COMPSEES: Schwerpunkt zu "Making Sense of Archives"

Comparative Southeast European Studies 70, no. 4, 2022 is available in open access. It features a thematic section on “Making Sense of Archives”, Guest Editor is Iva Lučić (Uppsala).

This issue critically approaches archival collections and record-keeping practices in Southeastern Europe as well as the ways in which these have conditioned research questions and history-writing. 

Iva Vukušić (Utrecht) discusses the archive of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague, whose records reveal important insights into the logics of violence during the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s. 
Gilles de Rapper (Athens) explores photographic practices and their archives in the context of socialist Albania. Amila Kasumović (Pittsburgh) engages with Habsburg documents in the state archive of Bosnia and Herzegovina, approaching them as a colonial archive in a European context. And Ana Sekulić (Sarajevo) examines the archive of the Franciscan Monastery of the Holy Spirit in Fojnica, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and its record-keeping practices for imperial documents originating from Ottoman governance.

In addition, the issue contains a study by Kristina Nikolovska (Windsor) and Raluca Bejan (Halifax), who expand Esping-Andersen's typology of welfare regimes to compare the disparities in Covid-19 infection and mortality rates in East and West European states. 

In the Open Section, IOS director Ulf Brunnbauer discusses the manifold consequences of Bulgaria’s veto on EU accession talks with North Macedonia, first declared in 2019.

The issue finally contains four book reviews.