Warwick scholar to address conflict in Balkan states

Contact: Mark Schwerin

KALAMAZOO—A scholar from the University of Warwick will address unrest in the Balkan states when she visits Western Michigan University this month.

Dr. Maria Koinova will speak at 7 p.m. Thursday, April 17, in the Fetzer Center as part of the George Klein Lecture Series. Her presentation, titled "Ethnic Conflicts and Governance in the Balkan States," is free and open to the public.

Maria Koinova

Koinova, associate professor at Warwick, has held appointments at Harvard, Cornell, Dartmouth and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C. She received her doctoral degree from European University Institute in Florence Italy.

Her research on diaspora politics, conflicts and post-conflict reconstruction has been published by Review of International Studies, Foreign Policy Analysis, Communist and Post-Communist Studies, International Political Sociology and Ethnic and Racial Studies. She also wrote the book "Ethnonationalist Conflict in Post-communist States: Varieties of Governance in Bulgaria, Macedonia and Kosovo."

Koinova is interested in why ethnonationalist conflicts vary in the level of violence they generate and why violence at whatever level persists and when and why things change for the better or worse. To get at the answers, she explores three cases similar in their characteristics, but different outcomes: Bulgaria, where majority-minority conflict has been free of violence; Kosovo, where it has not; and Macedonia, which is somewhere in between.

About the series

The George Klein Lecture is organized by the Department of Political Science's Institute of Government and Politics. It is named after the late Dr. George Klein, a longtime member of the University's Department of Political Science and an internationally known expert on Balkan politics and eastern European political systems. His widow, Dr. Patricia V. Klein, WMU associate professor emerita of science studies, created an endowment in his honor that funds the lecture series.

For more information, contact Dr. Peter Wielhouwer, associate professor of political science and director of the Institute of Government and Politics, at (269) 387-5685.