Journal on Ethnopolitics and Minority Issues in Europe

Abstract

2015 marked 15 years since the Journal on Ethnopolitics and Minority Issues in Europe (JEMIE) was established as the flagship academic publication of the European Centre for Minority Issues (ECMI). Coincidentally, 2016 also marks an important anniversary, namely 20 years since ECMI was founded on 4 December 1996, in Flensburg, on the German-Danish border.As such, we thought it fitting that the closing 2015 Issue of our Journal should be an anniversary one, looking back at these 15 years of publication history and remembering some of the topics and articles published here, while at the same time reflecting on some of the subjects and topics that could potentially be tackled in the journal in the future.Over the 15 years that passed since JEMIE was launched, the main focus of the journal remained constant: publishing articles, commentaries and book reviews addressing minority issues from a broad range of perspectives, such as ethnopolitics, democratization, conflict management, good governance, participation, minority rights, etc. Concretely, the topics approached in our Special Issues ranged from Europeanization and minority rights to minority language policies, non-territorial autonomy, minority participation in public life, new media, freedom of expression, and many others; these topics were discussed in connection to events and developments across Europe, understood in the broadest sense. Occasionally, JEMIE published special issues dedicated to specific minority groups (e.g. the Roma), or to particular institutions dealing with minority issues (e.g. the OSCE High Commissioner on National Minorities). The articles published in our General Issues covered additional ground in their selected subject matter, diverse approaches and geographical scope.It must be said that pursuing these topics and publishing such a wide range of articles could not have been possible without the invaluable contribution of JEMIE's previous editors, and of course without the help of the Advisory and Editorial board. (Lists of previous editors and current Advisory and Editorial boards can be consulted here: http://www.ecmi.de/publications/jemie/).As to the future of JEMIE, it will continue to pursue its focus on minority issues, reflecting - as it has been doing for the past 15 years - on academic, legal, socio-economic, or political developments in the field. Among other things, the impact of the refugee crisis on the situation of national minorities, as well as its potential impact on the definition of national minorities and the protections afforded to national minorities, migrants, and refugees will probably constitute important research topics in the near future. In addition to the commitment to publish high-quality articles in the field, we will also seek to improve our visibility and impact factor, by including JEMIE in the major research databases.These being said, our readers are invited to enjoy in the following a selection of articles published over time in JEMIE. Selecting these articles from the almost 200 that were published over the last 15 years was no easy task; deciding on which articles and topics should be included here meant reflecting on what topics were of most interest to our readership, and which articles provided the most original and relevant analyses. In the end, we chose to use the number of quotations the articles generated - while being aware this is a far from perfect criterion - as a guide to our most popular articles. Obviously, using the number of quotations as a criterion brings with it its own problems: for one, articles published in the earlier years of JEMIE will have had more time to generate quotations and therefore appear higher on our impact-generating list of articles. It is however a good indicator of the interest they generated through their choice of topic and approach, and of course of the quality of the analysis they provided. …