Comparative Southeast European Studies 74/2 erschienen

IOS journal Comparative Southeast European Studies 74, no. 2, 2026 has been published in open access:

The issue features three research articles under the annual theme’s header „The Yugoslav Wars and the Year 1995: Reflections. Resilience. Reverberations“:

• Nicolas Moll (Sarajevo) asks „Why do people keep diaries in times of war and mass violence?“ looking at 24 diaries written in besieged Sarajevo between 1992 and 1995. He identifies war diaries as a practice that connects resilience and resistance as two different but complementary concepts.Nicolas Moll (Sarajevo) asks „Why do people keep diaries in times of war and mass violence?“ looking at 24 diaries written in besieged Sarajevo between 1992 and 1995. He identifies war diaries as a practice that connects resilience and resistance as two different but complementary concepts.
• Alex Cruikshanks (Wakefield) traces the diachronical depths of the persisting internet (and paper) trail of an alleged meeting between Bosnian president Alija Izetbegović and US ambassador Warren Zimmermann in Sarajevo on 28 March 1992 – a meeting for which there is no evidence that it ever took place, and substantial evidence that it did not.
• Ivana Dinić (Gießen) explores a peacebuilding initiative implemented by the OSCE for young women from Serbia and Kosovo, questioning the program‘s expressed favoring of a “comfortable” atmosphere, which, as the author shows, amounts to bracketing out the participants‘ political, ethnic, and other potential differences.

The issue also features three individual articles, but these too are interrelated, contentwise:

• Sandro Tabatadze (Tbilisi) analyzes the education policies of far-right parties focusing on Dveri in Serbia and Alt-Info in Georgia.
• Norbert Merkovity (Szeged) and Viktória Zakinszky Toma (Subotica) examine the evolution of digital campaigning in Hungary and Serbia from the 1990s to the 2020s, situating both countries within debates on digitalisation under hybrid regimes.
• Sami Kiraz (Çorum) examines Turkey’s security discourse about the Syrian civil war, the Second Nagorno-Karabakh War, and the Gaza crisis, demonstrating how security has increasingly become a practice constructed, disseminated, and legitimized through media channels in the sense that Turkey‘s security discourses differ according to the type of crisis, but still occur through a common media logic that appeals, first of all, to threat perception, normative legitimacy and moral frameworks.

In the open section, Eric Ušić (Rijeka) gives a compelling review of the film Fiume o morte! (2025) by Igor Bezinović – a form of performative historiography that reconfigures memory through reenactment, archival reappropriation, and collective participation focusing on the 1919–1921 occupation of the city of Rijeka/Fiume by the Italian writer Gabriele D’Annunzio. 

The issue also contains four book reviews.