What holds Europe together? In the face of economic instability, shifting political trends and a global pandemic, this question comes to mind more and more often. ERC grantee Anelia Kassabova is part of a team of four researchers who, in 2019, won a Synergy Grant to investigate this issue and find what really ‘unites us in diversity’.
The peoples of the Balkans' region have long shared an "entangled" and tumultuous history. A visit to the Western Balkans shows how deep the scars of the bloodsheds of the 1990s have been in this part of the world. The scale of violence has exceeded our common understanding with human rights' abuses, massacres, torture, rapes and ethnic cleansing from all sides. With such context in mind, one would have thought that Balkan history could have been studied from a "relational" or "transnational" perspective, to which it seems historically predisposed. But this has rarely been the case.
