Journal articles on the topic 'Self-determination, national – serbia – kosovo'

The attempt to secede from Kosovo, which began in the nineties of the twentieth century, ended with NATO’s aggression against Yugoslavia, which formally usurped the southern Serbian province by the most powerful Western countries. The threat to the national security of the Republic of Serbia by the armed aggression of the NATO Pact is a unique example of the violation of all existing international legal norms prohibiting aggression against a sovereign and independent state. It is emphasized that even with the introduction of the Interim International Administration (UNMIK), the security situation has not stabilized. The political decisions of the representatives of the international community were framed in the paradigm of “absolute independence” of Kosovo and Metohija, despite the dissatisfaction of the then top officials of the Republic of Serbia. The illegal attempt to secede from Kosovo and Metohija through the adoption of the Declaration of Independence in 2008 by representatives of the Albanian national minority raised a number of political, economic and social questions about the strategy of the subjects and forces of the national security system of the Republic of Serbia. It is indicated that the ongoing dialogue between representatives of the Provisional Kosovo Institutions and representatives of the Republic of Serbia contributed to the signing of agreements in various fields. However, their implementation has a negative impact on the sovereignty, i.e. the jurisdiction of the institutions of the Republic of Serbia. The international administration created to date has failed to ensure the implementation of UN Security Council resolution 1244. The article analyzes the dynamics of events that led to the unilateral declaration of independence in violation of all norms of international law, including the right to political self-determination. The results of the work indicate an uneven interpretation of some norms regulating the status of national minorities (in this case, Albanians), as well as an attempt by Western countries to impose a solution to the Kosovo problem on the Republic of Serbia exclusively through various forms of recognition of the so-called independence.

Due to the intertwined and parallel interests of the great powers in Kosovo and Metohija, a kind of geopolitical knot has been created, as a field of aggressive geopolitical actions by non-Balkan and Balkan neighbouring political factors, which is reflected in current events, making them politically and security complex. After 2008, we have witnessed the unilaterally recognized so-called independence of Kosovo, which continued the process of internal transition and territorial fragmentation of Serbia that is clearly marked as a challenge and threat even in the current geopolitical and security context. Therefore, the paper has tried to show and explain the importance of the southern Serbian province, first of all emphasizing its geographical and geopolitical importance as a central area on the Balkan Peninsula, which makes it very important for the control of traffic, economic, communication, strategic and other corridors. The second part of the paper presents a geopolitical analysis of the current events in the south of Serbia and the consequences for the country's internal political structure and international position. In addition, the security aspects of the Kosovo-Metohija knot have been analysed, with a focus on national security and security problems caused by the violent exclusion of the Serbian territory and the self-proclamation of the so-called independence of Kosovo, in order to find sustainable solutions for the security situation in the south of Serbia.

After the Security Council had established the international administration in Kosovo on grounds of the Resolution no. 1244 of 10 June 1999 for the construction and reconstruction of the legal and economic systems, the support and protection of human rights, the provision of humanitarian and other assistance, it adopted the conclusion that the achievement of a political settlement for the southern Serbian province would primarily depend on the development and consolidation of peace and security. Accordingly, in May 2001, the international administration adopted the Constitutional Framework for Provisional Self- Government in Kosovo, which defined the status of the Serbian southern province as a whole and indivisible territorial entity under the interim international administration. The Constitutional Framework is regulated as a substantial transfer of state responsibilities by the peoples of Kosovo and Metohija to the provisional institutions of self-government and it should ?enjoy substantial autonomy within the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia?. This institutional development is aimed at establishing constructive cooperation among various ethnic communities in order to build a common democratic state. Since this solution is not quite legally balanced, it could not go without any negative consequences in terms of national sovereignty. The suspension of sovereignty of the Republic of Serbia in Kosovo and Metohija has eventually contributed to creating of the conditions for the socalled unilateral declaration of independence of the Republic of Kosovo. The analysis of the activities undertaken in the field of resolving the status issue after the unilateral declaration of independence of 17 February 2008 suggests that the solution for the Kosovo and Metohija should be primarily sought within the United Nations system.

As a result of striving accession to the EU, all states in southeast Europe have as precondition to solve inter ethnic conflicts and to balance the system in a way that makes the relations between dominant group and minorities one of the mutual respect, based upon the principle of non discrimination. In Western Balkans some of the most controversial issues in the past decade have revolved around the educational rights. The fragile society of Kosovo faces many challenges, and the system of education is just one of them. The ongoing dialogue between Serbia and Kosovo and painful process of state building often overshadows important educational issues. The educational system of Kosovo is segregated, extremely divisive and highly politicized. It is widely accepted that education has strong impact on individual’s identity formation. In this context ethnicity, nationality and citizenship constitute just a few of the possible identities within the individual’s self-conception being the most relevant to the relationship between citizen and the state. In the analyses of the theoretical foundations of multiculturalism the role of education in a culturally diverse society is very important for identity formation based on the concept of the citizenship as identity. By constitution Kosovo is a multicultural society but the meanings and expressions of this are contested both within the dominant Albanian majority and Serbian minority. Conceiving comprehensive discussions if Albanians and Serbs of Kosovo in the future could potentially accept to identify themselves through the citizenship of the new state before their ethnic and national based identities (cross linked with Albania respectively Serbia), it is a broad topic and beyond the scope of this paper, but for the purpose of this study the concept of the citizenship as identity is considered only in a narrower context - that of the role of education in identity formation

In 2005, years after an enforced peace was constructed between Serbia and its Albanian-majority province Kosovo, the outcome of a better life for ordinary citizens seemed yet to be fulfilled. However, this was not the most important change in the lives of Kosovars. I will argue that the lives of Kosovars are characterised by a lack of economic growth and the increased importance of the normative concept of the hegemonic man. Kosovars, like many “traditionally” patriarchal societies, have constructed identities of the patriotic man and the exalted childbearing woman as icons of national survival. These designated identities often negate the realities of war-affected communities. The gendered places of man and woman in political reality are marred by the traumatic events of life. Within this framework, I analyze interviews with people who have developed “alternative” identities or, as phrased by Carver, “bonded” senses of self-esteem as a result of viewing themselves as somewhat unable to live up to the iconic emblem. In the context of a continued occupation of the province by both the international bodies assigned to the province and the Serbian state (Kosovo is not yet independent from Serbia), one of the main questions asked by many Kosovars today remains: “What was the war about if not independence and where are the spoils of victory?”

In the paper, the author attempted to reveal the influence of the idea of self-determination on the emerging (in the historical and legal context) world order, taking into account the rapidly developing political and legal processes in the 18th-21st centuries. Attention is given to the use of the relevant law by certain states in their national interests, which, in the conditions of instability of the international system, makes self-determination an object of numerous influences, interpretations and restrictions. Considering cases from international practice and documents, the author concludes that over the centuries the concept of self-determination has undergone many transformations and was considered as a tool for redrawing the borders of Europe in the early and middle of the 19th century, after the end of the First World War and before the collapse of the USSR and Yugoslavia. As a mechanism of decolonization, and at the turn of the 20th–21st centuries — as a tool for fragmenting the political map of the world using the ethnic factor as a basis. Quite interesting are the conclusions about the impact of the institution of human rights, remedial secession, external and internal forms of self-determination, globalization processes on the development of the relevant law. The paper, along with other examples, examines the impact of real politics and the existence of double standards when considering issues of international legal recognition of Kosovo in the event of secession from Serbia and the annexation of Crimea to the Russian Federation.

Departing from the “double-eagle affair” at the World Cup 2018, this article analyses several dimensions of the “Swiss connection” between football, migration and Kosovar diaspora nation-building in the early 21st century. After a massive influx of Kosovar refugees during the 1990s, the Kosovar community in Switzerland included around 200.000 people in the early 21st century. Some of them founded migrant football clubs, and a number of players with Kosovar roots even pursued international careers as professionals. Two of them, Granit Xhaka and Xherdan Shaqiri, caused quite a stir when celebrating their goals as Swiss national players against Serbia at the 2018 World Cup with the hand gesture of the Albanian double-eagle. Yet, the Kosovar “Swiss connection” in football has several other dimensions: The admission of Kosovo to FIFA and UEFA wasn’t only supported by the Swiss Football Association (and indirectly by the Swiss government’s favourable stance regarding Kosovar independence), but even more so by Swiss national players with Kosovar roots. The newly established national team of Kosovo profited from players brought up in Switzerland as well as a Swiss coach, whilst on the other hand several key players of the Swiss national team of the early 21st century were of Kosovar extraction. This, together with the good performance of immigrant teams such as FC Kosova Zurich helped to change the hitherto rather negative image of Kosovar migrants in Swiss society, whilst at the same time initiating processes of self-reflection about Switzerland’s quality as a multicultural immigrant society.

AbstractThe aim of this study was to determine the prevalence of alcohol consumption among adolescents in Serbia and its association with sociodemographic characteristics. This paper is based on data from a national health survey of the population of Serbia in 2013 (no data for Kosovo and Metohija), conducted by the Ministry of Health of the Republic of Serbia. For the purposes of this study, data on households and individuals over 15 years of age were used; thus, the final sample for analysis included 858 patients (aged 15 to 19 years). Researchers used demographic characteristics (age, gender, type of home, region) and socio-economic characteristics (income per household member, the index of well-being, self-assessment of health, cigarette smoking, tendency towards psychological and physical violence) as the independent variables. A χ2 test was applied to test the differences in the frequencies of categorical variables. The correlations between alcohol consumption, as the dependent variable, and the independent variables (mentioned above) were tested by logistic regression. All results less than or equal to 5% probability (p ≤ 0.05) were considered statistically significant. The prevalence of alcohol consumption among adolescents in Serbia is 51.6%. Alcohol consumption is significantly associated with sex, type of home and the index of well-being (p < 0.05). The prevalence of alcohol consumption is higher in males (57.1%), in adolescents who come from urban areas (59.3%) and in adolescents who, according to the index of well-being, belong to the wealthiest financial category (23.9%).

Background/Aim. According to the number of active smokers, Serbia occupies a high position in Europe, as well as worldwide. More than 47% of adults are smokers according to WHO data, and 33.6% according to the National Health Survey Serbia in 2006. Smoking physicians are setting a bad example to patients, they are uncritical to this habit, rarely ask patients whether they smoke and rarely advise them not to smoke. These facts contribute to the battle for reducing the number of medical workers who smoke, as well as the number of smokers among general population. The aim of the study was to determine the smoking behavior, knowledge and attitudes and cessation advice given to patients by healthcare professionals in Serbia. Methods. A stratified random cluster sample of 1,383 participants included all types of health institutions in Serbia excluding Kosovo. The self administrated questionnaire was used to collect data about smoking habits, knowledge, attitudes and cessation advice to patients given by health professionals in Serbia. Results. Out of 1,383 participants, 45.60% were smokers, of whom 34.13% were physicians and 51.87% nurses. There were 46.4% male and 45.4% female smokers. The differences in agreement with the statements related to the responsibilities of health care professionals and smoking policy are significant between the ?ever? and ?never? smokers, and also between physicians and nurses. Twenty-five percent of nurses and 22% of doctors claimed they had received formal training. However, only 35.7% of the healthcare professionals felt very prepared to counsel patients, while 52.7% felt somewhat prepared and 11.6% were not prepared at all. Conclusions. According to the result of this survey, there are needs for more aggressive nationwide non-smoking campaigns for physicians and medical students. Experiences from countries where physicians smoke less and more effectively carry out smoking cessation practices need to be shared with Serbian physicians in order to improve their smoking behavior and smoking cessation practices.

