A new season….

So it has been quite a while since I posted on here. This does not mean that I have stopped thinking about minority rights as I continue in my role as Director of Teaching and Learning within the School of Law, Politics and Sociology at the University of Sussex.

My current thoughts and reflections have very much been inspired by some of my summer reading (or re-reading/) on Balkanise, Nesting Orientlisms, and in the post-Soviet space and Eurasia. Key texts have included the following:

Bakić-Hayden, M. (1995). “Nesting orientalisms: the case of former Yugoslavia.” Slavic review 54(4): 917-931.

Todorova, M. (1997). Imagining the Balkans, Oxford University Press.

Mishkova, D. (2018). Beyond Balkinism: The Scholarly Politics of Region Making, Routledge.

Mujanovic, J. (2018). Hunger and Fury: The Crisis of Democracy in the Balkans, Oxford University Press.

Klein, J. (2019). Making Minorities in the Eurasian Borderlands: A Comparative Perspective from the Russian and Ottoman Empires. Empire and Belonging in the Eurasian Borderlands. K. A. Goff and L. H. Siegelbaum, Cornell University Press: 17-32

Tlostanova, M. (2015). Postcolonial Theory, the Decolonial Option and Postsocialist Writing. Internationale Forschungen zur Allgemeinen und Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft 186: 25-45.

Decoloniality and post-socialism are therefore emerging themes in my thinking and writing, reflecting on minority rights (at least as presently understood and lobbied for) as a Western and/or Central European concept and the relationship between the two, the legacy of Versailles (my current focus) and whether we see ongoing ‘orientalisms’ either in the work of the relevant human rights monitoring bodies and European institutions, or within different regions (a likely theme of the book).

A short post for now, but I decided it had been too long and I wanted to post before the busyness of the start of term term takes over. I am very much looking forward to sharing with, and learning from, this year’s human rights students on the LLM International Human Rights Law, the MA Human Rights and those taking human rights as a final year option. Bring it on!!