Call For IBAC Conference In Kosovo
7th IBAC CONFERENCE
“THE ROLE OF DIPLOMACY IN THE HISTORY OF THE BALKANS”
(9-11 November 2017-Prishtina)
Diplomacy is a stage of performance where the communicative skills and representative abilities play the leading part. Diplomats, envoys, missionaries, as well as travellers with royal tasks in history constituted a group of learned people with rare capabilities that enables modern societies to trace back to a wide-ranging or even a universal past subtly designed with royal and imperial symbols. This was also the case in the Balkans throughout the Middle Ages and early modern history. Princely courts have always been a centre of diplomatic encounters. The Balkans in the 14th and 15th centuries were swarming with Italian merchant-envoys, Ottoman and Hungarian emissaries, Stefan Dušan’s representatives, the ambassadors of Dubrovnik and many more traveling back and forth between the princely courts and royal seats of the kingdoms in and around the peninsula.
The political and military rise of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the Ottoman Empire, and the house of Habsburg in Austria in the 16th century changed the diplomatic agenda of the Balkans to be redefined on an imperial level. The independent courts of local and regional powers ceased to pursue diplomatic goals on their own behalf and the learned class of the Balkan societies preferably with a tie to nobility offered its expertise and proficiency in diplomatic affairs to the imperial courts in Istanbul, Vienna and to the royal residence in Warsaw. In doing so, the local nobility found yet another way to hold an esteemed status within the early modern imperial system marked with clashing Ottoman-Habsburg-Polish armies for hegemonic goals. A scholarly attempt on the identification of the Ottoman, Habsburg and Polish envoys would certainly contribute to reconstructing the so-called blurred past of the Balkan nations during the imperial age.
With the Congress of Vienna in 1815 diplomacy took a new path on the global level and mostly deemed as an instrument to preserve the status quo among the great powers of the new international system which was created at the Congress. Particularly after the early 19th century the fate of political developments as well as of peoples in the Balkan region as in the rest of the world began to be determined through diplomacy either in congresses usually dominated by great powers or bilateral negotiations executed by the diplomats of the related nations. Thus, the newly established nation states in the Balkans during the long nineteenth century were mostly resulted not directly from the wars but usually from the diplomatic negotiations afterwards.
Consequently, in order to improve the level of academic knowledge of the political history of Balkans and of the process of nation-building in the region it would be very productive to discuss the role of diplomacy in the Balkans in an academic environment. Thus, together we can define topics in accordance with the general frame of the conference, “The Role of Diplomacy in the History the Balkans”.
Additionally, besides the main conference theme, the organising committee also welcome proposals dealing with Kosovo during the Ottoman Empire, Ottoman Balkans, Turkish-Kosovo Relations as well as related subjects.
CONFERENCE TOPICS
• Court and diplomacy (ceremonial receptions, codes of behaviour, ceremonial settings)
• Princely and imperial images at diplomatic encounters
• Symbolic language and communication between diplomatic agents
• Diplomacy and law
• Residents and residential ambassadors
• Diplomatic missions in foreign lands
• Diplomatic writing as historical narratives (ambassadorial reports, diaries of diplomats)
• Diplomacy and cultural exchange
• Role of diplomacy in state and nation building
• Diplomatic instruments in the 19th century Balkans
• Diplomacy as a means of intelligence-gathering and espionage
• the training of diplomats in early modern and modern Europe
• Cultural diplomacy in the Balkans
• Turkish diplomacy in the Balkans
• War and Diplomacy
• Kosovo during the Ottoman Empire
• Turkish-Kosovo Relations
• Ottoman Balkans