[ Balkans ]

It has been a trend of the waning 20th century that scholars increasingly felt the need for not only a critical re-evaluation of their sources but also of their disciplines. This trend has not gone unnoticed among students of the Balkans; the violent conflicts and wars of the 1990s, it seemed, invested such re-assessment projects with even greater consequence.

Reviewing aspects of this debate, he seeks to pose new questions on the basis of its preliminary conclusions on diverse themes such as international communication, perceived mandates of historians, the nature of historiographical legacies and traditions, competition by amateur historians, and the problem of disciplinary parochialism. The aim is not to formulate an agenda for Balkan Studies as such but to foster a continued debate on the state of the discipline, a purpose also served by the international workshop Balkan Studies - quo vadis? on April 25, 2009, in Vienna.