Aim: The aim of this study is to compare the differences in breast cancer therapy, health-care service practices, and their availability in ten European countries—Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Kosovo, Montenegro, Republic of North Macedonia, Croatia, Romania, Slovenia, and Republic of Serbia. Methods: An inquire survey was conducted among oncologists in the participating countries. The questionnaire was of qualitative character and focused on several key areas as screening practices, diagnosing, treatment, and health-care procedures utilization. The results were processed through comparative and percentage analysis. Results: All of the observed countries have national registries for breast cancer, but only in five, a mechanism of controlled action of early detection is implemented. Ninety percent of the countries have implemented in the national guidelines the European Society of Medical Oncology recommendations, while National Comprehensive Cancer Network is considered in only 50%. In all countries, digital mammography is a universal diagnostic method. Pathohistological analysis, including HER2 receptor expression and determination of the level of progesterone and estrogen receptors, is routinely performed in all countries prior to therapy. Some differences are observed in terms of FISH/CISH methods, determination of Ki-67 volume, and prognostic molecular assays. Trastuzumab is used as neo-adjuvant therapy in HER2-positive disease in all countries, while in Bosnia and Herzegovina and Croatia, only pertuzumab is used. Psychological support is integrated into the professional guidelines for treatment and monitoring in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, and Serbia. Conclusions: The international guidelines should be followed strictly, and some improvements in the health policies should be made in order to decrease the differences and inequalities in the availability of the breast cancer (BC) health services in the Central and Eastern European countries.

Recognition of regional features, outlining of the contours of regions, tendency to regionalize ethnic, economic, cultural and state-administrative space, and strengthening the ideology of regionalism in the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, that is Serbia and Montenegro, appear as a practical and political but also as a theoretical problem which includes and combines several scientific disciplines. The phenomenon of regionalism is not contradictory although it is primarily expressed through the numerous conflicts of interests rivalry and antagonisms of political subjects. The problematic side of the phenomenon of regionalism includes the result of an extremely negative and existentially tragic experience of the several years-long disintegration of the complex Yugoslav state. During the partition and disintegration of the second Yugoslavia, there also happened the disintegration of the Serbian ethnic area Growth, support and instigation of regional tendencies occurred in the historical circumstances of secession and did not stop in the post-secession period. Particularization and segmentation of political area, as well as the disintegration of the former state, did not occur in accordance with the norms of internal and international law. Legality was late and was achieved within the transformation of power reflected in the changed territorial policy of the dominant alliance of great powers. The entire past decade was characterized by an extraordinary metamorphosis of political space. Secession trend had the territorial features which included the change of borders and had been long in the focus of the global geopolitical attention. Territories were divided and made smaller. Intensive territorial dynamics within the external silhouette of the de-stated SFR of Yugoslavia resulted in the creation of several state and quasi-state political formations. Former republics became semi-sovereign states. Dispersed and displaced Serbian ethnos was configured in the three territories: in the Republic of Serbia - from which Kosovo and Metohia were amputated and placed under the UN protectorate - in the entire Republic of Montenegro and in the Republic Srpska, located in one part of the former Bosnia and Herzegovina. Demopolitical result of the geopolitical destruction of the Serbian ethnos was a great movement of the Serbian population from the west to the east, and its concentration in the territory of the Republic of Serbia this implied that the Serbs were expelled from their millennia-long abodes in Croatia, parts of Bosnia and from Kosmet. The geo-economic result of the same process was the devastation of the national economic strength west of the Drina and in the southern province. Economic regression occurred also in the national parent-land state. Balkan re-arrangement of the spheres of interest in the post-bipolar period was in 1995. fixed by the interest arrangement of the great powers known under the name Dayton Peace Agreement. Redistribution of the territories from the destroyed state occurred in the post-communist period with the expansion of west-civilization structures to the European east Westernization of the eastern part of Europe, or entire Europe as the other pole of the global West, could be characterized as a dual mega-regionality. Namely, the west is composed of Europe and America; on the other side, there is the global East or its hybrid variation Eurasia. With the disappearance of their common state and its framework, south Slavs found themselves in the seemingly independent, and actually client states. Western delimitation of the south Slavic area moved from the Yugoslav borders towards a wider Balkan demarcation. One could say that the revitalized notion of the Balkans became a new, in many aspects obligatory framework for regional thinking. The Balkan macroregion is further determined by the intentions to expand the European Union. One of the Euro-centric concepts, which is being experimentally employed precisely in the Balkans, is the establishment of the so-called Europe of regions in the peripheral areas. On the other hand, even though the process of the disintegration of the Yugoslav Federation appears to be irreversible, the superordinate Euro-American factor does not give up the possibility of the mezzo-regional initiatives, cooperations, associations and integrations. This "middle" level of dealing with the specificities of the Yugoslav region is related to the states and nations from the former Yugoslavia, or the so-called West Balkans. Naturally, it is not the tendency to revive the silhouette of the previous state, but certainly there is a noticeable intention to achieve a regional linking of the related, now semi-sovereign territories which sometimes belonged to the same state framework. The fourth level deals with microregionalism, that is the relation between the different areas in the newly-created states. It is interesting that the regionalist discourse is mostly cherished exactly in the ethno-heterogeneous Serbian area, although other Yugoslav states also have or had regional tradition and mixed population, like, for example, Slovenia and Croatia Nevertheless, these former Yugo-republics are structured as mono-national states, so the regional policy and ideology of regionalism are still not in the first plane. Regionalism within the newly-formed states could be supplemented with the micron level implying specific sub-regionalism of the highest degree, within the larger regions in the same state. This could be illustrated with Backa, Banat and Srem inside Vojvodina, understood as the northern Serbian region, or Kosovo and Metohia in the south of Serbia, in the province with the same name. In the part of Serbia outside the provinces, similar things could be said for Belgrade with its surroundings, Macva, Podrinje, Sumadija, Raska District etc. Thus, when it comes to the present FR of Yugoslavia, all five levels of regional dynamics have a principled, but insufficiently studied significance. Mega-regional level is related to the mark denoting the global belonging to the West. Macroregional level deals with the European loyalty, that is inclusion of the FR of Yugoslavia into the continental European trends. This trans-continental and continental direction of inclusion implies a historical teleology of the relative eastern belonging to the absolute West, that is Euro-America, and the entrance into the full structure of the European Union. All the mentioned problems of recognition and characterization of the regional phenomenology in the political topography of the world are motivated by the tendency to achieve as clear as possible spatial-temporal national and state orientation The direction is related to the so-called safety dilemma of the nation and the country faced with the change of size and essence of one's own state, with the different geopolitical position and redefined foreign-policy priorities. It is also the case of the changed alliance policy, and the innovated strategy of integration into the old and new global and regional political structures. On the basis of the indicated components of geopolitical context, one could say that the phenomenon of regions and their cognate correlates {regionally regionalization and regionalism) should not be understood exclusively through the legal categories of international law and the so-called constitutional solutions, that is administrative division of the state territory. Actually in the analysis of regions and regionalism in Serbia and the FR of Yugoslavia it is necessary first to discuss the pre-normative or meta-le-gal factors in the creation of the regional issue within the national and state issue, which have the form of the unsolved political problem. Meta-legality is located within the domain of the international relations and geopolitic. Meta-legal or pre-normative factors of the formation or recognition of regions and regionalisms deal with the possibility of the political constitution of the Serbian, that is Serbian / Montenegrin (still Yugoslav) society. Since the unique state area was destroyed in the four-year secession wars and there occurred significant demopolitical changes, war migrations, forceful displacements and expulsion of the population - the ethnic character of many areas was also drastically changed. At the same time, the post-secession existence of the FR of Yugoslavia could be also viewed through the optics of the state residuum. The remaining Serbia or Serbia (temporarily) without Kosovo is certainly not an equivalent for the Serbian ethnic space, nor for the entire Serbian lands. It is not even the FR of Yugoslavia, as a dual con federation of the Serbian / Montenegrin nation. Geopolitical reduction of the SFR of Yugoslavia to a residual creation of the FR of Yugoslavia was not deduced from the legality sui generis, but resulted from a conflict, the defeat of integralism and the victory of separatism, as well as from a new triumphal configuration of power. The impulse implying the statism of the collective rights from the former complex federal necessarily-multinational level was transferred to a lower mononational level. Therefore, the regionalist ideology in the post-secession reality of the residual state almost inevitably, as a tendency, nears the separatory particularism. Even the lost national state and the state entirety are openly denied within the requests for the territorization of the collective rights of various minorities. Naturally these requests do not carry the primary features of the development of democracy. On the contrary, in the majority of cases this implies the rise of parish and tribal consciousness prone to narrow-minded separation. Thus the post-secession requests for the regionalization are often just a slight rhetorical mask for real separatism. For example, they are expressed through the pseudo-national separation of Vojvodina from Serbia, as well as Montenegro from Serbia, or through the establishment of state-like entities in the territorial tissue of Serbia Alleged arguments are found in the unfinished disintegration of the SFR of Yugoslavia on the one hand, and in the prevention of the creation of the so-called Greater Serbia, even within the diminished Serbia That way, even in the post-secession, reduced Serbia one could easily recognize the tendencies of federalization and confederalization, even the amputation of its remaining state space. Additional arguments for the crawling secession and prolonged territorial destruction are found in the ideology of globalization and world trends of relativizing territorial integrity and state sovereignty. On the other hand, the idea about the principled insignificance of borders in Europe without borders, as well as Europe of regions, is emphasized. Thus, it is obvious that the new state and regional delimitations and demarcations are in contradiction with the vision of the trans-statal and trans-national integrity of the European continent. In Serbia itself, me problem of the restructuring of regions is determined by the inherited and unchanged triple division of its territory into the central part and two autonomous provinces in the north and south. Thus every idea for regionalization (expert, party, leader's, NGO and the like) faces the inherited, too narrow constitutional framework and easily slides to the federalization or confederalization of the Republic, and in extreme cases to the independence and sovereignty of ethnic, religious, linguistic and other minorities. Roughly put, the tendencies for territorial separation from the Republic of Serbia still exist in several neuralgic and unstable areas or regions. In Vojvodina, the presented tendencies have the character of a meaningless internal - Serbian autonomy, autonomism, latent separatism. Authentic Serbian autonomy lost its original character long ago and deteriorated into an internal national re-statism. On the other hand, in the furthest south of Serbia, in Kosmet, the UN protectorate is established, but the region is actually occupied and thus the status of the Province is "frozen". In the three municipalities in the south of Serbia, with the relative Albanian majority, Albanian separatism smolders within the platform of the so-called east Kosovo. In the Raska region (Sandzak) there are also strong tendencies for separateness on the religious-ecclesiastical, so-called Bosniac platform, with religious solidarity, and ethnic and territorial unity of all Bosniacs. In the meta-legal or pre-normative situation - which most often denotes political and geopolitical context implying interests, power and force - the inclinations for territorial design are faced with the conflicting ideology of regionalism. Therefore, the constitutional-legal solutions of the former, present and future regions, generated within the self-created legality which does not respect meta-legal, political and geopolitical impulses regardless of how aestheticized and "humanized" they may be - at the end face the practical impossibility of realization.

