Historicizing the nationalization in Albanian provinces: Divergent strategies, state-formation, and geo-political competition

The problem of invoking the concepts of "nation" and "state" as a category of analysis in the Ottoman historiography created a nationalist teleology that cut nationalization practices loose from their socio-historical preconditions by ignoring their uneven and combined development. This historical research proposes that a proper understanding of the socio-historical conditions of nationalization processes requires focusing on the dynamic interplay between the internal socio-political conflicts mediated by social-property relations, the state-formation, and the international geo-political competition. In this framework, the research reveals that this dialectical nexus rooted in different levels of class conflict provided the dynamics of political conflicts which influenced and transformed the course of Albanian nationalization. The research analyzes how the regionally-specific and internationally-mediated resolutions of class conflicts depending on the uneven balance of class forces and structures directed the strategies among heterogenous Albanian actors (i.e., rules and forms of conflict and cooperation), their sources of identity-formation, and constituted the social preconditions of Albanian nationalism as a contested practice.