scholarly journals CONFLICT OF A MEMORY CULTURE IN WESTERN BALKANS

STED JOURNAL ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Đorđe Vuković
Keyword(s):  
National Culture ◽  
Western Balkans ◽  
Collective Memories ◽  
Unsuccessful Attempt ◽  
The Past ◽  
Social Narratives ◽  
Memory Culture ◽  
Balkan Countries ◽  
Long Time ◽  
Single State

Cultures of remembrance that are officially affirmed by national elites in the Western Balkan countries, that is in the former Yugoslavia, are a source of ongoing conflict. Various collective memories and mutually antagonized interpretations of the past, show that Croats, Serbs, Bosnians, Macedonians, Montenegrins and others who lived together for centuries and decades within a single state, after all interpret and remember their common history in completely different ways. Their social narratives about the past and dominant cultures of memory are predominantly selective, one-sided, intolerant, exclusive. After a long time, they lived together members of different ethnic, religious and national backgrounds and their historically unfinished and unsuccessful attempt to form a common Yugoslav culture and unique Yugoslav identity, a difficult civil war occurred, ethno-nationalism escalated, and people who were very close and very similar to one another, tried to create as much difference and distance between themselves through violence. All national communities that participated in the wars of the 1990s, emphasized defending national culture as one of their main tasks. The warring parties sought to destroy everything that reminded them that different people, their neighbors and friends of a different religion were living there. Today, three decades after these conflicts, they are still prisoners of their attitude to history. The culture nevertheless brings them together and inspires them to understand themselves more and to cooperate better.

scholarly journals Monuments for deserters: A particularity of German memory culture

2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (3) ◽  
pp. 85-92
Author(s):  
Marco Dräger ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Armed Forces ◽  
Nazi Germany ◽  
Retrospective Evaluation ◽  
German Culture ◽  
The Past ◽  
Visual Presence ◽  
Memory Culture ◽  
Long Time

This paper examines the changing face of deserters in Germany and the gradual entry of monuments dedicated to them into German memorial culture. The multiple changes in the perception of the Wehrmacht (united armed forces of Nazi Germany from 1935-1945) deserters during the last 70 years from cowards and traitors to (anti-)heroes to victims is the result of generational shifts and changed political contexts. Deserters from the Wehrmacht were a taboo subject for a long time. Over the course of the past thirty years, their story has been reappraised. It now has a visual presence in the form of counter monuments which challenge notions of traditional heroic military virtues and the place of resistance in modern political German culture. Counter-monuments, which had their origins in Germany in the 1980s, were always intended to be provocative, for they sought to disrupt a discourse that had become anachronistic, even unbearable in the eyes of many. Whether they will continue to have a presence, whether further deserter monuments will be built, or whether a future retrospective evaluation will show these monuments to have been an ephemeral and singular phenomenon, is still uncertain.

Memories of the 1999 NATO Bombing in Belgrade, Serbia

Südosteuropa ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 64 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Orli Fridman
Keyword(s):  
Transitional Justice ◽  
Western Balkans ◽  
Collective Memories ◽  
International Intervention ◽  
The Past ◽  
Post Conflict ◽  
Yugoslav Wars ◽  
Nato Bombing ◽  
Transformation Processes

AbstractThis paper analyses the memories of Belgrade residents of the 1999 NATO bombing of Serbia (then part of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia). By focusing on the memories of this event, yet placing them in a broader context of the conflicts of the 1990s—the breakup of Yugoslavia and the post-Yugoslav wars—this essay explores what international intervention has meant to respondents in Belgrade by documenting memories of international intervention among older and younger generations, as well as among active members of antiwar NGOs in Serbia and citizens who were not engaged in activism during the 1990s. The paper aims to expand the scope of the discussions on dealing with the past and on transitional justice in the Western Balkans and to place them in the context of social memory studies and the study of post-conflict transformation processes. Furthermore, by presenting the case study of Serbia, this text contributes to the analysis of local mnemonic batt les as part of the creation of collective memories of the 1990s in post-Milošević Serbia, and it sheds light on the memories of the bombing as related to the war in Kosovo and the subsequent effects on shaping postwar Serbia–Kosovo relations.

scholarly journals Divergent memories and visions of the future in conflicts over mining development

2020 ◽  
Vol 27 (1) ◽  
pp. 898-916
Author(s):  
Erik Kojola
Keyword(s):  
Outdoor Recreation ◽  
Resource Extraction ◽  
Environmental Groups ◽  
Collective Memories ◽  
Iron Range ◽  
The Past ◽  
Industrial Landscape ◽  
The Future ◽  
Long Time ◽  
Resource Politics

