I began blogging on the Balkans almost three years ago, with the Bosnia Vault whose main focus was the latest news and current events from Bosnia (as the title suggests) and the ICTY tribunal.  The goal of Blogging Balkanistan is to focus on a wide range of social and cultural topics related to Southeast Europe (for my purposes: Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia, Serbia, Montenegro, Macedonia, Kosovo, Albania, Greece, Bulgaria, Romania and Turkey). Topics of interest include, but are not limited to: the  rise and fall Ottoman Empire, the cinema of the former Yugoslavia and its successor states, the politics and sociology of turbofolk, blogging culture, the history of Sarajevo, Balkan literature,etc. etc. etc.

Besides the Balkans,other topics of interest past and present which might make a cameo appearence include: the countercultural and commune movement on the 1960s and 1970s, the survivalist movement of the 1980s and 1990s; the Southern Civil Rights movement (primarily the Mississippi movement); the gay rights movement and the early years of AIDS epidemic; Russia and the Former Soviet Union-everything from ballet culture of St. Petersburg, to the Gulag, the Ukranian famine, the successor states and life in turn of 20th the century Baku or Odessa; International humanitarian law and genocide and crimes against humainity; figure skating; medieval European culture; Cairo , Beirut, South America and modern China and India.

-Shaina