Remembered Homelands, Divided Lands: Ottoman Legacies and the Roots of Ethnic Conflict

About this episode

The episode discusses how ethnic conflicts in Southeast Europe stem from historical configurations during the Ottoman period rather than ancient hatreds.

This talk argues that the ethnic conflicts of Southeast Europe are not the result of “ancient hatreds,” but of a specific historical configuration shaped during the Ottoman period. Under Ottoman rule, earlier forms of statehood did not disappear but survived in memory and identity in a kind of “suspended animation,” while at the same time demographic structures were significantly reshaped. Conflict emerged where these two processes intersected. In regions such as Kosovo, Bosnia, Vojvodina, and Transylvania, one group could claim historical precedence based on earlier statehood, while another could claim legitimacy based on later demographic dominance. The Greek–Turkish case shows a similar pattern, where a Byzantine territorial memory and Turkish nationhood collided over territories that became ethnically mixed during the Ottoman rule. The result is a particular type of conflict: not between truth and falsehood, but between competing and internally coherent forms of historical legitimacy — where both sides can plausibly claim that the land is, in different senses, their own. Csaba B. Horváth, PhD earned his PhD in International Relations at Corvinus University of Budapest after…

People in this episode

Guest: Csaba B. Horváth

Topics covered

• ethnic conflict
• Ottoman legacy
• historical legitimacy
• Southeast Europe
• geopolitics
• demographic changes

Keywords

• ethnic conflict
• Ottoman period
• historical memory
• demographic structures
• geopolitics
• Southeast Europe

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Hungarian Academy of Sciences

Places: Southeast Europe, Kosovo, Bosnia, Vojvodina, Transylvania, Greece, Turkey, Byzantine

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