CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2013
| Author | Kalemaj, Ilir |
|---|---|
| Title | Visualizing Virtual Borders: Identity Territorialization Shifts and 'Imagined Geographies' in the Albanian case |
| Summary | The primary research question that this dissertation addresses is: Why national borders change and why they are perceived differently inside versus outside of the state? What motivates such changes and what are the primary actors and factors that make groups have a certain mapping perception and when virtual shifts occur? This broad and general question is broken down into two empirical and specific questions: (1) how the understanding of the Albanian nation takes on different geographical borders over time--with some periods associated with the Albanian nation mapping onto Albania's state borders and other periods the Albanian nation expanding on the broader concept of "Greater Albania", and (2) why different Albanian communities (in Albania in one hand and Macedonia and Kosovo on the other) have often imagined the borders of the Albanian nation differently at the same point in time? This dissertation, builds on the argument that power struggle between ‘internal’ and ‘external’ (diasporic) elites plays the primary role in building political agendas that create national borders. I construct here a theoretical model that captures the dynamics of domestic versus international constraints on elite choices and how this leads to (re)construction of borders. This builds on the logic that the elites engineer and manipulate national(ist) symbols to create the necessary environment for personal political gains, which is mainly getting and retaining political power. In other words, these competing elites use expansionist/contractionary versions of national map and imagined virtual borders that may or may not be congruent with internationally recognized ones. In embracing one or the other map project, such elites, through cost-benefit calculations, are always constrained by external pressures, which conditionalize domestic discourse and place limits their on their actions and how it influences map weaving. Although the primarily case is the Albanian case, studied comparatively in both spatial and temporal dimensions, as well as investigating compatibility/differences in mass and elite discourse and actions, the references include many empirical bits from a multitude of cases. In addition, the findings have general applications in both analytical and policy-level because concurrent maps exist across states and societies and elite clashes are often largely dependent on geopolitical limits, while policy relevance extends to include the degree and scale of map materialization. |
| Supervisor | Jenne, Erin K. |
| Department | International Relations PhD |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2013/kalemaj_ilir.pdf |
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