Critical Approaches to Southeast Europe: A Cross-Disciplinary Series - CEU Press – serie

Contagions: Nationalism, Populism, and the Pandemic at Europe’s Edge offers a sweeping account of how COVID-19 collided with the political fault lines of Southeast Europe. Drawing on original surveys and rich comparative analysis, the book reveals how the crisis interacted with the power of nationalism and populism—reshaping trust, compliance, conspiracy beliefs, economic grievances, and even the memory of the pandemic itself. From the early months of surprising effectiveness to the region’s descent into some of the world’s worst mortality outcomes, the study shows how political ideologies acted like contagions of their own, undermining collective resilience. Southeast Europe emerges here not as an anomaly, but as a diagnostic lens onto broader European and global patterns of crisis governance and democratic fragility. Accessible yet deeply grounded in evidence, this book speaks both to scholars and to readers seeking to understand how ideology shapes societies under strain.

In Southeast Europe, there is a growing disjunction between “the way the world is” and the world that is described by law. The informal practices that address problems when formal institutions fail can be celebrated as spaces of creative problem-solving, or criticized as spaces for favouritism and corruption. When ruling political parties control informal networks, they consolidate the hold of unaccountable actors on power, moving from state capture to societal capture. This book presents findings from a collaborative, multidisciplinary research project. Over three years, a group of forty researchers examined informal practices in nine Southeast European states, adopting a mix of qualitative and quantitative methodologies. This close look at the Balkans illuminates persistent deficits in state legitimacy and capacity. The evidence allows a critical assessment of “Europeanisation” processes that produce only superficial formal changes, and of ways that networks of mutual assistance turn into instruments of social control and closure.

Water potential is a significant natural wealth of most parts of the Balkans, and it has given rise to a surge in hydropower investments unparalleled across Europe. As part of the process, a dam was planned to be built on the Una River, which runs through the Bosnian town of Bihać. This prospect alarmed the city’s residents, culminating in a protest in 2015. The book begins with this protest, and it explores how the threat of dam construction transformed the seemingly apolitical love of the river into a powerful political force around which thousands of people mobilized: riverine citizenship.The book is based on interviews with participants, archival research, and over twenty years of ethnographic research. Azra Hromadžić focuses on the tension between ecological sustainability efforts in favor of renewable energy, on the one hand, and citizens’ historically shaped, deeply-felt, love for the river, on the other. She shows how the language and promises of green transition can mask the forces of capitalist accumulation that drive this change — whether in the form of building hydroelectric dams or promoting eco-tourism — and thus set in motion another cycle of environmental degradation, social dispossession, and economic exploitation.