The article is dedicated to review of laws of countries of the so-called Yugoslav criminal law group, which originated in the former Yugoslav territory. The article describes the concept of the former Yugoslav territory as the territory of the former Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRY), consisting of 10 entities: the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, the Republic of Serbia, the Republic of Slovenia, the Republic of Croatia, the Republic of Montenegro, the State of Bosnia and Herzegovina, the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, the Republic of Srpska, the Brčko District of Bosnia and Herzegovina and the partially recognized Republic of Kosovo, each of which has adopted its own criminal laws. The mentioned states follow the SFRY criminal law traditions to a greater or lesser extent, which largely ensures similarity of criminal laws of these states and gives a possibility to unite them in the Yugoslav criminal law group. All of the states recognize the criminal liability of legal entities. The author points out the common historical, international and political roots of such liability; reviews options of establishment of liability of legal entities by inclusion of the corresponding provisions in the national criminal codes or adoption of specific criminal laws on liability of legal entities as well as statutory resolutions making it possible to consider a legal entity as a criminal liability subject; gives a scope of legal entities, which cannot be brought to criminal liability; emphasizes the differences in the determination of crimes, which can lead to bringing legal entities to criminal liability; notes that in some countries of the reviewed group legal entities may be brought to criminal liability only for specifically indicated crimes while other countries have no such limitation; analyzes the bases of liability of legal entities stipulated by criminal laws and the models of criminal liability of legal entities implemented in the states of the Yugoslav group: an identification model and an extended identification model; states application of articles of the general parts of national criminal codes for bringing of legal entities to criminal liability.

Abstract In this article, the author analyzes the implications of Kosovo's declaration of independence on state sovereignty and the principle of self-determination of peoples. He begins with an outline of the political process leading to the declaration of independence and the reactions of the international community thereto in which he also presents the various legal arguments raised for and against the lawfulness of Kosovo's secession from Serbia. The author continues with a discussion of whether the principle of self-determination of peoples does apply in the Kosovo case and whether the operation of this principle would justify a 'remedial secession'. Subsequently, he analyzes whether UN Security Council Resolution 1244 may be a legal barrier to Kosovo's independence to the extent that Serbia does not consent to such independence. Finally, in view of the extensive powers vested in the new international presence following Kosovo's declaration of independence, he discusses whether Kosovo fulfills the criteria of effective government and independence for being a state under general international law. The author concludes that international law remains controversial as to questions pertaining to conflicts between state sovereignty and self-determination of peoples and particularly to 'remedial secession', and that it is still too early to determine the impact of the Kosovo case on the development of international law.

In the context of public international law and relations between principles of territorial integrity and right to self-determination, independence of Kosovo will never be legal if it is not recognized by Serbia. This can be concluded from the examples of violent secession of Bangladesh and Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus. That is why Serbia still has a right to decide about the independence of Kosovo and Metohija despite signing Brussels Agreement and the fact that 100 UN member states recognized Kosovo as an independent state. Forty years after the secession of northern part of the island, Nicosia has not recognized Turkish republic of Northern Cyprus, which caused that this secessionist creation does not become a member of the UN. Its independence is not full from the perspective of international law, and this fact that cannot be disputed in spite of the factual occupation of the northern part of island by Turkey. On the other side, Pakistan recognized the independence of Bangladesh and forever lost half of its population and state territory. In return, half of its foreign debt was written off, 90,000 prisoners were released and 13,000 square kilometers of territory in western part of Pakistan, controlled by India, were returned. However, no one is offering anything similar to Serbia to recognize the independence of Kosovo. Debts of Kosovo towards IMF and World Bank are paid by Serbia. In addition, if Serbia recognized the independence of Kosovo, Serbia would lose about 100,000 Serbs living on that territory and about 1,200 square kilometers of territory in the northern part of Kosovo which is not controlled by Pristina. In that context, it is clear that principles of territorial integrity are still stronger in international law then right to self-determination. Postmodernist theories have a goal to hide that fact. Key of the independence of so-called ?Kosovo? is still in hands of Belgrade. That is why there are so many persistent attempts and strong pressures from the West to recognize the independence of ?Kosovo?. Example of Cyprus shows how to resist those attempts within the framework of public international law (by applying the principles of territorial integrity). However, if in the future Serbia chooses the same approach as Pakistan in the case of Bangladesh, Kosovo will be lost forever. At that moment, it would be clear that the relations of great powers in the world have changed.

Kosovo independence still remains a key issue on a global scale. In simple terms, there are two contradictory stands on the sovereignty of Kosovo. According to the first one, Kosovo declaration of independence is illegal due to the breach of international law and the constitution of the Republic of Serbia of 2006. Meanwhile the second stand proves that unilateral Kosovo declaration of independence was legal since Kosovo Albanians are fully entitled to the right of self-determination. The following paper presents an opinion on Kosovo independence expressed by the students of the Faculty of Political Science at the University of Belgrade and the University of Zagreb – two most important universities in Serbia and Croatia. The results presented in the paper are based on the survey carried out by the author in 2013.

Negara adalah lanjutan dari kehendak manusia bergaul antara seorang dengan orang lainnya dalam rangka menyempurnakan segala kebutuhan hidupnya. Semakin luasnya pergaulan manusia tadi maka semakin banyak kebutuhannya, maka bertambah besar kebutuhannya kepada negara yang akan melindungi dan memelihara hidupnya. Pada tanggal 17 Februari 2008, parlemen Kosovo memproklamasikan Kosovo sebagai negara merdeka, yang lepas dari Serbia pada sidang parlemen yang dihadiri 109 anggota. Sebelumnya Kosovo adalah satu provinsi dibawah kekuasaan Serbia yang mayoritas beretnis Albania. Tujuan penelitian ini dimaksudkan untuk mengetahui bagaimana pengaturan hukum internasional mengenai pembentukan negara dengan menggunakan hak menentukan nasib sendiri dan apa arti penting pengakuan dalam pembentukan suatu negara. Metode Penelitian yang digunakan adalah tipe penilitian yuridis normatif. Hasil penelitian menunjukkan pada saat ini, Hukum Internasional telah mengakui hak untuk menentukan nasib sendiri sebagai salah satu Hak Asasi Manusia dan berdasarkan hak ini semua bangsa bebas untuk menentukan status politik dan mengejar pembangunan ekonomi, sosial dan budaya. Namun, dalam konteks hukum internasional kemerdekaan sebagai wujud dari hak untuk menentukan nasib sendiri dimaksudkan untuk membebaskan diri dari penjajahan dan dominasi/kekuasaan asing. Dalam masalah pengakuan, unsur-unsur politik dan hukum sulit untuk dipisahkan secara jelas karena pemberian dan penolakan pengakuan oleh suatu negara sering dipengaruhi pertimbangan politik, sedangkan akibatnya mempunyai ikatan hukum. Definisi atau unsur-unsur negara terdapat dalam Konvensi Montevideo 1933 (Montevideo The Convention on Rights and Duties of State of 1933), dimana pengakuan merupakan unsur deklaratif dan apabila semua unsur konstitutif telah dipenuhi oleh masyarakat politik, maka dengan sendirinya ia telah merupakan sebuah Negara dan harus diperlakukan secara demikian oleh Negara-negara lainya.

The paper presents the structural elements of the concepts of integration and disintegration. The second part analyzes the Serbian disintegration in the SFRY. With the disintegration of the SFRY, one issue particularly affected the Serbs, actually the parts of the Serbian people who lived in the former Yugoslav republics. The unconstitutional, violent separatist political movements in Slovenia, Croatia, BiH, Montenegro and the self-proclaimed NATO states of Kosovo and Metohija had to confront the Serbs who remained in these newly created states with a choice: be committed to national integration or remain loyal to the new national separatist authorities? The issue of treason as the ultimate form of national disintegration is considered. In the third part, the basic causes of national disintegration in the Serbian people during the 6th century are pointed out.

The opposing positions of countries on the application of the principles of the peoples’ right to self-determination and the territorial integrity of states are considered. The purpose of the article is to prove that the positions taken by countries are not determined by international legal norms or a custom, but by political necessity. Research methods: comparative, historical, systematic methods and content analysis of documents. The main results of the work are the following provisions. The situation with the secession of Kosovo from Serbia, the recognition of Kosovo's independence by a number of states was the first precedent in the application of the principles of the peoples’ right to self-determination. Then, first of all, the Western countries adopted an atypical position for them to deny the inviolability of the borders of the state of Serbia. On the other hand, these same countries are characterized by persistent non-recognition and disregard for the independence declarations of Pridnestrovie, South Ossetia and Abkhazia. According to the results of the study, the author came to the following conclusion. Research results. The author proved that in the situation with Kosovo, the countries of the West made a strategic mistake in the political interpretation of the principles of the peoples’ right to self-determination and territorial integrity of states. This bloc of states has shown that in practice it is ready to deviate from predictable and legally correct interpretations of the principles under consideration, moreover, under the influence of political expediency.

The Iraqi Kurdistan region and Kosovo have their own struggles in exercising their right to self-determination. Both regions became victims as a result of trying to achieve independence. However, Kosovo's independence was successful, while the Kurdistan region's attempt for independence was not. It must be assumed that there must be reasons for the failure of independence in the Iraqi Kurdistan region, as well as Kosovo's successful independence. The international community's interests, in both cases, have to be explored as well. In other words, what are the reasons for the failure of the Kurdistan region's independence and the success of Kosovo independence? Further, this paper aims at defining self-determination and then providing a historical review of the Iraqi Kurdistan region, Kosovo's struggle for achieving the right to self-determination, and also a precise analysis of both cases. The methodology used in this paper is pure library research; focusing mainly on secondary sources. This paper legally recommends that the KRG must try to negotiate with the Iraqi federal government following a bilateral agreement under the supervision of international mediation whereby the Kurdistan region can have the right to secede when a constitutional violation is taken place by the federal government. Kurdistan region must review its relations with all international actors, which play a main role in the Middle East and make a lobby group by including separatists groups and other Kurds who live abroad to gather support for its independence in the future. Keywords: Self-Determination, Kurdish Autonomy, Iraqi Kurdistan Region, Kosovo and Serbia, International Community.

