The Identity Question Regarding the Macedonian Nation and Minorities

This chapter intends to outline the place of Macedonia in the nation-building process that took place in South-East Europe with the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire. Macedonia became the place where national aspirations converged and came into conflict with each other. This gave it a special role in the national narratives of Bulgaria, Serbia, and Greece both internally and in foreign politics. The (federal) Macedonian state that emerged after WWII sought to carve out its own trajectory in a space that was already occupied physically and ideologically by its neighbours. This led to a conflict that lurked under the surface for most of the Cold War but came out in the open with the dissolution of Yugoslavia. The chapter seeks to clarify some of the central issues related to Macedonian nationality and minorities in the Balkan and European context.

Students’ values, professional socialization and the mental gap of corporate social responsibility perceptions

This paper examines how values and professional socialization in business schools impact the formulation of students’ contextualized view of social responsibility. We propose the empirical concept of a mental gap between the existing and the wished-for level of a business school’s corporate social responsibility and estimate it empirically by using a sample of business school students from Central and South East Europe. Results show that students wish their business schools to reduce their current orientation toward economic outcomes and focus on environmental and social responsibilities. We interpret those empirical results in terms of the students’ wish to balance achieving economic prosperity and enjoyment of life with the prosocial outcomes of their education. New student generations’ perception of corporate social responsibility is not shaped by the professional socialization patterns but rather by the own perceptions, which can be influenced by experiential approaches to academic teaching and learning. Based on these empirical results, implications for academic practice and future research are explored.

Your Race Sounds Familiar?

Your Face Sounds Familiar, a celebrity talent television format developed by the Dutch production company Endemol and first broadcast in Spain in 2011, has entertained audiences in more than forty countries with the sight of well-known professional musicians impersonating foreign and domestic stars through cross-gender drag and, on many national editions, cross-racial drag, with results that would widely be regarded as offensive blackface where this has already been extensively challenged as racist in public. In central/south-east Europe, however, blackface is sometimes justified by arguing that it cannot be a racist practice because these countries have not had the UK and USA’s history of colonialism and racial oppression. Through a study of the Croatian edition Tvoje lice zvuči poznato (2014–), where until 2020 blackface had rarely been publicly challenged, this paper explores how far a critical race studies lens towards blackface can also be applied there.

Information and Communication Technology Development and Foreign Trade in the Region of South-East Europe

This paper provides an analysis of the influence of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) infrastructure, usage and skills on the export and import of goods and services in the region of South-East Europe (SEE) by applying gravity models to bilateral trade flows through the panel data analysis. The results show that GDP per capita and Internet usage have a significant positive impact on import, and in addition, the digital infrastructure and digital skills have a positive, but small impact on export. Distance has a negative impact on trade. These countries faced relatively poor development and usage of the ICT sector, which indicates unexplored potential which could be used to improve international trade if exploited by businesses, government and households.

The Significance of SDGs for the Raw Materials Sector: A Stakeholders’ Approach in Three ESEE Countries

The Raw Materials (RM) sector is linked to Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), impacting their implementation throughout the whole RM value chain (e.g., mining, processing, metallurgy, recycling, etc.). This study aims to identify and rank the most significant SDGs for this sector, from the perspective of key stakeholders, academics, university students, professionals, and industry representatives, in three East and South-East Europe (ESEE) countries: Poland, Greece, and Slovakia. Within this framework, 423 stakeholders from the above groups provided their views in a survey with structured questionnaires. The results were analysed, based on the stakeholders’ groups and the role of the sector in the countries examined. Overall, the SDGs 9-Industry, Innovation, and Infrastructure-, 8-Decent Work and Economic Growth-, and 7-Affordable and Clean Energy- were highly ranked by the stakeholders, indicating a strong link between these SDGs and the RM sector.

THE TEMPORALITIES OF POLICY TRANSLATION IN THE SEMI-PERIPHERY: REVISITING THE EUROPEANISATION OF WELFARE REFORMS IN CENTRAL AND SOUTH EAST EUROPE

This article seeks to conceptualise time and temporality in the context of semi-peripheral social relations, with a particular focus on the transnational dimensions of policy translation. In particular, we show how, albeit within the co-existence of multiple temporalities, ‘policy time’ and ‘time in policy’ tends to enable and privilege particular kinds of policy processes over others. Revisiting a number of themes from our ethnographic work on social policy reform drawn, mainly, from the post-Yugoslav and Hungarian context and relating, mainly, to so-called ‘Europeanisation’ processes, allows us to foreground the spatio-temporal dimensions of policy processes. The text explores some key challenges in terms of how to treat time within critical policy studies.

Lifelong training program on QGIS tools for earth observation sciences in south-east Europe

Earth Observation (EO) data are an indispensable source of useful geospatial information, which can be efficiently combined with other data within the latest released open-source QGIS software. This paper aims: i) to present a general overview of the QGIS EO plugins; ii) to promote the Lifelong Learning (LLL) courses for open-source QGIS software tools provided by the Geo-SEE Institute from Skopje; iii) to appreciate the advantages of open-source QGIS for developing and improving EO applications. The training objectives are to enhance the research, development tools and technologies of QGIS and stimulate the obtaining and disseminating knowledge to utilize the open-source GIS software. Furthermore, there is a growing need to increase the number of well-educated professionals on issues related to the EO sciences in South-East Europe (SEE), who are better prepared for the labor market in today's digital revolution by using QGIS tools and plugins combined with other related GIS software platforms provided by the OSGeo family.