Screening Souls, Building Nations. Macedonia(s) as a Laboratory for Balkan-wide Authoritatianism

Introduction

The project aims to investigate a little-explored and usually neglected aspect of the Macedonian Question throughout the late nineteenth and most of the twentieth century: namely, the function of the Macedonian Question as a catalyst and a testing ground for the emergence, development, and consolidation of authoritarian state policies on a nation-wide scale in all the Balkan nation-states involved.

Objectives

In other words, the project seeks to understand how the tools used by the rival nation-states to extract national loyalty in late Ottoman Macedonia—where nation had been widely conceived first and foremost as a political party—were subsequently transformed into a far broader method of social and political control.

Examination of Practices

MACAUTH will examine the transfer of particular administrative practices of surveillance, control, and political indoctrination, as well as state-sponsored violence and its ideological justification in the name of national expediency. This will be analyzed from the initial field of their application in Ottoman and post-Ottoman Macedonia to the mainstream political and social life of:

1. Greece
2. Bulgaria
3. Serbia/Yugoslavia

Additionally, the impact of the same heritage in Romania, Albania, the Ottoman Empire, and its successor nation-state, the Turkish Republic, will also be assessed.

Research Team

The research team consists of historians from all five Balkan countries which have been historically involved in the Macedonian conflict:

• Greece
• North Macedonia
• Bulgaria
• Serbia
• Romania

It also includes experts on Albania and the Ottoman Empire. The team is composed of:

• The Principal Investigator (PI)
• Nine post-doctoral fellows and senior researchers
• Two research assistants
• Two PhD candidates with their supervisors

Expected Outputs

They will produce the following outputs:

• A main monograph
• At least one thematic collective volume
• 20 articles in peer-reviewed journals
• Two Ph.D. dissertations
• Three workshops
• An international conference
• A journalists’ conference for the dissemination of the project’s output
• A website