Register for the in-person session
Join the Center for Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies for our autumn 2022 Graduate Student Lecture. This semester's lecture entitled "Negotiating Ethnicity: Diplomacy and the Demarcation of Epirus, 1913-1914" will be given by Christopher Kinley (PhD candidate in the Department of History).
Abstract: This presentation explores the diplomacy of the European Powers as they attempted to create a border between Greece and the inchoate Albanian state in the aftermath of the Balkan Wars and the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire in Europe. In order to create the border, the European Powers formed a commission to conduct interviews and ascertain the ethnicity of various villages throughout the region using the single criterion of language spoken in the home. The European Powers, however, engaged in specious and self-serving diplomacy to advance their own regional agendas, which often hindered the work of the border commission. The bilingual and multi-confessional nature of the region, paired with the unwillingness of villagers to cooperate, proved problematic for the commission. In the end, the European Powers created a border based upon their own agendas and negotiations. As a result, the border established in 1913 instigated ethnic conflict and the rise of a violent separatist movement that ultimately led to the short-lived Republic of Northern Epirus; an internationally recognized autonomous Greek ethno-state within the Principality of Albania. More than just a microhistory, this presentation pinpoints the emergence of diplomacy that delimitated lands and peoples to form ethnically homogenous nation-states in the aftermath of war—a diplomatic practice that was reiterated in various contexts in eastern Europe, and globally, after the First World War. Moreover, this presentation highlights transnational dialogues that bridged East and West Europe in the early-20th century, as well as providing a novel history of two southeastern European nation-states that have been largely relegated to the periphery in the study of eastern Europe.
About the Speaker: Christopher Kinley is a PhD candidate in the department of History at the Ohio State University under the supervision of Theodora Dragostinova. He specializes in the modern history of Greece and Albania. His thesis project details the creation of the Albanian-Greek borderlands through a diplomatic dialogue regarding ethnicity, and how the processes of war, military occupation, and diplomacy solidified national identities in the region.
