Balkan in Amerika: A Qualitative Analysis on the Balkan Diaspora in the United States

Several narratives exist about the Balkans and people from the region, with the primary narrative often being negative. Many know the region as one of conflict, where neighbors are always squabbling over land and history. This negative narrative has spread into the Balkan Diaspora in the United States and across the globe. This is significant because diasporas are independent actors that actively influence and are connected to the homelands they represent, as Barth and Shain argue in “Diasporas and International Relations Theory”. Currently, there are neither reliable statistics on the number of members of a greater Balkan Diaspora in the United States, nor are there many statistics on the number of members of the individual ethnic diasporas, such as the Serbian Diaspora, Bulgarian Diaspora, Romanian Diaspora, etc. A lot of research that exists on the Balkans is related to the conflicts in the 1990s, helping to shape the negative narrative of the Balkans as a region of prejudice and hate. Additionally, there aren’t enough resources allocated towards the Balkan Diaspora. There is some literature on diasporas in the post-communist world, such as in Koinova’s research on “Diasporas and democratization in the post-communist world”, as well as on ethnic diasporas from across the Balkan region, such as in Prelec’s research on the Serbian Diaspora’s political views and its impact on the 2017 presidential election and Raggazi’s article on the invention of the Croatian Diaspora during the wars in Yugoslavia in the 1990s. There is a lot of existing literature on prominent diasporas in the United States, that are large in both number and geopolitical soft power, such as the Armenian (Bolsajian, 2018) and Greek Diasporas (Kaloudis, 2008). However, there remains a gap when it comes to questions regarding identity and being part of both the Balkan Diaspora and its individual ethnic diasporas in the twenty-first century. Across the US, there are communities for individual ethnic diasporas, such as ethnic Orthodox Churches and Bosnian and Albanian Islamic Centers. However, there isn’t much of a dedicated space for a unified Balkan Diaspora and its members. For example, Balkan Bred is a company that sells products catered towards the former Yugoslav Diaspora and tells former Yuogslav Diaspora members’ stories in the form of blogs. Still, there isn’t a space for the entire Balkan Diaspora that includes both the western, eastern, and southern Balkans communities. Based on these considerations, we pose a few questions for our research: How do we create a space and community for all members of the Balkan Diaspora that is free of hate so we can more positively share our culture and heritage with one another and with the world? How can individual ethnic identities exist in conjunction with a unified Balkan Diasporic identity? The overarching idea is to reconstruct existing narratives about the Balkans as a region of prejudice and conflict by providing a space for members of the Balkan Diaspora to share their stories. The fields of study from which we derive our topic are Eastern European Studies and Global Politics with a thematic focus on Conflict Resolution. There are several goals with this project. We want to share Diaspora members’ stories about their experiences in the United States, related to identity, migration, and ethnicity. We want to build such a community for a unified Balkan Diaspora, initially virtually on social media, and then in-person. We want to share resources about the Balkans and its various ethnic diasporas, for both members of the Diaspora and for those who would like to learn more. We want these resources to be related to topics other than conflict, such as ethnic organizations, communities, articles, and books that celebrate individual ethnic diasporas.