Retrospektive, year IX, number 1

Borders, Spaces, and Ethnic Maps in South East Europe (An Overview)

Srđan Radović

DOI 10.64651/retrospektive.2026.9.1.1 📋

Received: 15. October 2025 | Accepted: 13. April 2026 | Published: 15. June 2026

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Article summary

The article provides an overview and discussion of ethnic or ethnographic cartography in Southeastern Europe — more specifically in the territory of the former Yugoslavia — in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It examines the contexts, practices, and discourses that, in different periods and under varying political and historical circumstances, shaped the cartographic (re)presentation of ethnicity. Although ethnic maps — and their creators — often claimed to cartographically depict objective and empirical data on the spatial distribution of particular ethnic groups, they rarely managed to avoid the inevitable political context that usually determined their production. A chronological overview of some of these ethnocartographic practices in Southeastern Europe up to the end of the twentieth century shows that they were one of the factors in defining space, ethnicity, and nationality, rather than merely a tool for the neutral representation of these same categories. One of the political contexts that shaped the production of these maps — the demarcation of borders and border-making practices more generally — is perhaps also the most evident when examining the Balkan and post-Yugoslav space.

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Authors' contacts

Kornelija Ajlec, dr.
University of Ljubljana, Faculty of Arts, Department of History

Kenan Çayır, dr.
İstanbul Bilgi University, Department of Sociology

Zvezdana Kovač
European Fund for the Balkans

Kriton Kuci, dr.
Department of Political Science and International Relations Faculty of Law and Humanities, Mediterranean University of Albania

Angelos Palikidis
Professor of History Didactics
Department of Humanities, School of Humanities, Democritus University of Thrace

Srđan Radović, dr.
Institute of Ethnography of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts

Božo Repe, dr.
University of Ljubljana, Faculty of Arts, Department of History

Vassiliki Sakka, dr.
Association for History Education in Greece

Article abstract

Ethnic/ethnographic maps produced by Balkan authors, much like those created in the larger European states, fixed “our” natives in their/our places, thereby spatially situating an imagined identity and territory, and linking that identity to the aim of claiming legitimacy over a particular geographical space. We should remember that the making of maps, across different periods, is usually not a matter of presentation but of representation, and that maps must be understood as “contingent and contradictory representations, that is, maps as social constructions”; or, as John Brian Harley argued, mapmaking “is never merely the drawing of maps: it is the making of worlds.”

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