Bleeding borders: Ethnic violence and social transformation in the Greco-Albanian borderlands

Bleeding borders: Ethnic violence and social transformation in the Greco-Albanian borderlands (1940-1949)

The presentation explores the intersection between paramilitary mobilization, violence, and nation-building in the area of Thesprotia/Chameria in north-western Greece circa 1940-1949. It does so by examining the activities of the right-wing paramilitaries of EDES (Ethnikos Dimokratikos Ellinikos Sindesmos–National Republican Greek League) between the Axis occupation and the early Cold War period. Studies of nation-building in twentieth-century South-Eastern Europe have discussed nation-building in terms of the state imposing its will to the periphery. The presentation goes beyond such narratives to demonstrate how the intertwinement between non-state actors and the national authorities facilitated the reconfiguration of centre-periphery relations both through violence and through the formation of novel political networks. Concurrently, it shows how these processes allowed the gradual integration of previously marginal local communities into the national body politic. This approach provides a more accurate understanding of the historical reality of state formation, with its pervasive accommodations between, and interlacing of, state and non-state violence’ and facilitates a more nuanced understanding of the role of non-state armed groups in the making of the nation state in Greece and the Balkans.

Image credit: A collage of Napoleon Zervas, leader of the military wing of the EDES resistance group, with fellow officers(left) Philiates (1855); lithograph by George de la Poer Beresford showing the town and surrounding mountains (right), Wikimedia.