New Book Roundup: March Featured Anthem Titles

Here a few of our featured titles released this March

Conditioning Democratization: Institutional Reforms and EU Membership Conditionality in Albania and Macedonia

by Ridvan Peshkopia

The volume critically reviews the theory of “consociational democracy,” often considered the key to stabilizing deeply divided countries, and reapplies it to the supranational institution of the European Union. In articulate, accessible prose, Ridvan Peshkopia builds on examples from multiple sectors in multiple countries to reconceptualize this theory and show that the EU can indeed use membership conditions as a tool to encourage and direct reform.

“This is a very engaging, informative and well-structured account of the impact of European Union membership conditionality on democratisation and reform in the post-communist Balkan states. It explores some very pertinent and perennial questions, on why and under what conditions some EU aspirant countries and some state sectors perform better than others in the implementation of externally enforced rules and practices. Peshkopia is an EU expert and a Balkans insider, in that he demonstrates a solid and critical knowledge of the EU approach to enlargement conditionality, but who also knows well the Balkan region and its national variance.”
—Othon Anastasakis, University of Oxford

Fabricating Authenticity in Soviet Hungary: The Afterlife of the First Hungarian Soviet Republic in the Age of State Socialism

by Péter Apor

The first book to confront the Hungarian state’s problematic remembrance of 1919 under communism, unravelling the connections between how a dictatorship remembers and the authenticity of constructed memory.

‘Péter Apor offers innovative, theoretically grounded interpretations of the Communist memory politics. This book is an important work on the history of East European Communism.’ —Gábor Gyáni, Research Professor, Institute of History, Hungarian Academy of Sciences, and Visiting Professor, Central European University

Interpersonal Encounters in Contemporary Travel Writing: French and Italian Perspectives

by Catherine Mee

A critical study on the theme of interpersonal encounter in late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century French and Italian travel writing.

‘Mee’s thoughtful study details how writers working in French and Italian depict interpersonal encounters. Their difficulty, she rightly concludes, shows us “what makes a journey a story”. ’ —Stacy Burton, University of Nevada, Reno