- Columbia, South Carolina
Carl T Dahlman
University of South Carolina, Geography, Faculty Member
- University of South Carolina, Walker Institute of International and Area Studies, Department Memberadd
- I'm a political geographer who studies processes related to territory, boundaries, identities, conflict, and migration in Southeastern Europe and parts of the Middle East.edit
Peaceful resolution of the Kosovo-Serbia conflict has remained elusive for two decades. Numerous proposals have attempted to settle the question of Kosovo’s status to create a polity at peace internally and with its neighbors, and ready... more
Peaceful resolution of the Kosovo-Serbia conflict has remained elusive for two decades. Numerous proposals have attempted to settle the question of Kosovo’s status to create a polity at peace internally and with its neighbors, and ready for integration into an enlarged Europe. Since the declaration of Kosovo’s independence in 2008, the primary means of resolving Serbia’s territorial claim has been through the process of decentralization: devolving political authority onto newly drawn Serb majority municipalities. The result of EU-sponsored Belgrade-Prishtina dialogues were the April 2013 and August 2015 Agreements, which would allow a Community of Serb-majority municipalities to create a new governmental entity, segregating Kosovo along internal ethnoterritorial borders. This article uses the concept of ethnopolitical territoriality to critically examine (a) the historical origins of local borders to govern Kosovo’s multi-ethnic space and (b) the new borders drawn by the strategy of decentralization.
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This book, Bosnia Remade, is an authoritative account of ethnic cleansing and its partial undoing from the onset of the 1990s Bosnian wars up through the present. Gerard Toal and Carl Dahlman combine a bird's-eye view of the entire war... more
This book, Bosnia Remade, is an authoritative account of ethnic cleansing and its partial undoing from the onset of the 1990s Bosnian wars up through the present. Gerard Toal and Carl Dahlman combine a bird's-eye view of the entire war from onset to aftermath with a micro-level account of three towns that underwent ethnic cleansing and--later--the return of refugees.
There have been two major attempts to remake the ethnic geography of Bosnia since 1991. In the first instance, ascendant ethno-nationalist forces tried to eradicate the mixed ethnic geographies of Bosnia's towns, villages and communities. These forces devastated tens of thousands of homes and lives, but they failed to destroy Bosnia-Herzegovina as a polity. In the second attempt, which followed the war, the international community, in league with Bosnian officials, endeavored to reverse the demographic and other consequences of this ethnic cleansing. While progress has been uneven, this latter effort has transformed the ethnic demography of Bosnia and moved the nation beyond its recent segregationist past.
By showing how ethnic cleansing was challenged, Bosnia Remade offers more than just a comprehensive narrative of Europe's worst political crisis of the past two decades. It also offers lessons for addressing an enduring global problem.
There have been two major attempts to remake the ethnic geography of Bosnia since 1991. In the first instance, ascendant ethno-nationalist forces tried to eradicate the mixed ethnic geographies of Bosnia's towns, villages and communities. These forces devastated tens of thousands of homes and lives, but they failed to destroy Bosnia-Herzegovina as a polity. In the second attempt, which followed the war, the international community, in league with Bosnian officials, endeavored to reverse the demographic and other consequences of this ethnic cleansing. While progress has been uneven, this latter effort has transformed the ethnic demography of Bosnia and moved the nation beyond its recent segregationist past.
By showing how ethnic cleansing was challenged, Bosnia Remade offers more than just a comprehensive narrative of Europe's worst political crisis of the past two decades. It also offers lessons for addressing an enduring global problem.
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ABSTRACT
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The Bosnian war was driven by fantasies of geopolitical and demographic engineering which led to ethnic cleansing and the separation of Bosnia's ethnic qua national communities from each other. The post-war peace opened up the possibility... more
The Bosnian war was driven by fantasies of geopolitical and demographic engineering which led to ethnic cleansing and the separation of Bosnia's ethnic qua national communities from each other. The post-war peace opened up the possibility of returns, most especially the politically sensitive cross-boundary return of Bosniaks to their old homes in Republika Srpska and Serbs to the residences in Bosnian Federation. This article considers one response of Bosnian Serb nationalist forces to returns, namely the strategy of distributing land plots to displaced Serbs to preserve the demographic consequences of ethnic cleansing. This study draws upon semi-structured fieldwork interviews with international and local officials in Republika Srpska to contextualize the policy within former Yugoslav norms, post-war Bosnian Serb politics and international community governance in Bosnia-Herzegovina.
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This article analyses how the strategic Bosnian locality of Brčko emerged as a distinctive geopolitical space during the post-war period. This resulted from the struggle between separatist nationalisms and the international community over... more
This article analyses how the strategic Bosnian locality of Brčko emerged as a distinctive geopolitical space during the post-war period. This resulted from the struggle between separatist nationalisms and the international community over the status of displaced persons in Bosnia, but this struggle played out differently in the municipality of Brčko as its status was unresolved at Dayton and for years afterward. Post-war nationalist rivalry to determine Brčko's status through the manipulation of displaced persons provoked the creation of the Brčko District as a territorial condominium nominally shared by Bosnia's two entities but under direct international supervision. Drawing upon fieldwork in Bosnia, we develop a critical geopolitical account of Brčko from wartime through the post-war period to the present. The article concludes by considering whether Brčko as a third geopolitical space holds potential to offer Bosnia a third space, overcoming the oppositional binaries of the war.
