Evolving Research Agenda
1. Research Overview (1990-2003)
2. Research Agenda (2003-2009)
3. Research on religion in Cyprus
4. Current research
1. Research Overview (1990-2003)
For the better part of the 1990s and up until 2003, my research agenda addressed (a) the relationship between globalization, modernity and culture (including the themes of transnationalism & Americanization) and (b) the study of ethnic nationalism in the Balkans.
The relationship between globalization and modernity was the subject of my first article published in 1994 in the journal Comparative Civilizations Review. This analysis was extended in my 2003 article on glocalization, space and modernity, published in European Legacy. I explored further the relationship between globalization and Americanization in the edited volume American Culture in Europe (1998). The construction of new transnational ties was the major theme explored in another volume on Communities Across Borders (2002; paperback, 2006). This volume employed a broad definition that makes it possible to examine not only the movement of peoples from one country to another, but also the migration of cultural practices (such as pop music or soccer) across borders. In addition to my theoretical engagement with this topic, qualitative and historical methods have been used in several articles and chapters on the Hellenic Diaspora & the Greek American community (Roudometof and Karpathakis, 2002; Karpathakis and Roudometof, 2004; Roudometof, 2000; 2010).
Several articles, chapters and presentations in the 1990s dealt with the topic of ethnic nationalism. This research agenda led to the publication of two edited volumes on Macedonia (2000) & the Balkans at large (2002) as well as two sole-authored monographs that examine how the articulation of ethnic nationalism led to chronic conflict and insecurity in the region.
In my 2001 book, Nationalism, Globalization and Orthodoxy, I argued that world-historical globalization is connected with the historical trajectory of the Eastern Mediterranean. While prior to 1820, nationalism emerged as an ideology strongly colored by Enlightenment ideology, it came later to be developed on an ethno-national basis. This tendency was the result of the regional pattern of nation building. The different perception and adaptation of two global discourses shaping the meaning of the "nation" were crucial to the local routes toward modernity. Within the discourse of citizenship, membership of a "nation" is fundamentally political and pertains to the rights and obligations of a citizen to his/her political community. In contrast, the discourse of nationhood employs particularistic criteria – derived from a local culture – as the basis of the "nation". Within this discourse, the "nation" is an entity constructed in terms of the genealogical or cultural ties of an ethnic community. Lack of acculturation into the legitimate national culture provides a justification for a person's exclusion from the "imagined community". This argument suggests that the ethnic conflict in the Balkans is historically recent and is a result of the region's path to modernity.
In early 2003, the publication of my second monograph, National Identity, Collective Memory and Ethnic Conflict, allowed me to apply this broad interpretation to the study of an on-going contemporary controversy, that of the Macedonian Question. This monograph was the culmination of several publications analyzing the post-1991 conflict between the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia and Greece over the "name issue", as well as additional publications on minority-majority relations in the southern Balkans. In the monograph, historical research and interpretation are intertwined with the analysis of the contemporary, post-1991 contest between Greece (and to a lesser extent Bulgaria), on the one hand, and the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (FYR – Macedonia), on the other hand, over the heritage of Macedonian culture and history. The book also covers the post-1945 evolution of Albanian nationalism in Kosovo and FYR-Macedonia – up until the conclusion of the 2001 civil strife between Macedonians and Albanians. To this day, it remains the only sociological monograph on these political & cultural disputes.
2. Research Agenda (2003-2009)
After I became assistant professor of sociology with the Department of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Cyprus my research interests shifted slightly. While I continued to work on culture, transnationalism and globalization my work also extended into the study of religion. Between 2003 & 2009 my research agenda focused mostly on (A) the area of cultural theory & cultural sociology (and specifically on transnationalism, cosmopolitanism & globalization), and (B) on the sociology of religion (and specifically on Eastern Orthodox Christianity).
With regard to cultural theory & cultural sociology, my work focused on the theoretical and to a degree, empirical investigation of the key concepts of cosmopolitanism, globalization and transnationalism. In my chapters on nationalism and transnationalism in Europe (in the 2009 Handbook of European Studies) & on nationalism and globalization (in Nations and Nationalisms: A Global Historical Overview), I explored the relationship among globalization, transnationalism and nationalism in Europe.
