also explores how Bulgarians’ historical and ethnic spaces are linked with specific geopolitics, such as passive internal geopolitics, soft revisionism, non-intervening geopolitical claims, blocking international integration as a disguised form of old territorial claims, and emerging historical geopolitics. It examines how the imagined national space is approached by statesmen, politicians, academics, and other creators of ‘high’ geopolitics. The book also pays attention to the role of spatial imaginations in growing ‘low’ (popular) geopolitics, which includes media, popular culture, and national mythology. Written in an interdisciplinary manner, this timely book will attract the interest of scholars and students in geopolitics, human geography, international relations, nationalism studies, and ethnic history.
Author: Robert A. Saunders
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351205013
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 300
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Book Description
This book brings together scholars from across a variety of academic disciplines to assess the current state of the subfield of popular geopolitics. It provides an archaeology of the field, maps the flows of various frameworks of analysis into (and out of) popular geopolitics, and charts a course forward for the discipline. It explores the real-world implications of popular culture, with a particular focus on the evolving interdisciplinary nature of popular geopolitics alongside interrelated disciplines including media, cultural, and gender studies.
Author: Diana Mishkova
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351236369
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 282
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Book Description
In recent years, western discourse about the Balkans, or “balkanism,” has risen in prominence. Characteristically, this strand of research sidelines the academic input in the production of western representations and Balkan self-understanding. Looking at the Balkans from the vantage point of “balkanism” has therefore contributed to its further marginalization as an object of research and the evisceration of its agency. This book reverses the perspective and looks at the Balkans primarily inside-out, from within the Balkans towards its “self” and the outside world, where the west is important but not the sole referent. The book unravels attempts at regional identity-building and construction of regional discourses across various generations and academic subcultures, with the aim of reconstructing the conceptualizations of the Balkans that have emerged from academically embedded discursive practices and political usages. It thus seeks to reinstate the subjectivity of “the Balkans” and the responsibility of the Balkan intellectual elites for the concept and the images it conveys. The book then looks beyond the Balkans, inviting us to rethink the relationship between national and transnational (self-)representation and the communication between local and exogenous – Western, Central and Eastern European – concepts and definitions more generally. It thus contributes to the ongoing debates related to the creation of space and historical regions, which feed into rethinking the premises of the “new area studies.” Beyond Balkanism: The Scholarly Politics of Region Making will interest researchers and students of transnationalism, politics, historical geography, border and area studies.
Author: Yuson Jung
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253036747
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 210
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Book Description
Balkan Blues explores how a state transitions from the collectivized production and distribution of socialism to the consumer-focused culture of capitalism. Yuson Jung considers the state as an economic agent in upholding rights and responsibilities in the shift to a global market. Taking Bulgaria as her focus, Jung shows how impoverished Bulgarians developed a consumer-oriented society and how the concept of "need" adapted in surprising ways to accommodate this new culture. Different legal frameworks arose to ensure the rights of vulnerable or deceived consumers. Consumer advocacy NGOs and government officers scrambled to navigate unfamiliar EU-imposed models for consumer affairs departments. All of these changes involved issues of responsibility, accountability, and civic engagement, which brought Bulgarians new ways of viewing both their identities and their sense of agency. Yet these opportunities also raised questions of inequality, injustice, and social stratification. Jung's study provides a compelling argument for reconsidering of the role of the state in the construction of 21st-century consumer cultures.
Author: Hall Gardner
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3031343182
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 334
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Book Description
This edited book will examine the Balkans and Eastern Mediterranean from multidimensional geo-strategic, political-economic, socio-cultural/religious and demographic perspectives. It analyzes the conflicting geopolitical interests of the major and regional powers, as well as those of NATO and the European Union, with a focus on energy, democracy and corruption, shifts in population, as well as religious political influence. The authors argue that the US, NATO and EU leaderships can no longer afford to ignore the two regions — if the increasing potential for conflict is to be averted. The Balkans and Eastern Mediterranean are returning to a major position in the contemporary geostrategic nexus since NATO began a new expansion into the Balkans by bringing Montenegro in 2017 and North Macedonia in March 2020 into membership, after its previous expansion to Slovenia in NATO’s “Big Bang” in 2004 and to both Albania and Croatia in 2009.
