This well-researched book sets out to provide an overall synthesis of scholarly conceptualizations of “the Balkans” as a spatial category. It builds on the author´s years-long research into the comparative history of regional concepts. A sizeable literature on “Balkanism” has so far mainly looked into western fiction, travelogues, and journalism in order to deconstruct popular distinctions between the European “Self” and Balkan “Other.” But how did academic discourse feed into such images and mental mapping? And what kind of self-representations emerge from scholars in the region?

Daria Mishkova starts her analysis in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when the Balkans moved to the forefront of European attentions as the Ottoman Empire disintegrated. From there she takes the reader to the interwar era, when the “pristine Balkans” figured as a way of “expressing the widely shared feeling of estrangement from modern life” (121). Representations of transnational commonality and interaction by intellectuals like Jovan Cvijić, Ivan Shishmanov, Nicolae Iorga, and Nikola Županić reflected national and geopolitical concerns, as did various federalist projects forwarded by either liberal or leftist thinkers before and after WWII. Many believed a regional collective identity was a prerequisite for closer cooperation and common security. During the Cold War, southeast European institutes and specialized international associations continued interdisciplinary discussions on the region through conferences and journals. In western political perception, meanwhile, the Balkans emerged mainly as a sub-region of communist eastern Europe, although after the break-up of Yugoslavia the region returned as a metaphor for ancient hatred and endemic violence to public discourse.

Beyond Balkanism is written from an original and intriguing perspective. It convincingly demonstrates how academic discourse functions as a social mechanism to construct cognitive maps and, ultimately, political realities. Not to forget: entanglement of politics with scholarship also happened in that a number of scholars were personally active in both fields. At the end of this thoroughly researched study, however, there is no clear picture of Balkan self-representations as they were linked to distinct and sometimes even opposing ideologies and value systems.

Only occasionally the analysis lacks historical context: for instance, when dealing with the German “Südostforschung.” Leading scholars like Fritz Valjavec appear mainly in their capacity as academics. But this picture is incomplete, as during WWII he and other scholars took an active role in advancing Hitler´s new racial order and the greater economic area under Nazi leadership, fighting loyally on both ideological and military fronts. The assessment that a dedicated advocate of the Nazi expansionist and racial program, and active member of the SS, should have “promoted views that chimed with the local understanding of the Balkans as a living cultural/historical entity with a political future rather than with the German understanding of a new . . . Southeastern Europe” (129) is simply wrong. To the contrary, the Nazi political and ideological context has influenced German academic discourse to a large extent.

While regional representations have become an established field of research, discussions of whether regions are formed by structural commonalities or constructed by imaginations continue. “Tailoring academic research to established spatial categories predetermines to a large extent its conclusions,” the author underlines (236). Irrespective of this concern, Beyond Balkanism focuses on self-representations that explicitly do assume some kind of regional identity. Many Albanian, Greek, Serbian, Romanian, and Bulgarian intellectuals, however, did not believe that they would belong to some kind of sub-region when advocating federalist concepts such as the pan-European idea, the Danubian-Balkan federation, or the European Union project. But these were apparently beyond the scope of the research.

Although Mishkova agrees that “none of the ‘regional’ historical experiences and legacies was exclusively a Balkan one . . .; nor did they affect this geographical space as a whole and in the same degree,” (236) she defends the area studies approach against global and transnational history challenges. True, from the perspective of more recent approaches, the question of whether the Balkans exist—either as reality or imagination—is largely irrelevant. But Mishkova remains faithful to the idea of historical regions and their making, while proposing to reconfigure the meaning of the Balkans into a “fuzzier, processual and open-ended one” (239).

The book is inspiring and deeply reflective. It is highly recommended to all interested in area studies and symbolic geography.