Geographies of Ethnopolitics: Unravelling the Spatial and Political Economies of ‘Ethnic Conflict’

St Antony’s College Oxford. South East European Studies at Oxford (SEESOX), European Studies Centre, Occasional Paper No. 7/06, April 2006, 29 p.The paper examines the relationship between spatial structures and ethnopolitical problems and discourses in the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia. Its main aim is to challenge the dominant narratives about the genesis of the ‘ethnic war’ that supposedly engulfed this country in 2001, by investigating some of the affected areas’ underlying social, economic and political geographies. The main argument of the paper is that ethnopolitical conflicts lie at the tip of an iceberg of socio-spatial
contradictions that accumulated during the days of Yugoslav modernisation, and were further strengthened by the post-communist transition. The paper thus examines the political and territorial processes that predicated the rise of these ethnopolitical struggles. It identifies several ways in which the ‘ethnic war’ discourse was produced through the assignment of factual authority to particular geographical narratives.