Pål Kolstø

Lev Tolstoi was not only one of the world's most famous writers, he was also a deeply concerned thinker and hugely influential critic of the Church whose impact was felt long after his death. For an entire generation, Tolstoi set the agenda for ethical and religious thought, in Russia and beyond. Most of Tolstoi's main ideas drew on his Christian heritage – selected and creatively combined. While he claimed that his life's work consisted of rediscovering the pure doctrine of Christ as it had been before the Church perverted it, in fact he radically reinterpreted the Christian faith he had encountered in his own life, Russian Orthodoxy. This book offers a new and comprehensive account of Tolstoi's relationship with the Orthodox Church and its teachings, and shows how the Russian Church reacted to the “Tolstoi phenomenon” and attempted to counteract the influence of this new “heretic" - with scant success.

Lev Tolstoi and the Russian Orthodox Church

Heretical Orthodoxy

In spite of the growing literature on discourse analysis, the relationship of discourse to violent/non-violent outcomes of conflict is an under-researched area. This book combines theories on ethnic conflict, identity construction and discourse analysis with a comprehensive and inclusive survey of the countries of the former Yugoslavia. It presents an understanding of the interrelationship between 'words' and 'deeds' grounded through an extensively close analysis of film, television and newspapers samples taken from the period. This combination of ground-breaking applications of theory with detailed empirical case studies will make Media Discourse and the Yugoslav Conflicts of key interest to scholars across a range of social sciences including sociology, discourse analysis, media, conflict and peace studies as well as those concerned with ethnopolitical conflict.

Representations of Self and Other

Media Discourse and the Yugoslav Conflicts

After the conflagration of Tito’s Yugoslavia a medley of new and not-so-new states rose from the ashes. Some of the Yugoslav successor states have joined, or are about to enter, the European Union, while others are still struggling to define their national borders, symbols, and relationships with neighbouring states. Strategies of Symbolic Nation-building in South Eastern Europe expands upon the existing body of nationalism studies and explores how successful these nation-building strategies have been in the last two decades. Relying on new quantitative research results, the contributors offer interdisciplinary analyses of symbolic nation-building in Albania, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia, Kosovo, Macedonia, Montenegro, and Serbia to show that whereas the citizens of some states have reached a consensus about the nation-building project other states remain fragmented and uncertain of when the process will end. A must-read not only for scholars of the region but policy makers and others interested in understanding the complex interplay of history, symbolic politics, and post-conflict transition.

Strategies of Symbolic Nation-building in South Eastern Europe

An examination of how historical myths have contributed to the crystallization of national boundaries in the Balkans, primarily among the South Slavs.

Myths and Boundaries in South-eastern Europe

Andrei Edemsky

The break-up of the Soviet Union in 1989 left 25 million Russians living in the 'near abroad', outside the borders of Russia proper. They have become the subjects of independent nation-states where the majority population is ethnically, linguistically, and often denominationally different. The creation of this 'new Russian diaspora' may well be the most significant minority problem created by the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Paul Kolstoe traces the growth and role of the Russian population in non-Russian areas of the Russian empire and then in the non-Russian Soviet republics. In the post-Soviet period special attention is devoted to the situation of Russians in the Baltic countries, Moldova, Belarus, Ukraine and the former Central Asian and Caucasian republics. A chapter written jointly by Paul Kolstoe and Andrei Edemsky of the Institute of Slavonic and Balkan Studies, Russian Academy of Sciences, delineates present Russian policy toward the diaspora. Finally, Kolstoe suggests strategies for averting the repetition of the Yugoslav scenario on post-Soviet soil.

Russians in the Former Soviet Republics

Helge Blakkisrud

"Our research project organised a capstone conference at Tallinn University 28-29 April 2016, and most of the chapters in the current volume were first presented as papers at that conference."--Page xvii.

Pål Kolstø

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