Conflicts over extractive development often center around predicting future profits and economic growth, and estimating industrial pollution. How these projections are understood and seen as legitimate and trustworthy depends on social actors' environmental imaginaries and timescapes. Thus, I examine the temporal and cultural dynamics of natural resource politics, particularly how affective connections to the past and future mobilize support and opposition to new mining. I use the case of proposed copper mines in the rural Minnesota Iron Range region to explore the different environmental imaginaries and timescapes that mining opponents and proponents use to understand the potential socio-environmental impacts, and to legitimate their positions. Proponents, including long-time and working class Iron Range residents and mining corporations, view the region as an industrial landscape built by mining and hope new proposals will renew the past to create a prosperous future. Meanwhile, environmental groups who oppose mining view the region through an environmental imaginary based on outdoor recreation, and draw on collective memories of family and youth trips to understand new extractive projects as a rupture to their vision of the future. I show that resource extraction is understood through temporalities that differ across intersections of class and region, and that emotional meanings of the past and visions of the future animate contemporary political action.Keywords: Resource extraction, mining, environmental imaginaries, timescapes, collective memory, environmental politics, emotions

scholarly journals Value Added Tax Efficiency in the Western Balkan Countries

2021 ◽  
Vol 59 (1) ◽  
pp. 175-184
Keyword(s):  
Value Added ◽  
Tax Revenue ◽  
Western Balkans ◽  
Efficiency Ratio ◽  
Value Added Tax ◽  
Large Share ◽  
The Past ◽  
Balkan Countries ◽  
Tax Systems ◽  
Consumption Taxes

An important feature of the tax systems of the Western Balkan countries is the large share of consumption taxes in total tax revenue. Despite its relatively short existence, VAT in particular has proven to be an important fiscal tool, due to its many advantages. The aim of the article is to outline the main developments in VAT in these countries in the past two decades and to analyse its efficiency. The main result of the article is that the tax has good overall revenue performance in the Western Balkans, as measured with the C-efficiency ratio.

scholarly journals Diaspora Identity and a New Generation: Armenian Diaspora Youth on the Genocide and the Karabakh War

2019 ◽  
Vol 48 (5) ◽  
pp. 915-930
Author(s):  
Dmitry Chernobrov ◽  
Leila Wilmers
Keyword(s):  
Digital Communication ◽  
Early 20Th Century ◽  
Collective Memories ◽  
The Past ◽  
The United Kingdom ◽  
Armenian Diaspora ◽  
Long Time ◽  
New Generation ◽  
Shed Light

AbstractIn this article, we explore the role of the early 20th-century Armenian genocide and the unresolved Karabakh conflict of the 1990s in identity shaping among the new generation of Armenian diaspora—those who grew up after the establishment of the independent Armenian state in 1991. We draw on original interviews with diasporic youth in France, the United Kingdom, and Russia—diasporas that were largely built in the aftermath of the genocide and the Karabakh war. Diaspora youth relate to these events through transmitted collective memories, but also reconnect with the distant homeland’s past and present in new ways as they engage with new possibilities of transnational digital communication and mobility. Their experiences of identity shed light on how the new generation of diasporic Armenians defines itself in relation to the past; how this past is (re)made present in their interpretations of the Karabakh conflict and in everyday behaviors; and how diasporic youth experience the dilemmas of “moving on” from traumatic narratives that for a long time have been seen as foundational to their identity.

Remembering the Past in Nineteenth-Century Scotland

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
James J. Coleman
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
National Identity ◽  
19Th Century ◽  
21St Century ◽  
Collective Memories ◽  
The Past ◽  
Prevailing View ◽  
The Way

At a time when the Union between Scotland and England is once again under the spotlight, Remembering the Past in Nineteenth-Century Scotland examines the way in which Scotland’s national heroes were once remembered as champions of both Scottish and British patriotism. Whereas 19th-century Scotland is popularly depicted as a mire of sentimental Jacobitism and kow-towing unionism, this book shows how Scotland’s national heroes were once the embodiment of a consistent, expressive and robust view of Scottish nationality. Whether celebrating the legacy of William Wallace and Robert Bruce, the reformer John Knox, the Covenanters, 19th-century Scots rooted their national heroes in a Presbyterian and unionist view of Scotland’s past. Examined through the prism of commemoration, this book uncovers collective memories of Scotland’s past entirely opposed to 21st-century assumptions of medieval proto-nationalism and Calvinist misery. Detailed studies of 19th-century commemoration of Scotland’s national heroes Uncovers an all but forgotten interpretation of these ‘great Scots’ Shines a new light on the mindset of nineteenth-century Scottish national identity as being comfortably Scottish and British Overturns the prevailing view of Victorian Scottishness as parochial, sentimental tartanry

scholarly journals Predicting Fraud Victimization Using Classical Machine Learning

