The Balkans are often imagined as a region of explicitly demarcated ethnic and religious divisions, forged through centuries of imperial subjugation, regional rivalry and other such conflicts. Yet nowhere is the complexity behind this more apparent than in the peninsula’s untamed frontiers, where identities have been contested and reshaped by coercion and force.

Albania required a military and political nucleus capable of asserting and defending its self-agency. That nucleus was Isa Boletini ...

Gjergj Kastrioti, better known to the world as Skënderbeu or Skanderbeg, the 15th-century Albanian leader who resisted the Ottoman Empire for well over two decades, occupies a singular place not only in the chronicles and archives of military history but in the collective unconscious of his people. Jung argued that roups of people possess a psyche much like individuals; a collective mind filled with archetypes that give substantial form and meaning to their experience ...