The position of the Serbian schools and teachers in Kosovo and Metohija was harsh and insecure due to constant attack and criticism from the Turks and Arbanasi. The Turkish government considered the teachers to be the people actively working on achieving Serbian national interests, and the schools were believed to be places where the utmost authority of the Turkish government and state is being constantly undermined. Educational politics sought to make schools places where students and bearers of national cultural prosperity are educated. Perceived this way, elementary school and conception of education and upbringing, instigated high demands from future educators. Teachers were required to be both transmitters of knowledge as well as the national workers and educators. Unable to start fundamental social changes, teachers focused their social work on awakening national consciousness and preserving school self-government based on the privileges of the Patriarchate and on informing the Consulate about all events in their area. Serbian government used their reports for official protests in front of Turkish Porta as well as for informing the world public about the position of their countrymen in Ottoman Empire. Thus, most of all, the Turkish state authorities challenged the work permit of Serbian schools. Teachers had to confirm their school diplomas before the competent authorities in the town of Skoplje, which fundamentally changed the social position of Serbian schools.

The relationship between identity and national consciousness is one of the important issues, not only, of the sociology of identity but of the overall opinion of the social sciences. This scientific question has been insufficiently researched in the sociological thought of Bosnia and Herzegovina, and with this paper we are trying to actualize it. Aware of theoretical-methodological and conceptual-logical difficulties related to the research problem, we considered that in the first part of the paper we make some theoretical-methodological notes on the problems in studying this phenomenon, in order to, above all, eliminate conceptual-logical dilemmas. The use of terms and their meaning in sociology and other social sciences is a very important theoretical and methodological issue. The question justifiably arises whether we can adequately name and explain some of the “character traits” of the contemporary national identity of the Bosniak nation that we want to talk about in this paper with classical, generally accepted terms, identity, consciousness, self-awareness, shame or shame, self-shame. Another important theoretical issue of the relationship between identity and consciousness in our case, the relationship between the national consciousness of Bosniaks and their overall socio-historical identity is the dialectical relationship between individual and collective consciousness, ie. the extent to which the national consciousness of an individual or a particular national group, political, cultural, educational, age, etc., is contrary to generally accepted national values and norms. One of the important factors of national consciousness is the culture of remembrance. What does it look like for Bosniaks? More specifically, in this paper we problematize the influence of “prejudicial historiography” on the development of the culture of memory in the direction of oblivion or memory. What to remember, and why to remember. Memory is part of our identity. The phrase, not to deal with the past but to turn to the future, is impossible. How to project the future and not analyze the past. On the basis of what, what social facts? Why the world remembers the crimes of the Nazis, why the memory of the Holocaust and the suffering of the Jews is being renewed. Which is why Bosniaks would not remember and renew the memory of the genocides committed against them. Due to the Bosniak memory of genocide, it is possible that the perpetrators of genocide are celebrated as national heroes and their atrocities as a national liberation struggle. Why is the history of literature and art, political history and all other histories studied in all nations and nations. Why don't European kingdoms give up their own, queens and kings, princesses and princes. These and other theoretical-methodological questions have served us to use comparative analysis to show specific forms of self-esteem among Bosniaks today. The concrete socio-historical examples we cite fully confirm our hypothesis. Here are a few of these examples. Our eastern neighbors invented their epic hero Marko Kraljevic (Ottoman vassal and soldier, killed as a “Turkish” soldier in the fight against Christian soldiers in Bulgaria) who killed the fictional Musa Kesedzija, invented victory on the field of Kosovo, and Bosniaks forgot the real Bosniak epic heroes , brothers Mujo and Halil Hrnjic, Tala od Orašac, Mustaj-beg Lički and others, who defended Bosniaks from persecution and ethnic cleansing in the Bosnian Krajina. Dozens of schools in Bosnia and Herzegovina have been named after the Serbian language reformer, the Serb Vuk Stefanović Karađić (1787-1864), who was born in the village of Tršić near Loznica, Republic of Serbia. Uskufije (1601 / 1602.-?), Born in Dobrinja near Tuzla. Two important guslars and narrators of epic folk songs, Filip Višnjić (1767-1834) and Avdo Medjedović (1875-1953), are unequally present in the memory and symbolic content of the national groups to which they belong, even if the difference in quality is on the side of the almost forgotten. Avdo Medjedovic, the “Balkan Homer”, is known at Harvard University, but very little is known in Bosnia and Herzegovina. And while we learned everything about the murderer Gavril Princip, enlightened by the “logic of an idea” (Hannah Arendt) symbolizing him as a “national hero”, we knew nothing, nor should we have known, about Muhamed Hadžijamaković, a Bosnian patriot and legal soldier, he did not kill a single pregnant woman , a fighter in the Bosnian Army who fought against the Austro-Hungarian occupation of Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1878. When it comes to World War II and the fight against fascism are full of hero stories. For one example, we will take Srebrenica, the place of genocidal suffering of Bosniaks. Before the war against Bosnian society and the state 1992-1995. in Srebrenica, the elementary school was called Mihajlo Bjelakovic, a partisan, born in Vidrići near Sokolac. Died in Srebrenica in 1944. The high school in Srebrenica was named Midhat Hacam, a partisan born in the vicinity of Vares. It is not a problem that these two educational institutions were named after two anti-fascists, whose individual work is not known except that they died. None of them were from Srebrenica. That's not a problem either. Then what is it. In the collective memory of Bosniaks. Until recently, the name of the two Srebrenica benefactors and heroes who saved 3,500 Srebrenica Serbs from the Ustasha massacre in 1942, who were imprisoned by the Ustashas in the camp, has not been recorded. These are Ali (Jusuf) efendi Klančević (1888-1952) and his son Nazif Klančević (1910-1975). Nothing was said about them as anti-fascists, most likely that Alija eff. Klančević was an imam-hodža, his work is valued according to Andrić's “logic” as a work that cannot “be the subject of our work” In charity, humanitarian work, but also courage, sacrifice, direct participation in the fight for defense, the strongest Bosniaks do not lag behind Bosniaks, but just like Bosniaks, they are not symbolically represented in the public space of Bosnia and Herzegovina. We had the opportunity to learn about the partisan Marija Bursać and many others, but why the name Ifaket-hanuma Tuzlić-Salihagić (1908-1942), the daughter of Bakir-beg Tulić, was forgotten. In order to feed the muhadjers from eastern Bosnia, Ifaket-hanum, despite the warning not to go for food to Bosanska Dubica, she left. She bravely stood in front of the Ustashas who arrested her and took her to Jasenovac. She was tortured in the camp and eventually died in the greatest agony, watered and fried with hot oil. Nothing was known about that victim of Ustasha crimes. Is it because she is the daughter of Bakir-beg Tuzlić. Bey's children were not desirable in public as benefactors because they were “remnants of rotten feudalism”, belonging to the “sphere of another culture”. In this paper, we have mentioned other, concrete, examples of Bosniak monasticism, from the symbolic content of the entire public space to naming children.

Having in mind the number of countries that have recognized the independently proclaimed state of Kosovo, contrary to the principles of international law that does not recognize self-determination and secession, as well as those countries that have not recognized it, it can be concluded that the area of Kosovo and Metohija, as an integral part of the territory of the Republic of Serbia, has no status of an internationally recognized country. On the other hand, taking into account the natural resources in the area of the Kosovo-Metohija basin, especially mineral wealth, Kosovo and Metohija with its geoeconomic potential has not accidentally found itself in the global geopolitical pattern defined by the US. By aggression on the FRY, that is, the RS, NATO forces led by the US brought the area of Kosovo and Metohija under control in the form of a protectorate of the already instrumentalized UN. Namely, in line with Joseph Nye's theory of "hard and soft power", the Kosovo-Metohija region, or the southern Serbian province, was placed under "hard occupation", i.e. the patronage of NATO forces called KFOR. The "elasticity" of international law that characterizes political relations among the existing powers and power centres on a global scale produces a high level of mutual competition for resources, security and economic prestige, increasing the potential for escalating conflicts. Therefore, in addition to the increasingly pronounced security and crisis aspects, it is necessary to look at the geoeconomic and geopolitical place, importance and role of Kosovo and Metohija, as one of the currently greatest NATO bases in Europe and as an imperialist reflection of the US and/or a perspective expression of the RS.

All 15 former Soviet Republics share a unique federal history with a particular understanding of the right to self-determination. Moreover, seven of them were federalised during the Soviet era, amounting to a major challenge to their territorial integrity after independence. While these states confronted their minorities in different ways, the Russian solution to its inherited national question has been the most comprehensive. This has made Russian understanding on self-determination essentially different from the mainstream of the international community, which in turn explains Russian persistent objections over the Kosovo independence (2008) and partly clarifies the events in Georgia (2008) and Crimea (2014). This article analyses how the former Soviet Republics coped with the transformation from the ethnofederal state to independence. The focus will be on Russia as the most affected of them and on the persistent Soviet legacy in its interpretations of self-determination and, consequently, its policies towards its post-Soviet neighbours.