Entropy ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 23 (3) ◽  
pp. 300
Author(s):  
Mark Lokanan ◽  
Susan Liu
Keyword(s):  
Machine Learning ◽  
Financial Literacy ◽  
Learning Algorithm ◽  
Demographic Characteristics ◽  
Financial Knowledge ◽  
The Past ◽  
Machine Learning Model ◽  
Long Time ◽  
Regulatory Organization ◽  
Investment Fraud

Protecting financial consumers from investment fraud has been a recurring problem in Canada. The purpose of this paper is to predict the demographic characteristics of investors who are likely to be victims of investment fraud. Data for this paper came from the Investment Industry Regulatory Organization of Canada’s (IIROC) database between January of 2009 and December of 2019. In total, 4575 investors were coded as victims of investment fraud. The study employed a machine-learning algorithm to predict the probability of fraud victimization. The machine learning model deployed in this paper predicted the typical demographic profile of fraud victims as investors who classify as female, have poor financial knowledge, know the advisor from the past, and are retired. Investors who are characterized as having limited financial literacy but a long-time relationship with their advisor have reduced probabilities of being victimized. However, male investors with low or moderate-level investment knowledge were more likely to be preyed upon by their investment advisors. While not statistically significant, older adults, in general, are at greater risk of being victimized. The findings from this paper can be used by Canadian self-regulatory organizations and securities commissions to inform their investors’ protection mandates.

1993 Soichiro Honda Lecture: The Challenges of Change in the Auto Industry: Why Alternative Fuels?

1994 ◽  
Vol 116 (4) ◽  
pp. 727-732 ◽  
Author(s):  
R. J. Nichols
Keyword(s):  
Air Quality ◽  
Alternative Fuels ◽  
Combustion Engine ◽  
Auto Industry ◽  
Transportation Fuel ◽  
Alternative Fuel Vehicles ◽  
The Past ◽  
Entire Country ◽  
Long Time ◽  
Difficult Transition

Development of vehicles to operate on nonpetroleum fuels began in earnest in response to the energy shocks of the 1970s. While petroleum will remain the predominant transportation fuel for a long time, petroleum supplies are finite, so it is not too soon to begin the difficult transition to new sources of energy. In the past decade, composition of the fuel utilized in the internal combustion engine has gained recognition as a major factor in the control of emissions from the tailpipe of the automobile and the rate of formation of ozone in the atmosphere. Improvements in air quality can be realized by using vechicles that operate on natural gas, propane, methanol, ethanol, or electricity, but introduction of these alternative fuel vehicles presents major technical and economic challenges to the auto industry, as well as the entire country, as long as gasoline remains plentiful and inexpensive.

scholarly journals CYCLIC UNIVERSE AND INFINITE PAST

2007 ◽  
Vol 22 (34) ◽  
pp. 2587-2592 ◽  
Author(s):  
PAUL H. FRAMPTON
Keyword(s):  
Null Geodesic ◽  
Infinite Length ◽  
Infinite Time ◽  
Cyclic Universe ◽  
The Past ◽  
Long Time

We address two questions about the past for infinitely cyclic cosmology. The first is whether it can contain an infinite length null geodesic into the past in view of the Borde–Guth–Vilenkin (BGV) "no-go" theorem, The second is whether, given that a small fraction of spawned universes fail to cycle, there is an adequate probability for a successful universe after an infinite time. We give positive answers to both questions and then show that in infinite cyclicity the total number of universes has been infinite for an arbitrarily long time.

Long Time Coming: Prospects for Democracy in Iraq

2009 ◽  
Vol 33 (4) ◽  
pp. 115-148 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bruce E. Moon
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Other ◽  
Democratic Transitions ◽  
Quarter Century ◽  
The Past ◽  
Political Experience ◽  
Long Time ◽  
Time Required ◽  
Established Democracies

Prospects for democracy in Iraq should be assessed in light of the historical precedents of nations with comparable political experiences. Saddam Hussein's Iraq was an unusually extreme autocracy, which lasted an unusually long time. Since the end of the nineteenth century, only thirty nations have experienced an autocracy as extreme as Iraq's for a period exceeding two decades. The subsequent political experience of those nations offers a pessimistic forecast for Iraq and similar nations. Only seven of the thirty are now democratic, and only two of them have become established democracies; the democratic experiments in the other five are still in progress. Among the seven, the average time required to transit the path from extreme autocracy to coherent, albeit precarious, democracy has been fifty years, and only two have managed this transition in fewer than twenty-five years. Even this sober assessment is probably too optimistic, because Iraq lacks the structural conditions that theory and evidence indicate have been necessary for successful democratic transitions in the past. Thus, the odds of Iraq achieving democracy in the next quarter century are close to zero, at best about two in thirty, but probably far less.

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