Of special significance for my work has been the relatively recent concept of glocalization. In several articles and chapters, I have examined the relationship of glocalization to transnationalism and cosmopolitanism. Most importantly, in my 2005 article in Current Sociology, I have analyzed the relationship among glocalization, transnationalism, and cosmopolitanism & argued that transnationalism and cosmopolitanism should not be blended; for they are analytically distinct from each other. The article put forth the notion of a cosmopolitan-local continuum as a novel means for assessing the relationship between cosmopolitanism and localism. Following up on this article, and jointly with William Haller (Sociology, Clemson University) we operationalized the cosmopolitan-local continuum & published a book chapter in 2007 & an article consisting of a cross-national analysis of quantitative data in the Journal of Sociology (2010). This article analyses the data from advanced industrialized countries, using the 1995 and 2003 ISSP National Identity module data in order to detect whether the turn of the 21st century has brought increased or decreased levels of cosmopolitanism around the globe.
Special reference should be made here to my two special issues on collective memory I have edited for the Journal of Political and Military Sociology (2003; 2007). A total of 11 articles were included to these issues, which represent an effort to connect the field of politics to the fields of heritage and memory studies. My interest in this field was sparked by the writing of my 2nd monograph and continues to this day. The 2007 special issue of JPMS is partly based on the memory panels I organized for the 37th World Congress of the International Institute of Sociology (Stockholm, Sweden, 2005). My Introduction to the 2007 special issue summarizes my own reading and conceptualization of the sociology of memory.
With regard to sociology of religion, my interest in religion grew out of the close connections between religious and national identities in Eastern Europe. My articles, volumes and chapters examine the dynamics of Eastern Orthodox Christianity both in its totality as well as in selected countries (Romania, Greece, Cyprus, and North America). Editing the volume Eastern Orthodoxy in a Global Age (Alta Mira Press, 2005) offered me the opportunity to present an overview of the state of post-1989 Eastern Orthodoxy. The volume is divided into two parts. The first part includes descriptions of religious responses by several Eastern European churches (Romania, Ukraine, Russia, Serbia and Greece) to the challenges of globalization and post-1989 integration into the common European home. The second part consists of explorations of the transnational dimension of Eastern Orthodoxy, including recent developments in the Eastern Orthodox churches of North America.
This project led to a more intense engagement with the role of religion in post-1989 Orthodox countries. An additional volume grew out of the panels on Greek Orthodoxy, organized for the 2005 Congress of the International Society for the Sociology of Religion (ISSR, Zagreb, Croatia) & was concluded after five years of revisions. This volume Orthodox Christianity in 21st Century Greece (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2010) was co-edited with Prof. Vasilios N. Makrides.
This volume includes a total of 11 chapters and it is divided into parts: One part is addressing the relationship between Orthodox Christianity and contemporary Modern Greek culture while another part is addressing the connections between Orthodoxy, on the one hand, and ethnicity and contemporary politics, on the other hand. The volume's objective is to allow scholars to gain a better knowledge of an Eastern Orthodox country that has never experienced communism – and hence to offer a point of comparison vis-à-vis the post-communist Orthodox societies of Eastern Europe. In this manner, scholars can differentiate the institutional and cultural characteristics of Eastern Orthodoxy from those features related to the post-communist legacy.
3. Research on religion in Cyprus
Cyprus occupies a special place in my research record. Living on the island has offered me the opportunity to chronicle and document several developments regarding a variety of institutional issues pertaining to religion. In 2009, I published an article in the Journal of Contemporary Religion about the significance of the 2006 Archiepiscopal elections of the Orthodox Church of Cyprus. Different papers based on this material were presented in conferences and workshops in 2007. Using the 2006 elections as my departure point, I am examining the evolution of the Orthodox Church of Cyprus from its post-1878 post-colonial experience to its current status. I argue that the Orthodox Church of Cyprus is currently entering a phase of normalization, whereby its institutional structures correspond to the conventional patterns of Eastern Orthodox administration and governance. In this regard, the Church's past nation-leading role should be considered situational and not trans-historical. A different part of that discussion also forms the basis for a chapter on the Orthodox Church of Cyprus during the Cold War period, published in Eastern Christianity and the Cold War, edited by Lucian Leustean (London and New York: Routledge, 2010).