Since it declared its independence in 1991, the Republic of Macedonia has faced several problems of key importance. Apart from the economic underdevelopment, this country has been characterised by bad ethnic relations between the two most numerous communities in the country - the Macedonian and Albanian ones. The Albanian community, which makes approximately one fourth of the total population in Macedonia, has tended to define itself as a "constitutive nation" within the newly formed and independent Macedonia. The outstanding ethnic tensions present in 1990s turned into open armed conflicts in the February-August 2001 period. More than 200 people were killed, while 100,000 people were displaced from their homes in the conflicts between the Albanian militia and regular Macedonian police and armed forces. After the USA and EU had made pressures on the conflicting parties, they adopted the Framework Agreement on 13 August 2001 in Ohrid. It proposed the amendments to the 1991 Constitution of the Republic of Macedonia. The amendments have brought out changes in the constitutional and political system of Macedonia - "double majority" in the Parliament, increased number of members of ethnic communities in the police and administration, Albanian language as an official, strengthening of the local self-rule, etc. Apart from the Macedonian people as a holder of sovereignty, the preamble of the Constitution of Macedonia includes the Albanians, Turks, Vlachs, Serbs, Romans and members of other peoples who live in Macedonia. In September 2002, parliamentary elections took place in Macedonia. The coalition For Macedonia Together headed by the Social Democratic Alliance of Macedonia won half of the seats in the Macedonian parliament. Then were defeated the nationalistic parties VMRO-DPMNE and Democratic Party of Albanians that had been in power during the ethnic conflicts. The Democratic Union for Integration (established in 2002) won almost 70 per cent of the Albanian votes while the Party for Democratic Prosperity and People's Democratic Party were defeated at the elections. After the September elections, the new government was forded and it embraced the members of the coalition For Macedonia Together and Democratic Union for Integration - with five Albanian ministers. The Ohrid Agreement is a step forward in settling the ethnic relations in Macedonia. Apart from the fact that it was adopted under the pressure of the international community, it is a basis for constitutional and political reforms, improving the position of the Albanians as the most numerous non-Macedonian community. However, it should be said that even today there are two parallel "societies" - Macedonian and Albanian ones, with no common touch between them, living separately from each other. In spite of all obstacles, it is necessary to insist on building of confidence and reconciliation between the Albanians and Macedonians. This can be achieved by repatriation of refugees and displaced persons to their homes, by implementation of the law that includes the provisions on the positive discrimination of the Albanian community and by strengthening of security and stability in the region. As the author assesses, the bad economic situation in Macedonia could set new priorities to the government and it would include improvement of living conditions for its citizens. On the other hand, the greatest danger to the peaceful development of Macedonia is the Albanian National Army (ANA) whose substantial aim is to achieve unification of the "Albanian" territories in Western Macedonia with Kosovo and "Albanian parts" of Montenegro and southern Serbia.

Right to self-determination has in the last hundred years been developed through a string of international legal acts and a string of different contexts of international relations. This fact has influenced its contemporary normative content which is not stripped of political dimension. The author identifies in the article four criteria which are the key to full enjoyment of contemporary right of self-determination. These are: permanent and heavy breaches of rights of the people who requests self-determination from the state authorities, weak central government in the territory where this people lives, creation of people's own authorities who can effectively control this territory, support of great powers. Author analyzes the case of self-determination of peoples in Vojvodina to incorporate themselves into Kingdom of Serbia through the prism of these criteria and concludes that from the point of view of contemporary international law this incorporation would be perfectly legal.

AbstractThis article gives an overview of the current position of minority self-governance within the Serbian legal order and its multilevel governance structure, with a particular focus on issues deriving from the missing legal determination of national minority councils. Although Serbia’s 2009 Law on National Minority Councils was welcomed by the international community, both national minority councils and public agencies have from the very beginning of its operation expressed serious concerns relating inter alia to the unspecified legal status of the councils. This has resulted in frequent misunderstandings in practice and, rather than being real self-governments of national minorities under public law, the councils are usually treated as nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) or organizations under the influence of political parties. Instead of presenting (international) political and social scientific approaches to the legal character of non-territorial autonomy in general, the article focuses on concrete legislative solutions and Constitutional Court practice regarding issues relevant to the de jure status of national minority councils in Serbia, such as election rules, competences, and funding.

Ethnomusicological and ethnochoreological research of the central part of Kosovo and Metohija has been conducted since the late 19th century up to the present. However, the gathered data are sparse and provide insufficient (and only partial) information regarding the music and dance tradition of this area. This fact was the main motive for arranging our own field trip to the region, during 2015 and 2016. The recorded material and numerous informants' narratives provided an important insight into the state of both previous and contemporary music and dance practice, enabling one to examine the transformations regarding music and dance that have taken place since the 1990s from several viewpoints: national and multinational, professional and amateur, local and regional. The causes of the changes that have occurred over the course of the last few decades, will be discussed in this paper through the political, ideological, sociological, and cultural prism. Thus, our attention will focus particularly on the national ensembles Shota (Pristina) and Venac (Gračanica), as well as on the local repertoire of different ethnic groups - Serbian, Albanian, Romani and Croatian, in former and contemporary conditions. An especially intriguing question is to what extent, and in what ways did geopolitical restructuring and cultural evaluations in the post-socialist period influence the sustainability, i.e. the change in music and dance forms, as important aspects of the self-representation of the ethnicities that exist in this region?

The purpose of this article is to reveal the causes of national and cultural identity crisis of Serbs in Bosnia and Herzegovina during the period of Austro-Hungarian occupation and annexation, which led to modifications of their self-identity. The paper meets this research aim through an extensive study of the relevant literature presenting the views of Serbian and Russian scholars. On the basis of comparative-historical and socio-cultural approaches, the authors collate the existing definitions of ethnic, national and cultural identity and define the crucial factors that make the cornerstone of cultural identity: mother tongue, ethnicity, territory, religion, habitat, food, mode of life, customs and traditions, folklore and literature, artwork and historical past. They go on to chronologically identify the developments and changes of society on the territory of the present-day Bosnian state. The article further analyzes the position of the peoples of Bosnia and Herzegovina within Austria-Hungary comparing their status in society and explains the choice of Bosnian Muslims and Croats as the pillar of the new government. The research produced a number of key findings. The key determinants that formed and helped to preserve Serbian cultural identity through ages are Orthodox Christianity based on St. Sava sacred tradition and the Kosovo myth, a half-historical, halflegendary event that formed the heroic and spiritual code of values and serves as a gospel in preserving Serbian cultural identity. Another feature that produced a significant impact on transforming cultural identity of Bosnian Serbs was conversion to Islam on part of some Bosnians who came to be known as Bošnjaks. Along with Islam and Orthodox Christianity, part of the Serbian population of Bosnia and Herzegovina belonged to the Roman Catholic Church, identified themselves as Croats who spoke Croatian and used Latin script. Thus the indigenous south Slavonic ethnic group of Serbs who had the same historical background and spoke the same language was divided by religion and, partially, the language — the pivotal determinants of identity. The paper demonstrates the joint efforts of the peoples inhabiting the present-day Bosnia and Herzegovina in their struggle against the occupants which were manifested in the activities of Young Bosnia, an organization that aimed at preserving national identity and creating a united Serbian state. The authors conclude that the problem of national and cultural identity crisis of Bosnia and Herzegovina Serbs finds its roots in the historical clash of three civilizations and cultures — south Slavonic, oriental and western. The article identifies the markers of national and cultural identity of Bosnia and Herzegovina Serbs, the disintegration of which led to a crisis.

The issue of subjects of the right to self-determination is one of the most controversial issues in the theory of international law. The author, researching etymology, as well as cases of application of concepts “people” and “nation”, pays attention to their interchangeability and sometimes identification. The author proposes to view people (in a narrow sense) as a spatial, related to a particular socio-economic, linguistic, cultural and spiritual way of life, of individuals. Broadly speaking, a people is characterized as a social community that acquires a political identity and thereby becomes a nation, under certain circumstances, a State. The article proposed criteria for the self-determination of peoples and nations in accordance with the current international order and architecture. The research focuses on institutions such as uti possidetis juris and remedial secession. The author’s analysis of the advisory opinion of the International Court of Justice on Kosovo is of some interest. In considering the problem of indigenous and small-numbered peoples and national minorities, the author proceeds from the possibility that they may exercise their right to self-determination in the form of territorial autonomy or self-organization (self-government), depending on their number, characteristics of resettlement and other circumstances. Both models (territorial and extraterritorial) are designed to give indigenous peoples their identity, based, inter alia, on established traditions and customs, Development in accordance with the fundamental laws of the State and the norms of international law, while preserving the stability and territorial integrity of the State. On the basis of the jurisprudence of the Human Rights Committee, various aspects of the legal personality of individuals in the exercise of the right to self-determination have been examined.

It has been long and widely forecast that the security situation in the Balkans — indeed, in South-Eastern Europe generally — would become delicate, and would fracture, during the final stages of the Albanian quest for independence for the Serbian province of Kosovo and Metohija. The Kosovo region is now a lawless area. It has been ethnically-cleansed of Serbs, and re-populated by Albanians who have progressively and illegally, over the past decades, migrated into the area. Years of so-called peacekeeping by the international community count for nothing. Kosovo’s presence as a nominally independent state, without any of the essential foundations to meet the true criteria for sovereignty, can in no way further the stability of the region, or of Europe. Neither can it serve US strategic interests, unless US interests can be defined as a breakdown of viability of Eastern and southern Europe. Not only Kosovo, but all of Albania and other Balkan communities have become captive of the criminal-political movements which owe their power to their alliance with Al-Qaida, Iran, and the Saudi-funded Wahhabist movements. Therefore, new warfare will be supported by many elements of the international Јihadist movements which work closely with Albanian groups such as the KLA along the so-called Green Transversal line (or Zelena Transverzala) — really a clandestine highway or network — which not only carries jihadists but also narcotics and weapons along international supply lines crossing from Turkey and the Adriatic into the Balkans and on into Western Europe. So, the broader battle is now being joined in South-East Europe, in Kosovo, Rashka, the Preshevo Valley, in FYROM, Montenegro, and Epirus being in large part proxy warfare which is symptomatic of the emergence of a new Cold War on a global scale. One can only imagine the negative consequences for Balkan stability if, for example, Turkey’s status changes and Ankara no longer feels obliged to temper its activities, or its use of Islamist surrogate or proxy groups to further pan-Turkish ambitions. On the other hand, we have not yet seen the completion of the break-up of Yugoslavia, and even the wrenching of Kosovo may not complete it. We will then see the dismemberment of some of the Yugoslav parts already independent, perhaps even the dismemberment of FYROM and Bosnia. Perhaps those State Department officials will be surprised, too, to see — a decade or two hence — the claims of autonomy emerging for parts of Arizona, Southern California, or Texas, citing the same pretext of “self-determination” now being claimed by those who moved across the borders to occupy Serbia’s Kosovo province. The Balkans region and the Eastern Mediterranean generally are entering a further period of crisis, insurrection, and possibly open conflict. None of the regional states, but particularly Serbia, are doing enough to address the security ramifications of the coming de facto independence of Kosovo. Finally, conflict issues in the Middle East, and specifically in Iraq, and relating to Iran, will continue to have a profound impact on the stability of the Balkans, and vice-versa

The article focuses on the politics of representation in Kosova since the United Nations took over ‘peace management’ in 1999. It uses UN propaganda posters (political pedagogy) and local nationalist political advertising as a way to read the multiple gendered discourses of representation. It shows how gender is used relationally between competing forces – the ‘international community’ and nationalists – as a tool to ensure UN's imposition of Western policies and norms and as a mechanism for local politicians to consolidate their domination of the domestic/private sphere. Moreover, it discusses the price paid to mimic the West: how Kosovar politicians have sought to ‘undo’ national identity in favour of a Western self-representation through a gendered abnegation of Islam. Thus, as an intrinsic part of the discourse of ‘peace-building’, these images represent the site of power production, domination, negotiation, and rejection, involving the collaboration of different actors, institutions, and individuals. Three specific points will be made: first, the article seeks to show that a Western political modernization discourse has, paradoxically, reinforced patriarchal relations of power and traditional gender roles in Kosova through the subjugation of women. Second, it explains the inability to resolve competing Albanian narratives – one relying on the legacy of peaceful resistance and the other on the armed struggle against Serbian domination during the 1990s. Third, through the intermeshing of international peace-keepers and local nationalist patriarchs, it will show how the militarization of culture is perpetuated through, and in relationship to, gender.

