‘Albania: €1’ or the story of ‘big policies, small outcomes’: how Albania constructs and engages its diaspora

Since the fall of the communist regime in the early 1990s, Albania has experienced one of the most significant emigrations in the world as a share of its population. By 2010 almost half of its resident population was estimated to be living abroad – primarily in neighbouring Greece and Italy, but also in the UK and North America. This chapter discusses the emergence and establishment of the Albanian diaspora, its temporal and geographical diversity, and not least its involvement with Albania itself. Albania’s policymaking and key institutions are considered, with a focus on matters of citizenship; voting rights; the debate on migration and development; and not least the complex ways in which kin-state minority policies – related to ethnic Albanians living in Kosovo, Montenegro, southern Serbia, Macedonia and Greece – are interwoven with Albania’s emigration policies

The overstated merits of proportional representation. The Republic of Macedonia as a natural experiment for assessing the impact of electoral systems on descriptive representation

For the comparative study of the effects of electoral systems on the descriptive representation of ethnic minorities in parliament, Macedonia is a highly interesting case because the country had several elections under majoritarian as well as under proportional systems. Whereas most observers claim that ethnic Albanians have benefitted from the introduction of proportional representation, the article argues that the merits of PR have been overstated. First, scholars have often only reported members of political parties but not independent candidates in parliament. Second, when comparing the share of seats before and after the introduction of PR, the growing share of the Albanians in the population is usually ignored. © 2014 The Editor of Ethnopolitics

A political ethnography of rural communities under an authoritarian regime: The case of Belarus

Cet article explicite d’abord les conditions d’une enquête d’ethnographie politique menée dans les campagnes de Biélorussie entre 2006 et 2013. Une triple difficulté a émergé : enquêter principalement auprès des classes populaires ; effectuer cette ethnographie dans un milieu, le monde rural, où l’État, par ses structures économiques et administratives, est omniprésent, et où le contrôle sur les personnes est particulièrement marqué ; travailler sur le politique dans un régime autoritaire hérité de l’Union soviétique qui n’admet pas de mise en cause et de débat critique. L’article caractérise ensuite les modalités de mise en œuvre d’une “ethnographie en pointillés”, qui s’est avérée fructueuse pour recueillir du matériau, et reposant essentiellement sur trois techniques : la “décérémonialisation” de la situation d’enquête, la familiarisation avec les enquêtés et la symétrisation des relations par l’exposition de soi. A noter que cet article est traduit d’un texte intitulé “Enquêter en Biélorussie. Une ethnographie politique des mondes ruraux en régime autoritaire”. La version originale est accessible librement sur le site du BMS, sous la forme d’un document complémentaire à la version publiée de l’article.This article firstly explains the conditions for a political ethnography survey conducted in rural Belarus between 2006 and 2013. Three difficulties became apparent: conducting a survey primarily among the lower classes; carrying out this ethnographic study in an environment – the rural world – in which the State, via its economic and administrative structures, is omnipresent, and in which there is particularly strong control over the people; and studying politics in an authoritarian regime inherited from the Soviet Union, which does not tolerate challenges to its authority or critical debate. The article then characterizes the implementation procedures for a “discrete ethnography”, which proved to be a fruitful approach for the collection of material, based primarily on three techniques: the “deceremonialization” of the survey situation, familiarization with the subjects of the survey and the symmetrization of relationships by self-exposition. It is worth noting that this article is the translated version of an article called “Enquêter en Biélorussie. Une ethnographie politique des mondes ruraux en régime autoritaire”. The original version is openly available on the BMS website as a complementary document to this article