I have also served as guest editor for a special issue of the journal Social Compass (2009), focusing on Church-State relations in Cyprus. This special issue is an extension of my efforts to include Cyprus in the field of the sociology of religion & it partly grew out of my role as Cyprus Correspondent for EUREL. For the first time ever a major scholarly journal has devoted an issue on this topic. The special issue consists of an introduction and four articles: The topics range from analyses of the 2006 World Values Survey in both parts of the island to an examination of the role of minority religions in Cyprus to historical analyses of the role of Orthodoxy and Islam in the island's political and cultural life. In addition to authoring the introductory article, I co-authored (with Michael N. Michael, from the University of Cyprus' Turkish Studies Department) an article that discusses the post-1878 evolution of the Orthodox Church of Cyprus. We argue that the imposition of British colonial rule in Cyprus led to the Church's loss of statute and income. The Church's prolonged crisis contributed to the hierarchy's endorsement of nationalism as a strategy that allowed the hierarchs to regain a highly visible role in the island's public sphere. In turn, this strategy provided for the conceptual underpinnings for the Church's nation-leading role in the course of the 20th century. Another version of this research was published in English in the journal Thetis (2010) & an overview of the transformation of the Orthodox Church of Cyprus in the 1878-1931 period – inclusive of a comparison of Cyprus vis-à-vis the other Orthodox states of Southeastern Europe – appeared in Chronos (2010).
4. Current Research
My promotion to rank of associate professor coincided with the conclusion of several projects that represented the culmination of work done in the course of the past decade. Most of these volumes and articles appeared in print between 2009 and 2010. Thus, my current preoccupation is the completion of a monograph on the relationship between Orthodox Christianity and globalization.
This is a project partly based in part on my past research on Orthodox Christianity but it includes a considerable amount of additional research into the historical record. A preview of some of the arguments is presented in my 2008 article on the relationship among globality, territoriality and Orthodox Christianity, published in the journal Sociology of Religion. In this article, I am suggesting that the experience of globality leads to competing religious responses of de-territorialization and re-territorialization. In turn, these responses lead to acute conflict between Orthodox religious institutions. In contrast to the view that Orthodoxy is a branch of Christianity out of touch with broader cross-national trends, I argue that globalization and globality have had a profound impact in shaping the orientation and future direction of Orthodox institutions. From this point of view, the article employs the widely publicized conflict between the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople and the Orthodox Church of Greece (2003-04) as a contemporary example that illustrates the proposed socio-historical interpretation.
In addition to this major research project, several additional publications are currently in process. Perhaps most important among them are the follow-up chapters to my 2009 article on the evolution of the concept of globalization, published in the European Journal of Social Theory. That article contains an overview of the various agendas that have shaped the scholarly perception of globalization among the academic community; and argues that the effect of the 1989 revolutions strengthened considerably Western-centered interpretations of globalization – to the detriment of alternative interpretations. Forthcoming work in this line of research includes a chapter on cosmopolitanism for the upcoming volume European Cosmopolitanism (Palgrave Macmillan 2011) and a chapter on the variety of conceptualizations of the "glocal", for a forthcoming volume on glocalization.
Additional projects include:
- a chapter discussing various methodological issues of the cosmopolitan agenda for the forthcoming Sage Handbook of Cosmopolitan Studies,
- a chapter on the uses of religion in post-1989 Greece for a forthcoming volume on religion and heritage in contemporary Europe,
- a jointly authored article (with Michael N. Michael) on the economic functions of the Kykkos monastery (available online at www.mdpi.com) and
- a special issue on cultural trauma for the Greek-language journal Science and Society.