The process of creating the Albanian Federation, respectively the acceleration level, is combined with the EU integration process, respectively disintegration process. Certainly, the process of creating the Albanian Federation, as a political project does not face with the challenges the European Political Union project is facing, but the approach to the EU challenges will make us more clear the process from where could be outlined the creation of Albanian Federation. Divergences between the new and older EU members, but also between the EU member states that have national heterogeneity and as consequence were not allowed to pass the Rubicon of internal self-determination, different ethnicities within national borders ( Spain, Romania, Cyprus, Slovakia and Greece ) with those who present the type of homogeneous state ( Germany, Italy, Sweden, Slovenia, etc.. ), are reflected in the attitude towards Kosovo and, generally, the right to self-determination. Comparative overview of theses of Applied Policy Research Center ( CAP, Muenchen ) on possible trends in the development of European integration processes, in relation to the process of creating Albanian Federation to the first and fifth scenario results to be small, while to the fourth scenario this possibility seems to be big. The fourth scenario, combined with elements of the second scenario, it seems to be exactly that, in current circumstances is considered the most probable to be realized, but that goes in favour of the creation process of the Albanian Federation. Creation of the Albanian Federation should be regarded as a contribution to sustainable peace in the region. Albanian Federation could play a positive role in deepening the transatlantic relationship

The Republic of Serbia has introduced special circumstances for the determination of sentence for hate crime in the Criminal Code amended in December 2012. If a criminal offence is committed through hate based on race or religion, national or ethnic affiliation, sex, sexual orientation or gender identity of another, the court shall consider any aggravating factors except when it is not stipulated as a feature of the criminal offence. However, the State still neglects to consider mitigating factors. Moreover, it does not pay sufficient attention to eliminating verbal expressions of hatred and discrimination that often precede crimes motivated by hate. The paper discusses the possibility of improving education and coordinated activities of the State, particularly of courts, prosecutors, police and local self-governments, to combat hate speech and hate crimes. The aim of the paper is to present mechanisms of improving institutional capacities to prevent these phenomena that have been implemented within the project ?Implementation of Anti-Discrimination Policies in Serbia? financed by the European Union. The paper concludes that central to the success of this process are the education of state actors, and the development of a value system based on equality and acceptance of diversity.

After appearing only in medical law for a long time, advance directives and other forms of voluntary measures are increasingly also being recognised as an effective protector of the right to self-determination in family law. The aim of the paper is to consider the Croatian model of advance decision making in family law, observing it in the context of European, international and comparative law. In this sense, the paper first provides an overview of relevant international and European documents, then briefly analyses different solutions to the discussion in question that exist in the national legislations of the selected European countries, namely, Germany, Slovenia, the Czech Republic, Serbia, and finally a detailed analysis of Croatian law. The paper aims to point out certain doubts and ambiguities that exist in Croatian law, give suggestions for improving the legislation, and encourage the continuation of scientific research in this legal field.

The village of Lovćenac is located in the region of Bačka, practically halfway between the cities of Novi Sad and Subotica, and has a population of about 4,000. After World War II it was settled by Montenegrins from the region known as "Old Montenegro". Today, the residents of Lovćenac are faced with great challenges of ethnic and national identification. The village is a stronghold of Montenegrin nationalist feeling in Serbia, and the only place where Montenegrin "traditional" culture has been preserved to this day. Having studied Montenegrins in Serbian towns and cities, my intention was to study the identity formula of a rural Montenegrin community in Serbia, and it was with this aim that in 2009 I conducted a study of Lovćenac villagers' identity, using observation and the interview as methodological tools. I paid particular attention to the study of alternative parameters of ethnic identity, specifically the phenomenon of masculinity, which in this case could provide an important analytical instrument. In this particular case, masculinity is manifested through specific and adapted forms of aggresivity, heterosexuality, authoritarianism, laziness etc. These syndroms and concepts are important for self-determination, but also for description, making ethnic boundaries sharper and more distinct. This concept has proved to be especially useful in the case of identification with smaller ethnic (clan) and regional groups, i.e. in intragroup classification. Masculinity has turned out to be an important regulator of interethnic and intraethnic relations, that is, a relational category that is invoked and used when descent, regional affiliation, religion and language are insufficiently clear criteria for ethnic systematization and operationalization.

The meta-legal basis of the provincial autonomy of Vojvodina appeared in political form only after the state fusion in 1918. A crossanalysis of the material on Vojvodina political autonomism points to its origin in the historical law of the Habsburg Empire, which was accepted by a group of few political outsiders and landowners of Vojvodina. The new modern state effectively and quickly solved problems: currency, tax and agrarian issues, improvement of trade, association and achieving sustainability of independent farms in Vojvodina. Then the Vojvodina autonomists looked for arguments in the backward standpoints of the past. The narcissism of cultural "superiority", negative prejudice against "Serbianians", the confusion of the concepts of regionalism, decentralization, autonomy and self-government became the political material for the future meta-legal construction of the autonomy of Vojvodina modeled on the "crown land" of the Habsburg real union. Already at the time of the fusion of Banat, Bačka and Baranja with Serbian, there were certain tendencies for the distinctiveness of the administration of these united area. At that time, happened first political attempts of a small number of politicians for the "State of Slovenes, Serbs and Croats" to receive a certain role in the fusion of those areas with Serbia, by dint in Zagreb. In the area of Vojvodina, the right to self-determination of the people meant breaking the state ties with Hungary and fusion to Serbia. For this purpose was formed the Great National Assembly of Serbs, Bunjevs and other Slavs of Banat, Bačka and Baranja was formed. At the end of 1918, the Assembly elected by direct, equal and general suffrage of the population. This was the realization of the people's right to self-determination in a modern democratic form. The Assembly elected the administrative bodies of the temporary management of the area. Those bodies were not effective due to outdated understandings, unclear legal nature, and lack of distinction between administrative work, legal authorisation and legal competence. The problems caused by the temporary regional administration make dificulties the subsequent work of the authorities of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, causing great intolerance towards "centralism." The government of the new state effectively solved administrative problems, currency, tax and agrarian issues under democratic conditions, and developed local selfgovernment. As the public became aware of the benefits of democratic modernity, general support for the new order grew. Opponents of the new order were a small number of nationalized landowners, economically stable officials and privileged individuals of the former Habsburg order. Among them, Serbian opposition politicians and Croatian nationalists sought support. Vojvodina's political autonomism is from the beginning linked to the political work of Croatian nationalists, the political fashion of "regionalism" and the historical sentiments of the Habsburg era. From the beginning formulated political ideas of Vojvodina autonomy, two phenomena stand out conspicuously: the support of Croatian nationalists and emotional intolerance towards Serbia and "Serbians." These phenomena are paradigmatically shown by two historical sources: Mihovil Tomandl's article "Serbian hegemony" (1923) and the proclamation of the Independent Democratic Party published under the title "Vojvodina wants to be its own" (1924).

This paper covers the period from 1937 to 1945, the period of the establishment and works of the Serbian Cultural Club. The paper will discuss the political circumstances in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia in wich Serbian Cultural Club was founded, as well as the program goals and its activities in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Special emphasis will be put on the period of the Second World War in the Bosnia and Herzegovina and the former common state and the activities of the Serbian Cultural Club in the Second World War. The work and achievement of the program goals of the Serbian Cultural Club in the Second World War will be presented through the work of the Exile Government in London and the activities of the Chetniks Movement in the Bosnia and Herzegovina and the former common state. The Serbian Cultural Club was formed as a form of political association and activity, which included politicians, public workers, scientists, members of various political organizations, representatives of state and parastate bodies and organizations, under the slogan "Serbs for Reunion". The club acted as a unique and homogeneous organization, regardless of the composition of the membership, with the goal of saving Serbia and Serbs. This most clearly expressed his overall activity, composition and degree of influence on state policy. The most important issues of state or Serbian nationalist policy for the interest of the Government were discussed in the Club, so the club had an extensive network of boards and several media. Professor and Rector of the University of Belgrade, Dr. Slobodan Jovanović, was elected the first president of the Serbian Cultural Club. He was the ideological creator of this organization (and he set out the basic tasks and goals of the Club). The vice presidents were Dr. Nikola Stojanović and Dr. Dragiša Vasić, and Dr. Vasa Čubrilović the secretary. Dr. Stevan Moljevic was the president of the board of the Serbian Cultural Club for the Bosnian Krajina, based in Banja Luka. According to Dinić, the initiative for the formation of the Serbian Cultural Club was given by Bosnian-Herzegovinian Serbs Dr. Nikola Stojanović, Dr. Vladimir Čorović, Dr. Vladimir Grčić and Dr. Slobodan Jovanović. The activities of the Serbian Cultural Club can be divided into two stages. The first from its founding in 1936 until the signing of the Cvetković-Maček agreement, and the second from 1939 to 1941. The program of the Serbian Cultural Club was a sum of Greater Serbia programs of all major political parties that operated in Serbia with the help of state institutions. The goals of the Serbian Cultural Club were mainly: expansionist policy of expanding Serbian rule to neighboring areas, denying the national identity of all other Yugoslav nations and exercising the right to self-determination. The program goals of the Serbian Cultural Club were to propagate Greater Serbian ideology. With its program about Greater Serbia and its activities, the Serbian Cultural Club has become the bearer of the most extreme Serbian nationalist aspirations. After the Cvetković-Maček agreement of August 1939, the Serbian Cultural Club demanded a revision of the agreement, calling for a Serbo-Croatian agreement based on ethnic, historical or economic-geographical principles. The adoption of one of these principles was to apply to the entire area inhabited by Serbs. The subcommittees of the Serbian Cultural Club in Bosnia and Herzegovina had the primary task of working to emphasize its Serbian character, and after the Cvetkovic-Macek agreement to form awareness that the whole of Bosnia and Herzegovina should enter the Serbian territorial unit. With the prominent slogan "Wherever there are Serbs - there is Serbia", the Serbs in Bosnia and Herzegovina were marked as the "vigilant guardian of the Serbian national consciousness". The leadership and most of the members of the Serbian Cultural Club joined the Chetnik movement as Draža Mihailović's national ideologues. The policy of the militant Greater Serbia program and Serbian nationalism of the Serbian Cultural Club was accepted as the program of Draža Mihailović's Chetnik movement. Some of Draža Mihailović's most important associates belonged to the Serbian Cultural Club. The main political goals of the Chetnik movement are formulated in several program documents. The starting point in them was the idea of a "Greater and Homogeneous Serbia", which was based on the idea that Serbs should be the leading nation in the Balkans.

