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

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.

In other words, 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.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, from the initial field of their application in Ottoman and post-Ottoman Macedonia to the mainstream political and social life of Greece, Bulgaria and Serbia/Yugoslavia, as well as to the respective diasporic communities.

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

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 and Romania), plus experts on Albania and the Ottoman Empire.

It is composed of the PI, nine post-doctoral fellows and senior researchers, two research assistants and two PhD candidates with their supervisors.

They will produce a main monograph, at least a thematic collective volume and 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 and a website.