Author: Ian O. Lesser
Publisher: Rand Corporation
ISBN: 083303233X
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 145
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Book Description
Greece has been profoundly affected by recent changes in the internationalenvironment, on its borders, and within the country itself. Manylong-standing assumptions about Greek interests and Greece_s role havefallen away and have been supplanted by new approaches. The country hasbecome progressively more modern and more European, and its internationalpolicy has become more sophisticated. At the same time, the geopoliticalscene has evolved in ways that present new challenges and new opportunitiesfor Athens in its relations with Europe, the United States, and neighboringcountries. Many of these challenges cross traditional regional boundariesand underscore Greece_s potential to play a transregional role, lookingoutward from Europe to the Mediterranean, Eurasia, and the Middle East. Thisreport explores the new geopolitical environment Greece faces, payingspecial attention to the implications for southeastern Europe andtransatlantic relations; explores options for Greek strategy; and offerssome new directions for policy in Greece and on both sides of the Atlantic.
Author: Zbigniew Brzezinski
Publisher: Basic Books
ISBN: 0465093086
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 208
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Book Description
Bestselling author and eminent foreign policy scholar Zbigniew Brzezinski's classic book on American's strategic mission in the modern world. In The Grand Chessboard, renowned geostrategist Zbigniew Brzezinski delivers a brutally honest and provocative vision for American preeminence in the twenty-first century. The task facing the United States, he argues, is to become the sole political arbiter in Eurasian lands and to prevent the emergence of any rival power threatening our material and diplomatic interests. The Eurasian landmass, home to the greatest part of the globe's population, natural resources, and economic activity, is the "grand chessboard" on which America's supremacy will be ratified and challenged in the years to come. In this landmark work of public policy and political science, Brzezinski outlines a groundbreaking and powerful blueprint for America's vital interests in the modern world. In this revised edition, Brzezinski addresses recent global developments including the war in Ukraine, the re-emergence of Russia, and the rise of China.
Author: Graham Fuller
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000010287
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 166
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Book Description
With the astonishing transformations in the geopolitics of the world since the collapse of the Soviet Union, Turkey has been profoundly affected by the changes on its periphery. For the first time since the beginning of the century, a Turkic world has blossomed, giving Turkey potential new foreign policy clout from the Balkans across the Caucasus a
Author: Asya Draganova
Publisher: Emerald Group Publishing
ISBN: 1787439631
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 260
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Book Description
On the crossroads between the cultural influences of perceived global models and local specificity, entangled in webs of post-communist complexity, Bulgarian popular music has evolved as a space of change and creativity on the edge of Europe. An ethnographic exploration, this book accesses insight from music figures from a spectrum of styles.
Author: Mary C. Neuburger
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 080146594X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 321
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Book Description
In Balkan Smoke, Mary Neuburger leads readers along the Bulgarian-Ottoman caravan routes and into the coffeehouses of Istanbul and Sofia. She reveals how a remote country was drawn into global economic networks through tobacco production and consumption and in the process became modern. In writing the life of tobacco in Bulgaria from the late Ottoman period through the years of Communist rule, Neuburger gives us much more than the cultural history of a commodity; she provides a fresh perspective on the genesis of modern Bulgaria itself. The tobacco trade comes to shape most of Bulgaria's international relations; it drew Bulgaria into its fateful alliance with Nazi Germany and in the postwar period Bulgaria was the primary supplier of smokes (the famed Bulgarian Gold) for the USSR and its satellites. By the late 1960s Bulgaria was the number one exporter of tobacco in the world, with roughly one eighth of its population involved in production. Through the pages of this book we visit the places where tobacco is grown and meet the merchants, the workers, and the peasant growers, most of whom are Muslim by the postwar period. Along the way, we learn how smoking and anti-smoking impulses influenced perceptions of luxury and necessity, questions of novelty, imitation, value, taste, and gender-based respectability. While the scope is often global, Neuburger also explores the politics of tobacco within Bulgaria. Among the book's surprises are the ways in which conflicts over the tobacco industry (and smoking) help to clarify the forbidding quagmire of Bulgarian politics.