This article presents the textbook of the famous Transcarpathian and Slovak Rusinist Valery Padyak Istoriia karpatorusyns′koho natsional′noho teatra y dramaturgiï [History of the Carpatho-Rusyn National theatre and drama]. The Rusyns (more precisely, the Carpatho-Rusyns) are the autochthonous East Slavic population of the Carpathian region: Ukrainian Transcarpathia and the adjacent regions of Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, and Romania. There is also a Rusyn diaspora present in Serbia, Croatia, the USA, Canada, and other states. The number of Rusyns in the world is a controversial issue, one reason for this being their polyvariant identification. At present, a significant proportion of ethnic Rusyns consider themselves representatives of an independent people, who are not Ukrainian or Russian. Padyak, a staunch supporter of the Rusyn ethno-national identity and at the same time a serious academic scientist, made an attempt to trace the development of drama and theatre in the Rusyn environment in parallel with the processes of Rusyn national self-determination. The author traces the evolution of folk theatre performances to the modern Rusyn national theatre, which is actively being developed in different states with Rusyn inhabitants. V. Padyak pays increased attention to theater and drama in the second half of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as well as during the period when Subcarpathian Rus (Transcarpathia) entered the structure of interwar Czechoslovakia and Horthy Hungary. In contrast, the author hardly examines post-war theater life in the Transcarpathian region, believing that its study is more appropriate in the context of Ukrainian, rather than Rusyn, studies. This textbook by V. Padyak, addressed primarily to Rusynist students at the University of Prešov (Slovakia), is of undoubted interest to anyone interested in the history and culture of the Rusyns.

Background: Slavic idea, which was based on the idea of the ethnic, linguistic-cultural and historical affinity of the Slavs, was intensified at the beginning of the twentieth century in conditions of political enslavement of the majority of Slavic peoples. It became an integral part of such concepts as Austro-Slavism, Illirism-Yugoslavism, Russian imperial Pan-Slavism, and neo-Slavism. In the interwar period, the ideas of Slavic unity aroused interest in almost all Slavic states and became the subject of discussion on the pages of the special periodicals. The Ukrainian intellectual O. Bochkovskii outlined his point of view. Purpose: The purpose of the article is to analyze the interpretation of O. Bochkovsky (in 1916, investigating so-called non-historical nations, distinguishing three phases in the process of their national revival: national awakening, economic emancipation, politicization of the movement), the idea of Slavic unity in all its manifestations at various stages of historical development . Results: O. Bochkowski believed that in the process of national revival, the desire of small Slavic peoples to rally on the grounds of belonging to the Slavs played a positive role: in uniting, the peoples hoped to stand in the struggle for their own existence, seeking support from the most numerous and strongest people. Therefore, among the Balkan and Austrian Slavs, Slavophilism was often identified with Russophilism. O. Bochkovsky criticized the philosophy of Slavophilism for lack of concrete measures in the program to solve the most important - the national problem in Russia. In Pan-Slavophilism, he identified two opposite directions: Pan-Russianism and Austro-Slavism. Pan-Russianism (Russian political Pan-Slavism) was used by the official Russian authorities outside the Russian Empire (in Austria-Hungary, the Balkans) to mask their imperialist goals. Austro-Slavism regarded as a typical manifestation of the Slavophilism of the enslaved Slavic peoples, who began on the path of rebirth. O. Bochkovsky considered contradictory statements of the new course of Neo-Slavism: taking the principle of national self-determination and independence of the Slavic peoples, Neo-Slavism neglected the national movement of the Ukrainian people. Scientist called the First World War, which actualized the national question, a signal for the enslaved peoples, a process that initiated the formation of future interethnic relations. Evaluating the difficulties of the process of national consolidation of Yugoslavia after the end of the World War, the scientist assessed Illrimism as a consonant ideology, believing that Serbo-Croatian dualism was primarily due to cultural differences. He positively appreciated the formation of the "Kingdom of Serbia, Croats and Slovenes" and expressed regret over the degeneration of Illirism-Yugo-Slavism in Pan-Serbian central-ism. The scholar explained the formation and effective functioning of the Czechoslovak state in the absence of the Czech-Slovak antagonism. O. Bochkovsky assessed negatively appearance in the 1920-th a new Russian ideology – Eurasianism. O. Bochkovsky acknowledged for every nation the right to independence and the formation of their own state. He considered Pan-Slavism to be utopia, since after the First World War, there was an urgent need to protect the Slavs, and the isolation of a single Slavic people, which could have become a leader for the whole of the Slavic region, would constitute a threat to the independence of the weak Slavic peoples . More he considered the creation of political unions within continents, such as Pan-Europe, Pan-Asia, Pan-Africa, Pan-Amerika. Key words: Austro-Slavism, O. Bochkovsky, illirism, Eurasianism, neoslavism, Pan-Slavism, slavophilia, Yugoslavism.

The First World War launched a tremendous restructuring of the international system. One of its major outcomes was a transformation of the small states of Central and South-Eastern Europe from objects to subjects of international relations. Having emerged or enlarged their territories in wake of multinational empires’ collapse, the small states became key players on the regional level. Reshaping of the Balkan regional order is of a particular interest to researchers as the Balkan instability triggered destruction of the previous international system. The purpose of the article is to understand how a world conflict, which had broken out in South-Eastern Europe, transformed the region. To do this the author dwells upon three sets of question. The first is the Balkan contribution in the origins of the First World War. The second is an interplay of factors which caused reshaping of the Balkan political space during the war years. The third is a new landscape of the postwar order in South-Eastern Europe. Methodological approaches applied here define new and actual character of this article. The author uses conceptual tools of the theory of international relations to analyze a process of region «building» which took place in circumstances of «tectonic» shifts within the international system in the early decades of the 20th century. Thus, the author applies the analytical model of the regional order as well as key definitions of the theory of international relations – great power, small state (the article focuses on Serbia, Romania, Bulgaria and Greece), principle of self-determination. It is concluded that the regional order emerged in the Balkans in wake of the First World War was a result of multi-dimensional interaction of factors. They are as follows: 1) the military, strategic and foreign policy planning of hostile coalitions of powers (the Entente and the bloc of the Central powers), seeking to win the loyalty of regional allies; 2) demonstrated by the small states understanding that the war had opened a «window of opportunity» to put into life their national interests and programs; 3) the decline of traditional multi-ethnic empires, which had formed political atmosphere in the Balkans. It is stated that a landscape of post-war regional order in the Balkans was determined with cooperation and competition of the local national states in the situation when the multi-ethnic empires had disappeared from the Balkan political space while the architects of the Versailles system – Great Britain and France seemed to be less interested in South-Eastern Europe in after war years. It meant that the new Balkan order enjoyed a relative autonomy compared to the previous one.

The complex issue of regions, treated by the new region science (which the author calls regionomics), implies the need to introduce certain distinctions for analytical purposes. Thus the article determines the requests of regional movements for political self-determination (= regionalist ideologies) as regionalism; attempts of the centralized Unitarian state to implement decentralization (or any other attempt of the state to introduce administrative divisions) as regionalization, and the region as the basic analytical concept of the regionomics. Experience points to the strong interaction between these three categories. Sometimes, a common name is used for them - regional (or regionalistic) corpus, that is regionality. To round up the regional issues, the regional policy, that is the strategy of regional development, should be added to these categories. The main goal of this paper is to clear up and define as correctly as possible the basic regionomic notions, to create not only an adequate analytical apparatus which would serve to explain the current regional phenomena and processes, but to present a basis for the policy which could successfully come to grips with the solution of the regionality problem (which has all the characteristics of a developmental, strategic problem). In addition, the paper also offers some terminological specifications (region, and not regija!). The paper presents answers to numerous questions: what are regions: an idea and/or reality? How are they characterized along the following dimensions: territoriality and institutionalization; objective criterion: homogeneity and functionality subjective criterion: identity. How do regions change and develop? By state interventions, restructuring of economy or through new discourses political, cultural or scientific? In the first part of the paper, the author also discusses the following issues: growth of a region as a social process region and power; regional separatism: economic and political; informatics revolution and regional structure (region versus network); global and European frameworks of the regionalization of Serbia. The second part of the paper is dedicated to the issues of institutional arrangements (optimal degree of the /de/centralization of a state), regional politics (regional goals in conflict, arbitrating, /de/centralization; aggregate efficiency versus inter-regional equality; generative regional model: "exceptions" from the "classic" rule: regional development contributes to the national-economic development; prosperity of the territory versus prosperity of the population; inter-regional equality: tendency for redistribution; tendency for centralization; goals of the policy of regional development; spatially coordinated regional-political target system; spatially non-coordinated regional-political target system; instruments of regional policy; evaluation of the results of regional policy; new regional policy from the end of the past and at the beginning of this century) and strategies of regional development (primarily, the strategy of achieving the goals of the region).

State is society’s need for the existence of an organized power, equipped with the right equipments of coercion and able to run the society, by imposing the choices that seem reasonable to them, through legal norms. State is an organization of state power; it is an organized power which imposes its will to all the society and has a whole mechanism to execute this will. The state realizes its functions through power, which is a mechanism to accomplish its relevant functions. The power’s concept is a social concept, which can be understood only as a relation between two subjects, between two wills. Power is the ability to impose an order, a rule and other’s behavior in case that he doesn’t apply voluntary the relevant norm, respectively the right. Using state power is related to creation and application, respectively the implementation of law. To understand state power better, we have to start from its overall character. So, we notice that in practice we encounter different kinds of powers: the family’s one, the school’s one, the health’s one, the religion’s, culture’s etc. The notion of powers can be understood as a report between two subjects, two wills. Power is an order for other’s behavior. Every power is some kind of liability, dependence from others. In the legal aspect, supremacy of state presents the constitutive – legislative form upon the powers that follow after it. Supremacy, respectively the prevalence, is stronger upon other powers in its territory. For example we take the highest state body, the parliament as a legislative body, where all other powers that come after it, like the executive and court’s one, are dependable on state’s central power. We can’t avoid the carriage of state’s sovereignty in the competences of different international organizations. Republic, based on ratified agreements for certain cases can overstep state’s power on international organizations. The people legitimate power and its bodies, by giving their votes for a mandate of governance (people’s verdict). It is true that we understand people’s sovereignty only as a quality of people, where with the word people we understand the entirety of citizens that live in a state. The sovereignty’s case actualizes especially to prove people’s right for self-determination until the disconnection that can be seen as national – state sovereignty. National sovereignty is the right of a nation for self-determination. Sovereignty’s cease happens when the monopoly of physical strength ceases as well, and this monopoly is won by another organization. A state can be ceased with the voluntary union of two or more states in a mutual state, or a state can be ceased from a federative state, where federal units win their independence. In this context we have to do with former USSR’s units, separated in some independent states, like Czechoslovakia unit that was separated in two independent states: in Czech Republic and Slovakia. Former Yugoslavia was separated from eight federal units, today from these federal units seven of them have won their independence and their international recognition, and the Republic of Kosovo is one amongst them. Every state power’s activity has legal effect inside the borders of a certain territory and inside this territory the people come under the relevant state’s power. Territorial expansion of state power is three dimensional. The first dimension includes the land inside a state’s borders, the second dimension includes the airspace upon the land and the third dimension includes water space. The airspace upon inside territorial waters is also a power upon people and the power is not universal, meaning that it doesn’t include all mankind. State territory is the space that’s under state’s sovereignty. It is an essential element for its existence. According to the author Juaraj Andrassy, state territory lies in land and water space inside the borders, land and water under this space and the air upon it. Coastal waters and air are considered as parts that belong to land area, because in every case they share her destiny. Exceptionally, according to the international right or international treaties, it is possible that in one certain state’s territory another state’s power can be used. In this case we have to do with the extraterritoriality of state power. The state extraterritoriality’s institute is connected to the concept of another state’s territory, where we have to do with diplomatic representatives of a foreign country, where in the buildings of these diplomatic representatives, the power of the current state is not used. These buildings, according to the international right, the diplomatic right, have territorial immunity and the relevant host state bodies don’t have any power. Regarding to inviolability, respectively within this case, we have two groups to mention: the real immunity and the personal immunity, which are connected with the extraterritoriality’s institute. Key words: Independence, Sovereignty, Preponderance, Prevalence, Territorial Expansion.

