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The purpose of this article is to explore the smallness and weakness of the Republic of North Macedonia by observing its foreign policy behavior since its independence to the present day. Instead of focusing on criteria that rely on internal determining factors, the aim of this paper is to investigate the size and power of a state by observing its external behavior. To fulfill this purpose, the article employs a case study methodology. Specifically, it uses the case of the Republic of North Macedonia to observe and evaluate its smallness and weakness based on the demonstrated foreign policy behavior of this state, especially in its efforts to deal with external challenges. The contextualized analysis is expected to contribute to an enhanced understanding of how the main patterns of a state's foreign policy behavior may dictate its size and power and consequently its place and role within the international system.

In East-Central Europe, the past has always been a determining factor as a framework for interpretation: the social construction of the past often serves (served) current political purposes. It is no wonder that in the countries of the region, often different, sometimes contradictory interpretations of the past have emerged. In today’s European situation, however, the countries of Central and Eastern Europe are perhaps most keenly faced by the transformation of Europe, with unclear, chaotic ideas dominating political and intellectual markets instead of previous (accepted) values – in the tension between old and new, Europe’s future is at stake. The question is: what role the states of Central and Eastern Europe play/can play, to what extent they will be able to place the neighbourhood policy alongside (perhaps in front of) the policy of remembrance and seek common answers to Europe’s great dilemmas.

This article aims to sum up the main results of a research project made in 2016 and 2017 about the situation of 1190 Romanian migrants in Western Europe and to give an overview about the push and pull factors, transnational family structures, as well as the challenges and difficulties of the Romanian survey respondents living in Germany, France, the United Kingdom and Italy. It also considers the role of personal networks which represent an important motor of migration and constitute the main motive for the choice of a certain destination region. These migration networks lead to the construction of transnational social spaces between Romania and the destination country and have high influence in the search for housing or jobs but can also influence the integration process abroad.

Based on published primary and secondary materials and oral interviews with some eighty communal and organizational leaders, experts and scholars, this book provides a comparative account of the reconstruction of Jewish communal life in both Germany and in Austria (where 98% live in the capital, Vienna) after 1945. The author explains the process of reconstruction over the next six decades, and its results in each country.The monograph focuses on the variety of prevailing perceptions about topics such as: the state of Israel, one's relationship to the country of residence, the Jewish religion, the aftermath of the Holocaust, and the influx of post-soviet immigrants. Cohen-Weisz examines the changes in Jewish group identity and its impact on the development of communities. The study analyzes the similarities and differences in regard to the political, social, institutional and identity developments within the two countries, and their changing attitudes and relationships with surrounding societies; it seeks to show the evolution of these two country's Jewish communities in diverse national political circumstances and varying post-war governmental policies.

In the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, as well as in the states that emerged after its break-up, various types of conflict were evident at many levels. One such conflict has been sports rivalries, which, although intended to be separate from the prevailing political disputes, became a significant element in the escalating conflict between the federation’s nations and republics. This article aims to present and analyze the role of sport and its associated competitions in political conflict, both before and after Yugoslavia’s break-up.

Extensive research has demonstrated that neighbourhood ethnic diversity is negatively associated with intra-neighbourhood social capital. This study explores the role of segregation and integration in this relationship. To do so it applies three-level hierarchical linear models to two sets of data from across Great Britain and within London, and examines how segregation across the wider-community in which a neighbourhood is nested impacts trust amongst neighbours. This study replicates the increasingly ubiquitous finding that neighbourhood diversity is negatively associated with neighbour-trust. However, we demonstrate that this relationship is highly dependent on the level of segregation across the wider-community in which a neighbourhood is nested. Increasing neighbourhood diversity only negatively impacts neighbour-trust when nested in more segregated wider-communities. Individuals living in diverse neighbourhoods nested within integrated wider-communities experience no trust-penalty. These findings show that segregation plays a critical role in the neighbourhood diversity/trust relationship, and that its absence from the literature biases our understanding of how ethnic diversity affects social cohesion.

In the study, ethnic nationalism in the Balkans, the Russian influence and the degree of NATO’s contribution to peace processes in the Balkans are scrutinized and the impact of NATO’s presence on regional peace and stability is analyzed. By using articles, books, journals and internet sources, the process of the Balkans’ and especially the Western Balkans’ full membership to the EU and integration with NATO, the Political, economic, ethnic dynamics of the region, and NATO’s struggle against ethnic issues as in the case of Serbia-Kosovo crisis are examined. In addition, ethnic nationalism, Russian influence in the region, as a result of change in the security environment is evaluated, and the role of NATO in the SerbiaKosovo crisis as an example of both political and ethnic conflict, is analyzed. By doing a detailed literature review in the study, it is concluded that NATO is not just a military alliance, but a stabilizing and security-enhancing actor in resolving conflicts in the Balkans, and that NATO increasingly plays an effective and important role in regional resolution processes, and that security and stability in the Balkans and especially in the Western Balkans cannot be fully achieved without NATO’s leadership and contributions.

With increasing urban population density, conflicts in cities erupt more frequently and violently. Cities have become hotspots for armed combat, highlighting the urgency of understanding the impact of local communities and urban factors on the development of violent conflict. Joldon Kutmanaliev presents a novel approach to analyzing communal violence and armed conflicts in urban zones. Drawing from fieldwork in cities of southern Kyrgyzstan, he explains local-level variations in violence across neighbourhoods during the most intense and violent episode of urban communal violence in Central Asia - the clashes between Kyrgyz and Uzbeks in June 2010. Kutmanaliev explains why armed violence affects some urban neighbourhoods but not others, why local communities react differently to the same existential threat, how they deal with a deteriorating security environment and interethnic fears, and how different types of urban planning and urban landscapes influence the spread of violence. Importantly, the book identifies key factors that help local communities and their leaders to negotiate non-aggression pacts and control local constituencies, and therefore successfully prevent violence. Intercommunal Warfare and Ethnic Peacemaking explains communal war and ethnic peacemaking on the level of neighbourhood communities - a perspective that is largely absent in previous studies.

In this article, the attention is paid to the Bosnian war veterans´ organisations. In the post-Dayton period, veterans’ associations could be characterized as non-egalitarian structures with strong ethnic ascription reproducing ethnic cleavages and with wide patron-client bonds to the highest level of politics enjoying preferential positions in socio-political and economic life. Today, the majority of veterans´ organisations can be characterized as civic oriented NGOs rather inclusive with decreasing importance of the ethnicity as the defining principle, limited preferential political treatment, and with the potential to mobilize across ethnic lines and building cross-ethnic contacts and relations. I searched for mechanisms and processes that produced alternations in the veterans’ organisations role and behaviour. The tracing of the political, societal and economic context in and outside of Bosnia and in the population of veterans’ organisations discovered the existence of twelve mechanisms which combination and interplay “produced” the change in veterans’ organisation's role and behaviour.

Szabolcs Pogonyi (2017) Extra-Territorial Ethnic Politics, Discourses and Identity in Hungary. Palgrave Studies in Citizenship Transitions. Cham, Switzerland: Springer International Publishing.