Football in Southeastern Europe ─ From Ethnic Homogenization to Reconciliation

This volume draws together scholarship across a number of disciplines – history, sociology, media and cultural studies, political science, Slavonic studies – to examine the significance of the sport of football within Southeastern Europe, with an especial focus on countries of the former Yugoslavia. The volume is timely as there is growing recognition inside and beyond the academy that football is a key cultural site in which the tensions within the region have been, and continue to be, reflected. Important issues such as resurgent nationalism, ethno/religious identity construction, and collective masculine identity are played out in relation to the sport of football. The papers within the volume explore these and other themes in detailed case studies that will be of interest to academics and policy makers concerned with wanting to know more about how football should be considered within agendas focused on reconciliation and a socially inclusive future.

This book was previously published as a special issue of Sport in Society.

John Hughson is based at the International Football Institute, University of Central Lancashire. He is author of Making Sporting Cultures (2009); principal author of The Uses of Sport (2005); co-editor of The Containment of Soccer in Australia (2010); co-editor of Sport in the City: Cultural Connections (2011); and principal editor of The Routledge Handbook of Football Studies (2014 forthcoming), all of which were published by Routledge.

Fiona Skillen is Lecturer in Sport and Events at Glasgow Caledonian University. Her research interests focus on the history of sport, in particular, aspects of gender, politics, social policy and health. She is particularly interested in the influence which dominant discourses concerning gender and modernity had on women’s popular culture. Dr Skillen is the author of Women, Sport and Modernity in Interwar Britain (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2013).