The recruitment and retention of well-qualified military personnel are essential for any armed forces. This is even more true because most armed forces in Europe have shifted from a conscript-based to an all-volunteer format. Based on presentations and discussions during the 14th ERGOMAS Conference in Athens, Greece, June 26-30, 2017, this special publication of Contemporary Military Challenges focuses on the challenges of recruiting and retaining interested young people in the armed forces. In the ERGOMAS Working Group “Recruitment and Retention”, chaired by Tibor Szvircsev Tresch, 20 papers from different researchers were presented. In the five conference sessions on this issue, we had interesting discussions on various related topics. Session 1 dealt with the subject of minorities in the armed forces, and especially how they can be integrated and how they can participate in the system. In the next session, recruitment and retention in the reserve forces stood as the theme of the presentations. Politics and the military: mutual influence and the effect on military personnel was the topic of session 3, and session 4 analysed the motivational factors and reasons for attrition. The last session focused attention on recruitment and retention strategies. From these five sessions we were able to choose five presentations from all of these topics to adapt as journal articles. In the five articles offered in this journal, recruitment and retention are broadly discussed in historical terms and also based on the most recent research results. In military sociology research has generally addressed the recruitment of volunteers into the active force, but the reserve components and the conscription system should also be reviewed in detail. This special issue also analyzes reserve forces and conscription systems with regard to recruitment and retention. In the past not much attention has been paid to the topic of recruitment and retention in Europe. This was also true during the time of the Cold War for the conscript-based armed forces; the recruitment of new personnel was guaranteed by the conscript system. The advantages of this system were that the conscripted young men (in Europe only men were obliged to enter the armed forces; for women this was on a volunteer basis, and in some countries it was even forbidden for women to join the armed forces, or they could join only in auxiliary positions) could be socialized during their military service and also convinced that a professional military position could be a career for them. In other words, through the conscript system the armed forces were able to win new personnel who could imagine staying in the armed forces as long-term employees. One consequence of this was that the armed forces did not have to recruit new personnel on the free job market. The ‘in-house’ recruiting system provided by conscription was in most cases sufficient to catch enough personnel and – very importantly – well-qualified staff. But with the end of the Cold War and new missions, armed forces had to cover new tasks. These new tasks also required, on the one hand, personnel who were able and willing to stay abroad for a longer time, and on the other hand, new skills to cope with the new circumstances in the missions abroad. With the conflicts in the 1990s such as the Gulf War, the Somali Civil War with the United Missions UNOSMO I and II, the Bosnian War and the Kosovo War with the involvement of NATO, Western European armed forces had huge problems sending qualified personnel to these crises. Paradoxically the European armed forces were at that time much bigger in the number of soldiers than they are today, but in almost every country it was forbidden to send conscripted soldiers on missions abroad. Therefore the situation was that after the end of the Cold War these armed forces were not fit for the new tasks. Through the experience gained within these missions, a process of multi-nationalization and professionalization took place in the European armed forces. Multi-nationalization meant that it was more important for many states to join alliances, especially NATO. In a multi-national framework the aspect of greater interoperability between different armed forces was given heed. This led to more professional structures. This structural change is strongly reflected in the number of armed forces that have suspended conscription. In 1990, just four out of 26 European countries had an all-volunteer force, i.e. no conscription system. Today, most European states have switched to an all-volunteer format for their armed forces. This situation has altered the manning system. The flow of newly conscripted recruits disappeared, and personnel had to be found on the free market. At the same time as the armed forces were changing from conscript-based mass armies to leaner all-volunteer forces, civil society was engaged in a process of changing values. Traditional values such as obedience, discipline, and subordination became less significant for young people, and values such as autonomy and self-determination were esteemed much more. Some reasons for this were urbanization, an increasing level of education, and greater differentiation and specialization in the working environment. This led to a discrepancy between civil values that focus on the individual, and military values, which refer to the group dimension. At the moment the consequences of this process can be seen in the difficulty recruiting military personnel in sufficient quantity and quality. Questions related to human resources have become existential for armed forces; not only filling positions in the armed forces, but also adapting them to the new missions in a multicultural environment requires the urgent efforts of human resources development. Attention is now directed towards widening the recruitment pool. Women and young people with a migrant background should complement the traditional recruitment profile of a young, white male. Or in other words, the new recruiting targets must be on an equal footing with the old traditional recruitment basis. With that in mind the European armed forces must alter their recruitment outlook so that they will be attractive to these new target groups. The papers and research presented in this journal may help to broaden the understanding of this new recruitment and retention process. Have a good read!

В статье рассматривается, сложная проблема национального самоопределения народов. В современном международном праве, как известно, признаются два кардинально противоположных подхода к решению данной про блемы. Первый подход связан с территориальной целостностью государств, ко торая признается международным правом и уставом ООН, а второй с правом нации на самоопределение вплоть до отделения и возникновения нового незави симого государства. В то же время от влиятельных государств земного шара, а не от международного права зависит, признавать то или иное вновь образо вавшееся государство или не признавать. Классическим примером в этом плане служит Республика Косово, чью независимость признали США и другие государ ства, а независимость Абхазии и Южной Осетии признала РФ и еще несколько государств. The article deals with the complex problem of national selfdetermination of peoples. Modern international law, as we know, recognizes two radically opposite approaches to the solution of this problem. The rst approach is related to the territorial integrity of States, which is recognized by international law and the UN Charter, and the second to the right of a nation to selfdetermination up to the separation and emergence of a new independent state. At the same time, it is up to the in uential States of the world, not international law, to recognize a newly formed state or not to recognize it. Classic examples in this regard are the Republic of Kosovo, separated with the help of the United States, great Britain and other States from Serbia, as well as Abkhazia and South Ossetia, separated from Georgia. The independence of Kosovo was recognized by the USA and other States, and the independence of Abkhazia and South Ossetia was recognized by Russia and some other States.

The second part of the article considers the issue of the contradiction of the realization of the right to self-determination and the principle of territorial integrity of Serbia and Ukraine on the example of Kosovo and Crimea. It presents an analysis of the legitimacy of the will expression of Kosovars and Crimeans and its compliance with the norms of international law. The preconditions and factors of the ethnopolitical conflict are examined and the main problematic issues that caused controversies between the central and local authorities in Kosovo and Crimea are identified. The article emphasizes that the result of the plebiscites in Kosovo (1998) and Crimea (2014) was the declaration of independence, denied by central authorities of Serbia and Ukraine and met with mixed reactions by the international community. The self-proclaimed republics have only external features of statehood and are subject to external administration of other countries. A latent opposition of geopolitical opponents in the international arena is noted, which is to some extent traced through the position on the recognition / non-recognition of Kosovo and Crimea. The article draws attention to the fact that inconsistent interpretations of certain principles of international law promote secession movements in countries where conflicts periodically arise between central and local authorities. The emphasis is placed on the necessity of a clearer definition of the aforementioned international legal norms and obligations undertaken by subjects of international law. The article holds that in order to avoid such situations as in Kosovo or Crimea, to eliminate conflicts related to the possibility of an ambiguous interpretation and application of the principles of international law, an internationally recognized system of more stringent and comprehensive measures should be introduced to cease and prevent threats to the territorial integrity of countries. A strong position of the international community on the abovementioned principles with the history of the liberation movements of these peoples taken into account should become the measure precluding the aggravation of conflict situations related to the aspiration of peoples for self-determination.

This article is dedicated to the comparative analysis of the advisory opinion of the International Court of Justice on Kosovo, thereby revealing the criteria of the legality of realization of the right of peoples to self-determination and clarifying the question of their applicability to the Artsakh case. Historical and comparative methods of scientific research were used in the article, by means of which positive and negative aspects of the advisory opinion of the UN Court were highlighted. The analysis has shown that perhaps for the first time, an attempt was made by the International Court of Justice to define the criteria of the legality of the act of declaration of independence by a national community seeking self-determination, which aims to remove the right of peoples to self-determination from the sphere of political speculation and place it in the realm of legal certainty. The analysis also showed that the standards developed by the UN Court are fully applicable to Artsakh as well. The article also made an important record that even in the seemingly non-pro-Armenian stance of the ongoing negotiation process, new negotiation approaches being formed by Armenia are within the context of the legal logic of the UN court and thus have the potential to achieve legal confirmation of the independence of the people of Artsakh, if appropriate diplomatic and military-political work is carried out.

Abstract This article investigates the role of 1918, the end of the First World War, and the establishment of the Yugoslav state in public memories of post-communist Croatia and Serbia. Analysing history schoolbooks within the context of major works of history and public discussion, the authors trace the developments of public memory of the end of the war and 1918. Drawing on the concepts of public memory and historical narrative, the authors focus on the ways in which history textbooks create historical narratives and on the types of lessons from the past that can be extracted from these narratives. While Serbia and Croatia have rather different patterns of First World War memory, the authors argue that both states have abandoned the Yugoslav communist narrative and now publicly commemorate 1918 as a loss of national statehood. This is somehow paradoxical, since the establishment of the South Slav State in 1918 was supposedly an outcome of the Wilsonian principle of national self-determination. In Serbia, the story of loss is packed in a fatalistic narrative of heroism and victimhood, while in Croatia the story of loss is embedded in a tale of necessary evils, which nevertheless had a positive outcome in a sovereign Croatian state.