Book Review: The Shaken Lands (2023), edited by Tomas Balkelis and Andrea Griffante.

“This edited collection emerges from an online conference, “Violence and the Crisis of Governance in East Central Europe, 1905–1925” in November 2020, organised by the Lithuanian Institute of History (pp. vii, 11). In the “Introduction” (pp. 1–14), editors Tomas Balkelis and Andrea Griffante state that the aim of the volume is “to detect the centrality and meanings of violence during the breakdown and decomposition of East Central European states in the context of the political turmoil of the period of 1914–1923” (p. 6). They further outline two aspects of a guiding thesis that is engaged with throughout the contributors’ chapters: “that disintegration of state power brought by the Great War was a key condition that produced violence” yet the subsequent postwar process of state-building “was equally or more violent as nascent East Central European states institutionalized the use of violence to achieve their political agendas” (p. 6). The subsequent case studies explore violence grouped in three broad categories: state-sanctioned violence against civilians performed by regular troops; non-state or semi-sanctioned violence by paramilitary or para-state actors; and, communal violence by civilians against other civilians (p. 12)…“

Read the review on Forschungen zur baltischen Geschichte (2026).