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Critical geopolitics seeks to deconstruct the constructed objectifications of places as ‘territory’ or ‘homeland’ in realist and nationalist geopolitical discourse by remembering the messy spatiality of places as locations of human life... more
Critical geopolitics seeks to deconstruct the constructed objectifications of places as ‘territory’ or ‘homeland’ in realist and nationalist geopolitical discourse by remembering the messy spatiality of places as locations of human life and dwelling. This paper considers the Bosnian war and the international community's effort to reverse ethnic cleansing from a critical geopolitics perspective. Developing analysis around the notion of ‘home’, it argues that the Bosnian war was a war against homes in the name of idealized homelands. Domicide, the deliberate destruction of home, was its prevailing logic, the despoilment of Bosnia's multiethnic dwelling spaces its consequence. The international community's effort to promote ‘minority returns’ in the wake of the Dayton Peace Accords sought to roll back homelands but this effort at reverse spatial engineering has only partially reconstituted Bosnia's multigroup spatiality.
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... serve the founding vision of a more stable and prosperous Europe without necessitating a ... rerouting the European Union along an external path toward further enlargement and integration. ... programs is to prepare for eventual... more
... serve the founding vision of a more stable and prosperous Europe without necessitating a ... rerouting the European Union along an external path toward further enlargement and integration. ... programs is to prepare for eventual accession, although membership is not guaranteed. ...
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Drawing on the case study of Georgia's Ajara region, this paper makes the argument for foregrounding autonomy as a strategy used by states for managing diverse territories. Particularly salient to the concept of autonomy is its... more
Drawing on the case study of Georgia's Ajara region, this paper makes the argument for foregrounding autonomy as a strategy used by states for managing diverse territories. Particularly salient to the concept of autonomy is its flexibility as a spatial fix, one which can be variously deployed depending on the form of political relations between center and periphery. Empirically, we draw from a set of 22 interviews conducted in Tbilisi and Ajara's capital of Batumi to trace the arc of autonomy in the republic through its Soviet and post-Soviet history. Established on cultural grounds, the form of Ajara's autonomy has subsequently been institutional, instrumental, and nominal. The republic today maintains its autonomous status, though its competences are delimited from Tbilisi; rather, this status serves as a model for the future—albeit unlikely—reincorporation of South Ossetia and Abkhazia into the Georgian state. In conclusion, the paper endorses greater engagement with autonomies that fall short of conflict and separatism but nonetheless provide valuable insights into the suite of strategies that states employ in the management of territory. Autonomies are possibly entering a new, more unstable period of centralizing pressures that will challenge their original purpose and perhaps also regional peace and stability.
Gender, Place and Culturedepends on the assistance of those who give their time and effort as referees of manuscripts. The editors gratefully acknowledge those listed below, who contributed in this way in the past year. ... ISSN 0966-369X... more
Gender, Place and Culturedepends on the assistance of those who give their time and effort as referees of manuscripts. The editors gratefully acknowledge those listed below, who contributed in this way in the past year. ... ISSN 0966-369X print/ISSN 1360-0524 online q 2010 Taylor & Francis DOI: 10.1080/0966369X.2010.517032 http://www.informaworld.com ... Kristine Alexander Fiona Anderson Gavin Andrews Penelope Andrews Mariama Awumbila Kevin Ayotte Keiron Bailey Hazel Barrett Bipasha Baruah Gulsum Baydar Martha Bell Kathryn Besio Mona ...
... Carl T. Dahlman Part V Violence 223 Introduction 225 Carolyn Gallaher 19 Conflict 227 Mary Gilmartin 20 Post-conflict 235 Carl T. Dahlman ... was a site of one such conflict Source: IStock© Robert Dodge Figure 11.3: Istanbul... more
... Carl T. Dahlman Part V Violence 223 Introduction 225 Carolyn Gallaher 19 Conflict 227 Mary Gilmartin 20 Post-conflict 235 Carl T. Dahlman ... was a site of one such conflict Source: IStock© Robert Dodge Figure 11.3: Istanbul University Source: IStock© Simon Podgorsek Figure ...
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This essay explores organizations in civil society as constituting an important sphere of social action in which alternative geopolitical worldviews are produced and disseminated beyond the state. The authors discuss the conceptual... more
This essay explores organizations in civil society as constituting an important sphere of social action in which alternative geopolitical worldviews are produced and disseminated beyond the state. The authors discuss the conceptual relationship between non-governmental organizations and the geopolitics pursued by states and also develop an appropriate methodological program to investigate organizational geopolitics. This is accomplished by employing critical discourse
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The US presidential election of 2008 was one of the most significant elections in recent American history. Bringing together leading geographers and political scientists, this authoritative atlas analyzes and maps the campaigns,... more
The US presidential election of 2008 was one of the most significant elections in recent American history. Bringing together leading geographers and political scientists, this authoritative atlas analyzes and maps the campaigns, primaries, general election, and key state referenda to provide a rich picture of this watershed event.< br>< br> The contributors offer a comprehensive and detailed assessment of all aspects of the election, providing presidential results at the national level, in major regions, and in swing states. Drilling ...
This very well crafted book tells both the terrible story of the ethnic cleansing of large parts of Bosnia in the 1990s and the attempts to subsequently reverse the process. Refusing to accept the consequences of the violence implied the... more
This very well crafted book tells both the terrible story of the ethnic cleansing of large parts of Bosnia in the 1990s and the attempts to subsequently reverse the process. Refusing to accept the consequences of the violence implied the obvious need for reconstruction, and the return of the displaced people. The complicated and messy process that has resulted gives this book its all too apt title. The implications of the analysis stretch well beyond Bosnia and pose the contemporary dilemmas of geopolitics in sharp relief. As such, this is a detailed case study that has implications for numerous scholarly investigations of contemporary politics and boundary-making in particular.