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Ecologies of Ruin: (Re)bordering, Ruination, and Internal Colonialism in Greek Macedonia, 1913-2013

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Abstract

Modern Greece and its nation-building institutions have been associated with actual and symbolic, external and internal colonial-like projects within a double nationalist/colonialist critique. However, the ruins produced in the process are less explored despite their enduring effects among local communities. This is particularly the case in Greek Macedonia, where a major internal colonial project was carried out through a series of acts of spatial demarcation, erasure and re-inscription. The remains of this project, from military outposts to deserted villages, have an ambivalent nature: there are both institutional markers of state interventions with still felt consequences and resistive loci of counter-narratives.

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Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Laura McAtackney and Russell Palmer for organizing an exciting session at the Society for Historical Archaeology Conference in Québec City (January 8–12, 2014) and for their patience and meticulousness in reviewing different iterations of this text. I would also like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their critical comments and useful feedback. Finally, I am indebted to Karen Barkey for her support and to Neni Panourgia, Stathis Gourgouris and Katerina Stefatos for reading earlier versions of this paper and helping me clarify concepts and arguments. Of course any omissions or inaccuracies are exclusively my own.

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Correspondence to Dimitris C. Papadopoulos.

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Papadopoulos, D.C. Ecologies of Ruin: (Re)bordering, Ruination, and Internal Colonialism in Greek Macedonia, 1913-2013. Int J Histor Archaeol 20, 627–640 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10761-016-0364-3

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