Transitional change in the past two decades is only part of an unending sequence of socio-politico-economic changes through which the countries of the region have gone in the past 100 years. Older members of these communities have often, without a change to their place of residence, been citizens of five or six different states and experienced multiple changes of political systems, ideologies, constitutions, legal systems, and accompanying institutions, and they have borne witness to the creation of new entire social classes and strata and the destruction of old ones. This continuous vortex of transformation, which prevents the stabilization of social structure, and which makes official institutions particularly fragile and thwarts strategic action, has been accompanied by an almost incredible inability of Balkan societies to change and a surprising stability of social practices. It is as if wars, revolutions, and the dissolution of entire world-orders create waves on the surface of the practices of these societies, which then quickly revert to their established course. 

It is precisely in this space between head-spinning change to the official social institutions and extraordinary stability of social practices that the phenomena which we would like to discuss at our conference are born. We are inviting political scientists, sociologists, anthropologists, historians, social psychologists, legal experts, political economists to take part in the consideration of social, political, economic, legal, cultural, religious, familial, demographic, educational, media changes in the societies of the Western Balkans and the attitude of citizens towards them. We are particularly interested in research on change in citizens’ everyday lives in these societies, much more so than in schematic accounts of “system” changes which abound in the “transitiological” literature.